Don’t Tell Me What To Do!

http://www.newstatesman.com/blogs/helen-lewis-hasteley/2011/12/feminism-women-rights

I read this article by Helen Lewis in New Statesman, feeling like I’d read it before, it was so familiar:

‘The battles that remain involve telling people — often, but not exclusively, men — that I don’t like things they like, and I wish they didn’t like them either. I’m sorry, I know that you enjoy sexist jokes on TV panel shows, but they make me uncomfortable. I’m sorry, I know that you read lads’ mags, but I find them deeply depressing. I’m sorry, I know that you don’t think it’s a problem that women are under-represented in parliament, in science and in the media, but it is.

As a bleeding heart liberal, I feel hugely uncomfortable with trying to dictate other people’s tastes — and I certainly wouldn’t try to “ban” jokes or magazines or adverts or toys (or whatever) that I disagreed with. But fundamentally, feminism is about trying to change people’s minds. It just is. I am a killjoy.’

This sums up for me, how feminism ALWAYS assumes that its only project is to convince others that it is right, and to encourage (or coerce) people to do things how feminism wants them to be done.

There is no sense that a debate needs to be had, that feminists could learn from people who don’t share their views, that there can be compromise and discussion.

It’s my way or the highway.

But liberal feminists like Lewis tie themselves up in knots, claiming to not want to tell people what to do, but wanting people to do what they want them to do anyway, and sometimes lobbying to make their view Law.

I asked Helen in the comments if she, as a feminist respected the fact that I, as a woman, had differing views to her, in the name of independence. She said she did but I am not sure I believed her because deep down she knows she is right and I am wrong.

Photo via Lorraine Gamman: http://www.facebook.com/lorraine.gamman

Post script: This is Helen Lewis’s comment on men ‘contributing’ to feminist debate:

@AllyFogg @aliqot Meh, it's all about thesis/antithesis/synthesis, innit? And I really do think it's important men feel they can contribute.—
Helen Lewis-Hasteley (@helenlewis) December 30, 2011

 

An Ode To www.marksimpson.com

www.marksimpson.com is by far my favourite blog,

It helped me see the light of day, through the thickening fog

Of feminist myths that I was brought up to think were right and true

And it taught me about metrosexuals – those brilliant modern dudes.

I read that website every day: it’s my go to guy

For everything on gender and men, the what the how the why.

But now Mark’s blog is broken, and I am all at sea.

Where else can I find wisdom on masculinity?

Say Something

 

Your silence is deafening…

Fade-out

fading / fade-out

Painful ordeal in which the loved being appears to withdraw from all contact, without such enigmatic indifference even being directed against the amorous subject or pronounced to the advantage of anyone else, world or rival.

- Roland Barthes, A Lover’s Discourse

 

h/t @fennerpearson

 

 

The Myth of Male Power

I had an argument on twitter yesterday – call it a discussion- about gender and power and ‘oppression’. My position, that men do not have ‘more power’ than women, and that women are not ‘more oppressed’ than men, as a group, was laughed out of town. I was told that I was ignoring the ‘facts’ and denying the ‘objective’ truth of the situation.

I also chatted to a friend online who told me he’d received Warren Farrell’s The Myth Of Male Power as a Christmas gift. When I was still a feminist, I remember a working class man I worked with talking about this book. It was the first time I’d heard the word ‘misandry’ spoken out loud. I’m ashamed to say that I dismissed the man’s points, and went home to look up Farrell – deciding he was a misogynist and anti-women, anti-feminist, without even reading his book!

I still haven’t read the book but I am a lot more sympathetic to its themes, and the way it describes some of the injustices men face in a gendered society. For example, as regular reader stoner has pointed out, the selective service for men in America:

”In post offices throughout the United States, Selective Service posters [reading "A Man's Gotta Do What A Man's Gotta Do] remind men that only they must register for the draft. If the Post Office had a poster saying “A Jew’s Gotta Do What A Jew’s Gotta Do…” or if “A Woman’s Gotta Do…” were written across the body of a pregnant woman…” 28 

http://www.warrenfarrell.org/styled-2/summary.html

I am also reminded of Mark Simpson’s work. In fact, I think he mentions Farrell in Male Impersonators. In that book he also includes an incredible chapter about the miners’ strike in the UK in the 80s and its aftermath in the early 90s. He writes:

‘But it is a Star leader that makes explicit the reduction of ‘the workers’ to the ‘real men’. In a crude style not without resonance on the left, it jeers: ‘If Labour cannot do better for the miners, the founding fathers of the movement, it will prove conclusively that the party is now fit only for polytechnic lecturers, leftie lawyers and twittering* women teachers – NOT the workers’.’

The bitter irony is that media eulogies of the miners have only been possible because they are now so weak, and traditional masculinity so enervated. The Mirror offered a poster of an attractive, exhausted young miner slumped on a bench in a locker-room,posed in a sweaty singlet with a ghostly winding tower super-imposed, emerging from his leg as a kind of hazy memory of the phallus. In inviting pity, this male image also invites the gaze in a way that would have been impossible without the very changes in gender roles that it seems to lament.’

http://deathatthemall.wordpress.com/2011/12/16/men-at-war-mark-simpson-examines-masculinity-and-the-miners-strike/

I don’t have a BIG POINT to end on. I am probably left with Foucault, as usual, and the idea that ‘power is everywhere’ and much more complex than we allow for.

__________________________

Thanks to stoner and White Mischief for input.

*twittering has another resonance now which brings me back to the start of this post!

Male Impersonators by Mark Simpson at Amazon here: http://www.amazon.co.uk/Male-Impersonators-Performing-Masculinity-ebook/dp/B006K5ZMNE/ref=sr_1_1?s=digital-text&ie=UTF8&qid=1324033320&sr=1-1

Metrosexy Christmas

MERRY METROSEXY CHRISTMAS EVERYONE

THANKS for making QRGHQ a vibrant hub of gender discussion and metrotastic observations.

NOTE: I usually link up to Mark Simpson’s blog but it has a bug at the moment so I won’t. I don’t recommend clicking on links to his blog just now. I hope it recovers in time for the new metrosexual year! You can still buy his books at Amazon Kindle – Metrosexy and Male Impersonators are both going cheap:

http://www.amazon.co.uk/Male-Impersonators-Performing-Masculinity-ebook/dp/B006K5ZMNE/ref=sr_1_1?s=digital-text&ie=UTF8&qid=1324653732&sr=1-1

Don’t forget the QRG writing awards – winners announced in early January, and I am still accepting nominations:

http://quietgirlriot.wordpress.com/2011/12/18/qrg-awards-2011-your-nominations-please/

h/t Law and Sexuality: http://lawandsexuality.blogspot.com/2011/12/farewell-2011.html

http://metrosexy.wordpress.com/2011/12/23/metrosexy-christmas/

UPDATE Jan 15th – Tipped off by Stuart Warwick, Mark Simpson finally noticed this aussiebum video and blogged about it:
http://www.marksimpson.com/blog/2012/01/14/aussiebums-new-pocketjockit-or-should-that-be-pussypacket/

He did not reference me or Chris Ashford who first blogged about this, and, frankly, by posting a Christmas video in mid January showed himself to be out of date as well as rude. Where is the Metrodaddy I used to know and love? who had IDEAS?

Real Fags Join The Priesthood?

http://thesocietypages.org/socimages/2011/12/20/reasserting-the-priesthood-as-masculine/

The frankly annoyingly feminist Sociological Images referred to a recruitment video for the priesthood featured at NYPriest website.

The gender studies academics at S.I. said:

‘Usually, a male-dominated occupation wouldn’t be in need of having its masculinized character stressed so openly. However, the child sex abuse scandals that have rocked the Catholic Church in the U.S. and elsewhere have damaged the image of the priesthood. Not only did many priests sexually abuse children, but many of the abused children where boys. Had the abuse involved primarily girls girls in late childhood or their teens, the public may very well have expressed revulsion and disgust, but we also have cultural narratives available, such as the idea of the sexually precocious Lolita who entices men against their better judgement, that are often used to at least partially justify or explain adult men’s sexual attraction to or abuse of even young girls’

This really got my goat for two key reasons:

1) They are using hypothetical examples of girls being abused saying if it was girls being ‘sexually abused’ by men priests, people would come up with spurious justifications for it. And yet, the main reason this sexual abuse ‘scandal’ in the priesthood has been newsworthy is that the men doing the ‘abuse’ got away with it for years and years. It’s classic oppression olympics with girls and women always winning the gold victim status medal, even when they are made up examples!

2) The feminist analysis of ‘real men’ being used to ‘sell’ the priesthood is reductive and wrong. It ignores how men don’t just compare themselves to women but also to each other, and how the manly ‘real men’ discourse is fraught with tensions around homosexuality (which is a big part of sex in the priesthood) and how machismo is actually very camp.

As Mark Simpson would probably say, the priests and sociological images need to fag up!

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/mark-simpson/fag-up_b_987725.html

Oh, and 3) ‘Fishers of Men’? is that what they call it now

The Man Who Got Away

 

NEWS JUST IN:

Effective immediately, I have resigned from the Good Men Project. Details soon. Thanks to all for support.—
Hugo Schwyzer (@hugoschwyzer) December 21, 2011

 

http://www.hugoschwyzer.net/2011/12/21/why-i-resigned-from-the-good-men-project/

Man With A Pussy

Stuart Warwick has today released the video for his latest song: Man With A Pussy. Featuring the amazing David Hoyle it is a rare work of art amidst all the Christmas tat.

The song, about a man, with transexual undertones, reminds me of a piece I featured on the Fauxmos blog ages ago: Today I Am by Monmouth. He wrote:

‘A Y-chromosome is no excuse for not having a pussy. Yes, I know, the mirror doesn’t lie. Nevertheless, it’s a feeble, literal-minded gesture to unzip and with trembling fingers point to a full-grown cock nesting comfortably on a bed of balls and pubes.

Hello! There you are, my snake, my drill, my hammer… The vocabulary of insecure boys is brimful of power drills and lethal weapons lurking beneath every bulging crotch.

What is pussy-like about this lovely, smooth-skinned cock, this beast that has so often sparked up at the mere fragrance of its female counterpart?

Let’s unzip and take a look. Growing erect, free of his denim prison he unfurls, hardens, rises to the stroking teasing of a finger. Hard and agonizingly sensitive, he’s a funny monster—ven in the passionate folds of a tightly clenching vagina he sometimes becomes overstimulated, the moist ecstasy tipping over into pain for a moment. Even there, while I stroke this hard boner, she’s in there. Right there under my skin curled around every cell in my body, the sturdy X embracing her spindly brother Y.’

This theme of the intersection between man/woman, masculine/feminine, also reminds me of the work of Mark Simpson, particularly his seminal essay: Transexy Time. I showed Mark the piece by Monmouth when I first contacted him, asking him to endorse the Fauxmos project. He replied positively, adding:

‘I can’t find my pussy’.

Maybe David Hoyle and Stuart Warwick can help him locate his feminine organ, with this wonderful haunting tune and poignant imagery.

I don’t have any trouble finding my cock, as everyone knows.

Viva Transexy Times.

QRG Awards 2011 – Your Nominations Please!

http://quietgirlriot.wordpress.com/2010/12/30/blogpost-of-the-year-award/

Last year I did a QRG Blogpost of the year award, with two categories, beauty and truth.

This year I am expanding the prestigious award to include the following prizes:

Blogpost of the year (any subject/style)

My nominees for bloggers (don’t know which posts yet) Rachel Rabbit White, Heresy Corner, Law and Sexuality, Mark Simpson

Book of the year (any subject/genre/fiction/poetry/nonfiction/kindle books/paper books/anything)

Zoom Zoom- Penny Goring

Male Impersonators/Metrosexy – Mark Simpson

Automatic Assassin – Marc Horne

Writer of the year (any subject/genre/style)

Penny Goring, Marc Horne, Mark Simpson, Dan Holloway

The deadline for nominations is midnight, 31st December 2011. I will announce the winner in early January 2012.

Tell me your nominations in the comments.

GOOD LUCK!

Preaching To The Choir

I saw this lovely photo on the facebook wall of David McAlmont yesterday. It’s a ‘gay choir’ doing a Christmas concert. David was ‘the voice’ in the pop duo McAlmont and Butler quite a long time ago.

I asked under the photo, though, how the men joining prove they are ‘gay’ to get in the choir. This had some relevance to the wider world and to ‘gay’ politics. I had heard recently about a case involving some bisexual softball players who had been kicked out of a ‘gay’ league but who appealed and won their case.

But when I went back to David’s wall I saw my comment had disappeared, even though he’d originally ‘liked’ it. This is the conversation that ensued (click on image to enlarge):

The next thing I knew I had been ‘blocked’ by David, and all my comments (and the ones by the person arguing with me) had been removed.

I’ve only been on facebook five minutes and this censorious behaviour is already being used to shut QRG up.

Another person in the conversation is Paul Burston. He wrote a chapter in Mark Simpson’s Anti Gay(1996). But since then he has become a typical middle class white man gay activist, supporting his own and avoiding debate. He bans me from commenting under his Time Out Gay and Lesbian column, and he and Suzanne Moore publicly slagged me off on facebook before I was even a member.

At a personal level, even though I am a known ‘internet troll’ as Burston calls me, I find it upsetting when people who I once admired treat me like this.

But the issue is much wider than that. This is how ‘politics’ is conducted in the internet age. Dissent and discussion are not only discouraged but positively clamped down on. Either you preach to the choir or you shut up.