It definitely seems like this guy is WAY more concerned about winning an argument with the feminists than about an actual discussion of the issues.  He apparently didn’t get the memo about how being a good man doesn’t mean you never do or say things that are wrong.  It may be he was actually trying to get to a valid male experience with his original post, but we will never know.

What’s ironic is that I actually laid out a very neat way he could, I guess, “win” this argument, though from the beginning, his feminist critics have been open to the idea that male experiences are relevant and interesting. But we need fucking specifics, not just generalized and baseless claims that men are blamed for “everything” and men can’t get a word in edgewise because women are so domineering.

I think I know what he’s on about!

Every time a woman refuses to talk to that strange guy who’s following her down the street and repeatedly demanding her phone number, she’s treating all men like rapists! I mean, why can’t she just talk to the poor Nice Guy(tm) and give him what he’s asking?! Why can’t she just assume, every time she’s approached by an unknown man, that’s totally harmless and genuine?!

It’s totally our fault for speaking up against sexual harassment. We keep on forcing our “fear of rape” nonsense down the poor d00ds’ throats.

One close friend jokes, “When speaking to my wife I always make sure to look at the ground in deference. And I make sure not to make any sudden movements.”

Actually, I’m a mutual friend of this guy, and I can vouch that this story is true.

To be fair, though, he did marry a mountain lion.

I think what may be happening in some of these cases is similar to the relationship between my mom and my step-father. In almost every facet of their lives, he makes all of the important decisions, and the only decisions my mom has much say in are domestic ones, such as what they have for dinner. And whenever she makes a decision that he doesn’t totally agree with, he complains and fusses about it, so she gets defensive because it is one of the few aspects of her life where she has substantial control over what goes on. So I think most of the nagging/domineering wives syndrome among MRAs and other idiots, comes from them having almost total control over the lives of their wives and then getting pissed when their wives try to exercise the tiniest bit of influence. These men need to grow the fuck up and get over themselves.

The best part of your Twitter exchange with Matlack was when you responded to his assertion that women need to understand how men just want to eat, drink beer, fuck, and sleep, with “you think women don’t?”  This really gets at the heart of the matter of this guy’s problem.  He thinks that men are just deficient, that only women are born with the necessary equipment to make that extra effort and fold that laundry.  His kind of anti-feminism begins with a low opinion of men.

I think men end up feeling oppressed because women are so socialized to take care of “everything” regarding home care and scheduling for families and relationship maintenance, for lack of a better term, and women are expected to hide the efforts from men/men are allowed and expected to not care about that girly shit and go about blissfully unaware that any of it exists. Then when, eventually, the stress of being in charge of all that and never getting credit becomes too much for the wives (this is obviously a very heteronormative focus), men cannot see where the stress is coming from and have very little idea of what it takes to maintain a household and no way of knowing what is wrong. Men have no way of defending themselves because they have no idea what is going on and it is hard to make up for a lifetime of socialization through an argument.

In my experience the whole “women cannot accept how different the genders are” thing usually means that “women” want to spend time with men and get to know their hobbies and sometimes even fight their way into boys clubs, but men are demeaned by silly woman hobbies and aren’t really fighting their way into traditional feminine fields because elbowing into the girls club doesn’t really raise one’s status.

I get the impression, from watching my parents friends and all the barftastic sitcoms, that these feelings are wide spread and certainly ought to be examined and discussed. Unfortunately, this will not be possible until the men making the complaint actually take the time to specifically define what makes them feel frustrated and don’t want to find out that at least part of the frustration is due to a sense of eroding entitlement.

It is also worth noting that both men and women will gender police men who do try to take up “female” occupations like being a full-time parent or a “murse” so it is certainly not JUST privilege at play.

in post 7, in the last sentence of the 2nd to last paragraph, replace “and” with “but they” and it should make a little sense.

“But the bare minimum of being a good man is striving not to be sexist.”

Precisely. And a man who doesn’t get that observing and fighting against indulging in his own privilege requires work is one of the most annoying kinds around. Matlock seems to be saying: I’m not trying to be sexist, why don’t feminists like the sexist drivel I write? As opposed to asking: wow, if this many smart feminists are taking issue with what I said, I wonder if I mis-wrote somewhere, I wonder if there vague but dearly held beliefs of mine are perhaps founded on hugging my bigotry closer as the days get cold.

@Alysia: That’s a pretty good take on it as well, and is more generous to the men involved than I was, as I can only speak from personal experience of my mom and step-father’s relationship.

Side note: I must admit, looking at (all of) the manboobz comment thread, that MRAs have more trolling stamina than perhaps any other internet demographic. For a bunch of guys “going their own way”, they have a lot of trouble letting shit go.

#6:  No, he believes that women are servants, and should shut up about rights and stuff and get him a beer and a sandwich while keeping the house clean. 

  I’ve noticed that when you restrict guys to talking about mens’ issues without bashing women or feminists,  they’re not keen at all to talk about those issues. That “But seriously, what about the menz?” site has to allow its commentors to bash feminists or they’ll apparently complain.

Progrocker—I was thinking of sort of the “typical ‘good people’” family. There are clearly a lot of men like your step father and totally abusive men and MRAs and the like. And to be fair. there is no shortage of awful, abusive women too, but i don’t think that those are the “men” and “women” which the author is talking about in this situation.

I don’t think he had any specific ideas, really.  I read the article, interested in what it is that he thinks men are like, and all he could cite were stereotypes he didn’t really believe in.  Biological imperatives are really not worth pointing out, especially since what men like to define themselves by (like their work), and keep women out of arewhat goes beyond the bare minimum.  I guess it’s women who need to take care of all of the food-related stuff, and raise the kids, so men have the freedom to be something other than animals.  Now that I’m writing this comment, I wish I’d written his original piece. 

I often get the impression that men are mad that feminism hasn’t just worked out the kinks of gender relations for them, and handed them a simple guidebook for how to live an egalitarian life.  If men would engage with the project, they’d have more say.  Masculinity as a concept hasn’t evolved enough to be useful anymore.

I do know some men who feel like the inferior party in their romantic relationships with women.  What it comes down to is that they are always losing arguments with their girlfriends/wives, and have largely given up trying to win.  The fact that there are these fights implies that a) the guy is frequently fucking up and being called on it, or b) the couple is having conflicts like all couples do.  The fact that the guys think that they are always “losing” is usually that a) they were in the wrong and can’t defend themselves, b) they suck at arguing, or c) they are afraid of conflict or the perceived consequences of conflict.

Although always easier said than done, seems to me that if these guys stood up for themselves when they thought they were right and owned up when they were wrong, this problem wouldn’t exist.  Instead, they’d rather just cave in and then whinge about it, apparently.

Also, ZP’s comment was awesome.

Alysia, the invisibility of housework is a huge issue for women, but we also have to be assertive about not carving out “relaxation time” when it’s most convenient for our partners, and that might mean you get to use the TV when he wants to use the XBox. Learning how to assert your right to relaxation time is a huge important issue for women in the domestic sphere.

From birth, women are trained to be caretakers of men, and to take direction about when they are allowed to “relax” from men, and that’s really hard to throw off, because you’re not supposed to be assertive. So a lot of women don’t really get to relax how they’d like to: they either redirect their “relax time” activity into something that isn’t really that relaxing or try to meld their relaxation time into something that their husband does (again, even if it’s not relaxing). So let’s say husband is watching a game on the couch, and you’ve finished cleaning up and folding laundry, and you’d really like to watch HGTV and just zone out and look at property porn for a while. You can either a) go find something else to do that wasn’t really how you’d prefer to relax and might not be all that relaxing, or b) zone out on the couch watching the game which isn’t what you wanted, but at least he made a little room for you to sit down, and at least you’re getting to watch some TV. The notion that you should be allowed to say “hey, I need a break, can you let me have the couch for a while” is completely anathema to women, whereas men have no problem asserting their needs “hey, the game is on.”

Also, note, sporting events generally last HOURS—longer than a TV show or even a movie—which means that men can really stake their claim on the couch all weekend, because a Game Is Always On, and if she needs half an hour or an hour to watch House Hunters, well, but a Game Is On! So it can really be a means of keeping the woman away from the couch when there is important Man Tending that needs to happen.

Men are allowed to respect their relaxation time, and women are not.

It’s a shame, really, because there were some issues there worth discussing and now it feels like, for the time being at least, an opportunity was lost. Instead of considering such things as how masculinity is constructed, how it’s policed, who does the policing and why, Matlack set up the strawman of feminists blaming men for “everything”. There was a time in my life where I sympathized with that view, but as I matured and got to know more women personally, I found, among other things,  that 1) it isn’t true and 2) women have to deal with a lot of crap that I don’t have to and that’s worth critiquing. Doing #2 is not the same as blaming men for everything.

I think what may be happening in some of these cases is similar to the relationship between my mom and my step-father. In almost every facet of their lives, he makes all of the important decisions, and the only decisions my mom has much say in are domestic ones, such as what they have for dinner. And whenever she makes a decision that he doesn’t totally agree with, he complains and fusses about it, so she gets defensive because it is one of the few aspects of her life where she has substantial control over what goes on.

Well, and some women are controlling because some people are controlling. Feminism doesn’t depend on every woman being a good person. His observation about his friend’s relationship could be essentially correct. The problem is the conclusions he tries to draw from one example.

It just occurred to me that this “oh noes, the horror of having to defer to women !” thing reminds me of creationists and other deniers and their “oh noes, the horror of having to defer to scientists” mindset.

In both cases I can see where they’re coming from - why should we assume that that other person is automatically more right than you in this debate ? Shouldn’t we be dispassionately evaluating each other’s arguments in a spirited back-and-forth and such ? Doesn’t my opinion have as much value as anyone else’s ?

But at the end of the day we just have to accept that we’re all likely to be WRONG about some things, and that some classes of people are more likely to be right on certain subjects than we are. Like those for whom that subject is their job. Or their life. It isn’t about deferring to others or withholding one’s opinions, it’s about being smart about the way we evaluate uncertainty.

blackcurrents@9

“Matlock seems to be saying: I’m not trying to be sexist, why don’t feminists like the sexist drivel I write?”

It’s particularly odd that a guy who started a webzine to examine masculinity is so determined not to do any analysis of it.  He’s feeling put upon but can’t and won’t analyze what exactly it is that’s bothering him except a vague feeling that women are all against him.

One particularly sad aspect of this is his claim that women being cautious with unknown men since men could be rapists is the same and equally offensive as whites assuming that all black men are criminals.  The offensive generalizations of a privileged group have much more power so these two are not at all similar and it’s shocking that he thinks they are.

This reminds me of discussions about evopsych.

evopsych: *makes wild claim without evidence*
responsible scientist: *asks for evidence*
evopsych: wow, it’s incredible that you think the brain is magically immune to evolution.

Similarly,

MRA: *makes wild claim without evidence*
feminist: *asks for evidence*
MRA: wow, it’s incredible that you think all men are rapists.

You have more faith in GMP than I ever did, it always seemed like a weird “protesting too much” gender essentialist kinda thing to me.

This is an unfortunately too common pattern.  Guy says he’s different from the other sexist guys, he wants to understand, he is willing to have the conversation, but eventually it bumps up against his privilege.

At this point he could either admit he might be wrong or find a rationalization for accepting the truth.  Nine times out of ten it will be a retreat from understanding into evo-psych bloviation and sitcom stereotypes.

He’s willing to grant us humanity but only so far.

We see it on a regular basis among commenters on this blog.  Men who have supreme confidence in their thought process who nevertheless have never really examined the premises on which they base those arguments.  “Women are just as smart and valuable, they’re just different.”

@chingona: Very true. I just wanted to offer a concrete example that his view is not universally true. As has been pointed out here and on other feminist sites numerous times, the inertia of privilege means that men are used to getting their way most of the time with regards to relationships, and women are usually socialized to defer to their partners, so when their privilege is eroded just the slightest amount, it feels like an assault on them as individuals. Of course, most men don’t have a big problem when they don’t get their way with other men; it’s only with women that they are suddenly being “silenced”.

All these d00ds who blather on and on about how “men and women are different” are simply conflating that with their own male-female dynamic: I’m a self-absorbed immature douchebagge and while my self-absorbed immature douchebagge d00dbros tolerate me silently, the women in my life tell me the truth about my self-absorbed immature douchebaggiosity.

Isn’t this simply an example of “equal but different”? (by the way, this is what that expression actually means: “we’re so nice and magnanimous we’re going to grant some level of legal equality despite your inevitable and inherent female inferiority. Now go do porn for us.”)

NOT defending Tom, but I think MRAers yapping all day long online, implying he’s a pussy, put pressure on him to find a space that isn’t exactly where The Feminists stand.  So he’s a centrist!  Sweet midpoint between extremists at one end, the MRA trollertariat, and extremists on the other, angry broads filled with hatred and prejudice.  It’s 100% bullshit ... but the whole Some Men Are Good meme sounded reasonable at first.  Props to Amanda for giving it the benefit of the doubt until nobody could, and then calling Tom on it.

Unree, I think that’s exactly right. Which is why the only real solution to the MRA problem is the banhammer. They aren’t there to engage, but to bully. Fuck ‘em.

Yesterday I got a train back to my town, which due to engineering work and rain on the line or what-the-fuck-ever (yes, it’s in the uk, how did you guess?) didn’t get in til 1am. It was freezing and the town centre was rowdy so I got a taxi: despite a queue of taxis waiting, a sozzled bloke grabbed the door before I could shut it and yelled “Where are you going, love? Let’s share the cab!” Very luckily a glare and a sharp comment made him back off, slam the door and call me a bitch to his friend, and the cab driver had the sense to lock the door immediately.

Is that the kind of incident in which women ought to be more accepting of male behaviour? If so, what should I have done instead? Like Amanda, I’m hungry for specifics here.

It’s particularly odd that a guy who started a webzine to examine masculinity is so determined not to do any analysis of it.  He’s feeling put upon but can’t and won’t analyze what exactly it is that’s bothering him except a vague feeling that women are all against him.
Comment #20: Nutella on 12/19 at 01:28 PM

Not at all odd if he came into the argument convinced he was going to set everyone straight by being pleasant but firm about the nature of men and women being essentiallly different.

He apparently thought being a nicer MRA would solve everything.

One close friend jokes, “When speaking to my wife I always make sure to look at the ground in deference. And I make sure not to make any sudden movements.” I’ve watched him. He loves his wife.

He’s a very competent human being. But with her he’s decided the only way to survive is to submit. The female view is the right view. The male view just gets you into trouble.

How about this: Your friend being in a shitty relationship has little to do with feminism.

If we’re to take his friend’s word seriously, and I will, then he has options: Counseling, bellying up and telling her how he feels, shoot- dumping her works, too. Not useful: Blaming all women, everywhere.

To be fair, though, he did marry a mountain lion.

MOUNTAIN LION: (Roars)

CHRISTOPHER WALKEN: “Again?!  We just did it!”

  One close friend jokes, “When speaking to my wife I always make sure to look at the ground in deference. And I make sure not to make any sudden movements.” I’ve watched him. He loves his wife.

He’s a very competent human being. But with her he’s decided the only way to survive is to submit. The female view is the right view. The male view just gets you into trouble.

I find this kind of posturing—as with derails about male rape victims—so obnoxious.  It’s actually feminists and allies without an investment in toxic masculinity who tend to take these stories seriously and accept that the men described could be victims who need support.

Matlack is some friend if he really thinks the moral of this story is that we live in a matriarchy where dudes are punished just for being dudes.  This story isn’t funny, and if it’s true Matlack proves he doesn’t take men’s real suffering (even if they’re his close friends) very seriously at all except as a data point in his clueless rant.

Why’s his friend “joking” that? It describes an abusive relationship, and Tom says the friend is being truthful here. So the worst thing Tom could do is dismiss his friend’s pain and enable his abuser by laughing it off as something that just happens to anyone fool enough to take a wife.

Susan Faludi covered this same ground 20 years ago when she wrote her takedown of Warren Farrell. It’s still great reading (it was included as a chapter in “Backlash”) though sadly I can’t find a copy of it online though it is copiously referenced.

Ha, themmasses, we think alike! If his anecdote’s true (which I’ll pay him the respect of believing) it shows a worrying lack of concern for his friend and displays precisely the kind of boys-don’t-cry sexism the GMP was supposed to be fighting.

Ugh, you mean that men have to treat their spouses with respect?  One might even think the reverse is true!

Bleah.

  Dilan, that book is available on Kindle.  She took down a whole bunch of people who desperately needed taking down, and Farrell’s shellacking was especially elegant.  She took on Randall Terry, too. Neither Terry nor Farrell has changed or grown at all in the meantime, though Terry’s swapped out the wife he had then for a newer model.

yes, it’s in the uk, how did you guess?

You actually *have* passenger trains. And it was only a few hours late. And you used the word “bloke.”

Sorter Matlock:

“Women to blame for men being blamed for everything.”

2) I wanted evidence of how women are not accepting men, and what acceptance would look like.

The answer to that would undoubtedly be an argument that women should accommodate inconsiderate behavior and just generally accept a lesser quality of life so as enjoy the privilege and honor of domestic servitude to the wondrously different creatures known as men.

He’s a very competent human being. But with her he’s decided the only way to survive is to submit. The female view is the right view. The male view just gets you into trouble.

Total bullshit sitcom and rom-com stereotype there.  The world contains multitudes of men who are supremely confident that theirs is the right view and who are unafraid of expressing that in any company, but especially to the ladies.  See: the late Christopher Hitchens.

“He’s a very competent human being. But with her he’s decided the only way to survive is to submit. The female view is the right view. The male view just gets you into trouble.”

It’s probably more like that guy sometimes listens to her and finds that sometimes she’s got a point and sometimes they agree on things and sometimes she’s right and he’s wrong and vice versa. You know, like a pair of people interacting. But to a culture in which men who aren’t leaders are labeled as losers, such a situation is perceived the way he’s described it.

The answer to that would undoubtedly be an argument that women should accommodate inconsiderate behavior and just generally accept a lesser quality of life

This weekend I commented on a YouTube video (I know, I know, but I like Cenk Uygur and thought it worthy of constructive criticism), saying that responding to a woman’s comment on taxes and jobs by commenting on her looks wasn’t progressive. I got this gem of a reply:

I’m no womanizer, I honestly admit I’m a virgin, but as a male i think its just ok to let them get those feelings out of the way at first and then be serious. Maybe someday they will make a pill to fix that about men.

Yeah, as a male, he thinks women should just suck it up when men are horny. The best part was that, when I said that was bullshit because it’s not about horniness, and that if it were, a person who can’t control the horny enough to focus on the debate shouldn’t be debating, he said I was accusing him of being a lying sexist who made up his virginity.

It’s probably more like that guy sometimes listens to her and finds that sometimes she’s got a point and sometimes they agree on things and sometimes she’s right and he’s wrong and vice versa. You know, like a pair of people interacting. But to a culture in which men who aren’t leaders are labeled as losers, such a situation is perceived the way he’s described it.

I was guessing that the friend in question paints any deference to his SO as being beaten down, in order to beat his douchey friends to that particular punch.

As a male person, I find the whole “nice guy” and “good man” discussion really confusing and difficult to follow. I also feel like I should issue a few disclaimers:

1) There seem to be enough train wrecks involving males commenting on feminist blogs that I don’t feel the need to follow the blow by blow of feminists commenting on men’s rights or good men’s sites. With notably rare exceptions, I simply pay them no mind.

2) I don’t know that I can honestly call myself a male feminist. I guess fellow traveler would be an apt description. I don’t feel like I earned it, but rather that it was imparted to me by my mother and her “cool” friends. That may not fit the typical understanding of a male privilege but I feel like I lucked out and was given something many people my age, early/mid-30’s, were not.

3) I have a hard time with the notion that the idea of feminism is something that can be separated from the practice of feminism. I don’t see how a group of activists could operate in a patriarchal, hierarchical manner and still actually be feminists. In my time participating in a collective of feminist activists, I found that I had misunderstood certain concepts until I started to connect certain theories to certain practices.

4) One thing that seems abundantly clear to me at this point in my life is an idea that is so basic that it is profound in all that it implies and I keep coming back to it over and over again: Feminism. Is. For. Everyone.

Here are some questions I have about these “good men” and “nice guy” people:

It seems to me that branding oneself as a good or nice person, specifically in discussions surrounding gender and relationships is itself telling. Are their examples of female pro-men’s rights writers who are appealing to readers interested in men’s rights by labeling themselves “good women” or something remotely similar? Am I crazy wrong about this or isn’t the very idea that a male person would take steps to label themselves in that manner an indication that they are attempting to illicit a positive response from female people? And, if that is the case, doesn’t that in and of itself reveal something about the implicit views of that male person vis a vie gender and sexuality? It just seems like a disingenuous way to go about exploring topics like gender or sexuality or even race.

There are a few subjects that I would be interested in seeing debated between feminists and the good guy crowd. I think that there probably is a worthwhile discussion to be had about ethics in terms of how sexual reproduction and the differing obligations and contributions of each sex during the pregnancy-to-birth process might help us all better understand our own ideas about who should be responsible for what.

For example, when an anti-choice man whines to me about abortion or accuses me of selling out my gender for being pro-choice, my general response is to jab my finger into their chest and tell them that they cannot have a choice taken away from them when it was never theirs to begin with. I tell them that by making their own choice to have intercourse they are accepting each and every possible outcome because the only body that they have any legitimate right to control is their own. If they want to assign same moral value to a Blastocyst that they do to someone in their phone book, they still have to accept their own role in placing it there.

I would like someone with a totally different perspective to tear apart that reasoning and to push me to better understand the issue and the process of applying ethics to it. Yes, I would also like to consider other ways biology might create different experiences for each sex and how all of that is or isn’t connected to gender. However, I just don’t see what the “good guys” have to bring to that potluck. As you might have been able to tell from the tone of my previous paragraph, I simply do not take the same tack with feminists that I do with males opposed to feminism and that irony is not lost on me. When I am engaging with feminists or doing activism for causes aligned with feminism, I try not to be aggressively confrontational or attempt to dominate a room or a conversation but in other settings my behavior can be very different. I have been unable to cultivate a tolerance for intolerant people who callously disregard what other people value. I certainly don’t think of myself as a nice or good person and most of time I am instead concerned with trying to be an honest and empathetic person and leaving it up to other people to decide how nice or good I am or I am not.

 
  DonnaDiva at 42: In high school, my brother and I were liked by the girls/young women/whatever terminology you want to use, because we wouldn’t automatically agree with them in a transparent attempt to get dates and/or laid. The idea that women are going to get any man who disagrees with them in trouble is wrong and like you said, comes from very bad movies. Intellectually combative people like debate regardless of their gender. That being said, intellectually combative people of both genders might use dishonest arguments and tricks to win the debate if they don’t have anything substantive to say in return.

I made a couple of comments on the twitter battle and Tom sent me a link to a piece on the Good Men site written by a woman about how her life is so much better since she stopped seeing all men as potential rapists.  I thought that really strange since that had nothing to do with the comments I made until I realized he must think I’m female, really thats the only way it makes sense, he must have not considered I may be male and arguing against him.  Part of me is lmao but its pretty sad really, I’m so glad Amanda put the energy into debating him because lots of people throw out these really broad arguments like he did and are never really challenged on it so they go on with their deluded mindset and others just passing by think he has some kind of point.

Am I crazy wrong about this or isn’t the very idea that a male person would take steps to label themselves in that manner an indication that they are attempting to illicit a positive response from female people? And, if that is the case, doesn’t that in and of itself reveal something about the implicit views of that male person vis a vie gender and sexuality? It just seems like a disingenuous way to go about exploring topics like gender or sexuality or even race.

SaminMpls, this has been on my mind too since there’s a discussion going on at Feministe about Hugo Schwyzer and visible male allies.  To some extent I value their work, both because I think it could be persuasive to men who haven’t learned yet to listen to women, and because I believe that the suffering of men under patriarchy is real and deserves careful attention.

But I really don’t know if these allies’ writing leads a significant number of men to question their own privilege and expand their reading to work created and edited by people of other genders.  At some point, all cis men will have to take the step of really listening to someone different on the subject of gender.  And coming from belief in a meaningful gender binary, I don’t see how that can ever be a baby step for anyone, no matter how many blog posts about masculinity they fortify themselves with.

I also just can’t relate to learning about another group’s oppression and wanting to make a career of interrogating what the resulting privilege means for me.  There will never be enough time to recover and learn about the histories erased, contributions misappropriated, or tragedies enacted against marginalized people.  I can’t help but be suspicious of people who aren’t so fascinated by or angry about that that they can’t waste more time navel-gazing.

In the husband & wife quote, assuming that she isn’t abusing him and they’re not just having unusual communication problems, the husband is sending her a message by casting his eyes downward and behaving as if he’s trying not to provoke an alien: she’s an alien, she’s scary, she’s out-of-control. As soon as she tells him something that is upsetting her he can silently and instantly put her in a position of feeling that she has to explain it in a friendly, non-scary meek way.

I’m sure we’ve all had experiences with those behaviors in feminist comment sections: a guy shows up, spews apologies and flowery condemnations of “his sex,” before he begins his POV comment, as if you must approach feminists are scary or as if you could tame a nest of wild feminists if you approach on bended knee with a silver offering plate of castrated male genitalia. That’s annoying, so when feminists don’t react with especial gentleness to they guy their judgements are “confirmed.” It’s like a preemptive tone argument on steroids.

Everyone who is involved in social justice stuff has moments when they need to blow off steam, when they’re less than perfect, when striving for ideal thinking can be exhausting. It’s such a shame that Tom Matlack didn’t take that opportunity to show what a man blowing off steam about trying to be a Good Man would look like when said man is not engaging in sexism as a means to do so. Seriously, the world needs to know what that looks like because there are next to no examples. When trying to be a good feminist is exhausting I hope people don’t just GIVE UP and get all sexist.

The “middle of the road” mentality is fine in some areas but not social justice. If one group is saying “[x] are people,” and the other says, “[x] are subhuman trash,” then the middle of the road would be, “[x] are sort of like people but not quite,” and that is unacceptable.

@16: Your comment makes me really glad I grew up in a house that is the exception, where if anyone is assertive about the TV and tends to decide what to watch when, it’s been my mom (and usually it’s both the HGTV shows you mentioned AND the games - she is a bigger football fan than almost anybody else I know and regularly bowls over sexist men who think “well what can a ladee know about pigskin” by showing she actually knows the game better than they do). I mean, not that it’s a good thing that any one person has total control over the TV, and my dad, sister and I are regularly frustrated that we can’t watch things that she doesn’t want to watch. But, I guess I’m fortunate that no future boyfriend or husband of mine will ever be able to bully me into being deferent about that stuff simply because I’m a woman. (I say “future” because luckily, right now I have a very feminist boyfriend who doesn’t do that shit.)

Also, I share your sadness, Amanda. I thought the website had good potential. But I think that, like you pointed out, they don’t know the difference between “respecting other points of view” and “kowtowing to trolls.” And I’ve read the comments sections there, and it really is nothing but MRA trolling. On the last Hugo Schwyzer post I read, I think there was maybe ONE comment that respectfully and intelligently critiqued his point. All the other critical comments were trolls calling him a “pussy” and asking him when he was going to stop “feeling sorry for being a man.”

Sam, I think you have a really good point about the self-labeling problem. When they started, I just assumed that it was about feminism—-that feminism had made it clear that the old definition of a “good man” was out of date. Decent people don’t accept the idea anymore that all it takes to be a good man is to be a good provider and not overtly abusive. We believe good men have to be feminist in their orientation, accepting of their domestic responsibilities, supportive of women’s liberation goals, involved in their children’s lives, etc. To a large extent, that was what was going on. Certainly Hugo’s presence there made me think that was the desire of the whole staff.

But now I suspect that for Tom, anyway, it was more a defensive crouch. Claiming falsely that men are blamed “for everything” leads him to kick his legs and whine that men don’t get cookies for achieving not-overtly-a-dick behavior. It’s a form of Nice Guy syndrome, and it’s gross.

You are right that men who walk the walk don’t seem to be like, “But I’m a good guy! Give me a cookie!” Due to my career, I happen to actually know—-and date—-a lot of men who are not just feminists in their persuasion, but it’s their actual work. And they don’t do that crap.

I love the bobbing and weaving on the definition of “men”: first, women don’t understand the monolithic entity that are “men”. Which men? It’s not clear. Then we treat all men as if they were rapists when some of them are actually good. It reminds me of a lot of comment threads I’ve been on where men go on like, “What did you expect, girl? All men are rapists. Just total dirtbags.  Love us or prepare to spend the rest of your life on a hairy-legged lesbian commune!”

So which is it, Tom Matlack? What is this essential, innate manliness that women aren’t understanding? It’s not about raping, OK. So are you prepared to call out the rapists? Instead of answers to these questions all we get is a lot of dog-whistling about men’s differences, which as far as I can tell means men’s inherent need to be dickbags. That’s what I have to assume, unless he wants to clarify.

Amanda,

I’m curious.  Did Tom actively court you and other feminist bloggers?

Hi Amanda,

For others of you on this comment thread that don’t know me, I’m Lisa Hickey, publisher of The Good Men Project and CEO of Good Men Media.

Amanda, the last time we talked was when you emailed me your response piece to Tom’s article that we posted. I asked you if you at least understood our intentions with The Good Men Project. You responded:

“I do! I think the reason there was so much blowback is feminists online really support this idea…I think you can expect continued support for a project of having these discussions.”

So this is a funny way of showing your support.

Since this is filed under “feminisms” I’d like to get out of this mire and point out something else.

Tom’s article was part of an entire section about “The Presumption of Male Guilt”. It was in that context that his post ran. There were ten other posts by men and women who talked about this topic. Tom’s piece had gaps that others filled in.

I myself wrote a post called “Women Who Fear Men.” In that post, I talked about how I had a fear of men my whole life, and that my life got better once I got over that fear.

Also in that post, I had put out an offer to any women who wanted to learn everything I know about becoming a CEO of a national brand. How to get there, how to raise venture capital, how to write a business plan, where to start. 3 people took me up on it. I have already helped one of them put together an investor pitch deck. I told her I’d go on a VC pitch if that would be helpful. 

This is not bad for a day’s work. And get this—if 3 women became CEO’s of Fortune 500 companies, that would actually change the percentages of women who are CEO’s. That’s what a f*ing feminist does. They look at the numbers that need to be changed and they take the actions needed to change them. 

And guess who I learned everything I know about becoming a CEO, raising VC money and creating a scalable business?

Tom Matlack.

You can say that none of that makes any difference to the subject at hand or you can say again how “he’s got nothing.”

I’m not buying it. And I’m just not buying that what we’re doing is not helping both women and men.

To be clear, that email was sent before Tom doubled down. Now that he has, my doubts about his good intentions have been raised. There cannot be good intentions if someone, when caught saying sexist and bigoted things about women as a class, doubles down when caught on it. Tom gets no more cookies. The bare minimum of being a good man is being a feminist, and feminists don’t pretend that men are victims of some all-encompassing matriarchy.

If Tom has an argument where he produces evidence and examples, or just clarifies his definitions, that’s great! Right now, since he refused to produce this argument you and he keep swearing up and down he has, I’m forced to assume he has nothing. When I have examples and evidence to back up my risible arguments, I produce them. His utter unwillingness to do so demonstrates he doesn’t have the evidence or examples. Should he produce the evidence and examples, I’m happy to read and engage with them. But having been asked, repeatedly, for this evidence and examples, he refused to produce…..anything. Why, if he’s sitting on this gold mine of evidence and examples?

In the post above, I produced two things that would help lift Tom’s argument from “wah, women are mean oppressors” to an actual argument. To recap:

1) I wanted examples of these “differences” between men and women that Tom alluded to, but didn’t describe.

2) I wanted evidence of how women are not accepting men, and what acceptance would look like.

Very, very simple requests. His utter refusal to produce supporting evidence leads me to believe he doesn’t have an argument. Just stereotypes.

I didn’t read the piece because I can’t get past the title. “Being a dude is a good thing”? Fucking seriously?

Now, I don’t think “being a dude” is a bad thing. I just don’t think it’s a good thing either. Because I am not a whiny, entitled, lazy, dumber-than-a-box-of-rocks useless piece of shit, so I don’t ascribe any particular moral value to getting your dumb ass born in a certain demographic group. It was your mama who did all the work getting you born, anyway.

Now, all the stuff that happens after getting your dumb ass born in a certain demographic group, particularly stuff that happens to you as a result of getting your dumb ass born in a certain demographic group, we can ascribe moral value to. In this case, when one gets one’s dumb ass born as a dude, one gets raised according to standards and expectations of masculinity. Masculinity as it currently exists is primarily about being as big of an asshole as you can possibly be, so many men wind up being assholes. But that’s not the same thing as just being a dude. If “getting influenced by masculinity” and “being a dude” were the same thing, instead of just other people making sure that one thing follows the other, then being a dude would be a bad thing. But it’s not. It’s neutral.

Because it is neutral, wanting some sort of fucking “goodness” brownie points for it makes you a useless asswipe. Don’t you have any actual personal positive qualities you can refer to when insisting you’re “good”?

(And by “you,” in that last paragraph, I meant “general ‘you’”, or “one”. Not Amanda, obviously.)

I never “swore up and down” that Tom had a counter-argument to yours. My point was that everything we do at The Good Men Project is part of a much larger conversation, discussion and action. With many many contributors—350 at last count—all with a variety of points of view about manhood, masculinity and the male experience. And that the sum total of those POVs creates a body of work that is honest, not idealized, and seeks to explore in a very real way how guys are experiencing the world. Tom’s view was one of those. 

In my experience, this is how change can come about. You create a place where people are open enough to discuss the world as they see it. You might have other ways to create change.

Long term (10+ year) marriages have a tendency to get everybody-loves-raymondy.  There certainly are exceptions but a lot of marriages go bad in the same way.

Amanda: From your essay there…

The most obvious examples are that women have uteruses and breasts and vaginas, whereas men have penises and testicles.

Only if they’re cisgendered.

Nutella: “It’s particularly odd that a guy who started a webzine to examine masculinity is so determined not to do any analysis of it.”

I agree with Typist and Oldfeminist. Even in its “better” days, GMP has never been what I’d call feminist. It’s always been extremely paternalistic and heteronormative, biased toward monogamous marriage with children, and full of smug, patronizing “male feminists” like Hugo Schwyzer all up in there acting as if they know what’s best for the little ladies. If I want to read a blog by a guy who gives a fuck about gender equality, I’ll read someone like Thomas MacAulay Miller.

MoseyMcShuffleson: Agreed. That anecdote reminds me of all the men who make sexist comments, then duck or make as if they’re getting ready to bolt so that the evil feminazis don’t beat the shit out of them. Women are the real violent ones, ha ha! And they’re so irrational that the poor menz have to be careful around them! (I’m told this goes down all the time in Women’s Studies classes.)

But, yes, if that anecdote wasn’t made out of whole cloth, he’s belittling the emotional abuse happening to his friend. Or, what Baruk and Well, what? are saying about any agreement with women making one into a “pussy.”

Sam:

There seem to be enough train wrecks involving males commenting on feminist blogs that I don’t feel the need to follow the blow by blow of feminists commenting on men’s rights or good men’s sites. With notably rare exceptions, I simply pay them no mind.

You know, there’s this thing called Google. You can easily find descriptions of the term “Nice Guy” in a feminist context, as well as the arguments against anti-choicers that you seek. Men who show up on feminists sites saying, “I never follow any of this shit, please educate me!” are tiresome.

Lisa, nobody is obliged to support GMP or Matlack unconditionally. Also, I didn’t realize that a major priority of feminism was pushing more women up into the 1% so that they can shit all over the rest of us along with the men up there. And no site that aims to be taken seriously should give any credence to the opinions of Men’s’ Rights Assholes. You sound like nothing more than another brain-dead marketing “guru.”

I realize that post-modern (for lack of a better term) feminists and the MRA hate each other with tons of venom. The stuff said on both side quite frankly is not civil. It’s personal and ugly. I feel like I have dipped my toe into the wrong pond only to find it charged with electricity.

The MRA guys I frankly write off for the most part because at their most extreme they are just insane. I didn’t even know what the MRA was until I pissed them off and the SpearHead took aim at me.

But the feminists, well I consider myself a feminist. I take very seriously how my daughter and wife get treated by me, others, and the world. I have thought long and hard what it means to love fully. To be a good man, just for me, with regard to women.

So it’s much more difficult to take the level of personal attack, and frankly organized piling on, by so-called feminists. Sure it hurts. It hurts a lot. But that really doesn’t matter in the end. What it really leaves me asking is, “Where is all this personal bashing getting us?”

One of the things I asked in my original piece which caused the world to turn upside down is why it is that women want to talk about manhood so much more than men do? We see it right on GMP with our evangelists. The most insanely dedicated are for the most part women. Our CEO, as much as I love and adore and respect and don’t ever want to lose her, is a woman.

So we hit this divide. What is the point of what we are doing here on GMP? Is it to debate feminism? Is it to allow women to talk about their experiences with men? Is it to try to fight off the MRA? It is to have these vicious rounds of name calling in the name of gender?

That’s not where we started and not where I think we have the widest appeal. Sure it drives a lot of traffic from those interested in gender but not traffic from those who are more interested in how the heck to get through the day.

In the beginning this was about first person story-telling. Men telling their truth in a way that inspired and opened up the conversation to others. It was an attempt to find common ground among men, and women if they were interested in listening to men’s stories. When a man talks about losing his job or his wife or his child or his arm in war, feminism and MRA are no longer even part of the conversation. It is about hearing some guy talk about what remarkable, challenging, courageous, painful, joyous thing has happened in his life. It is about making men feel less alone. It’s about getting away from sports and porn and digging deep into the heart of the matter. Something for which I think many men yearn.

To my mind we have lost that thread more than we should. I don’t want to fight with those who call themselves feminists and then throw hand grenades at me. They have proven that they really aren’t interested in what I am interested in: men’s stories and goodness.

As I told Amanda directly on email before her last round of vicious attacks on me, you all are way too organized for me to mount a one man campaign to try to prove you wrong. I am not a debater. That was never my aspiration. My aspiration was to sit in Sing Sing and listen to a man tell me what happened. That brings tears to my eyes and moves my soul.

Oi!  Matlack!  You owe Toby Keith some royalties.

Seriously, people, the real tragedy here is that people are mad at Tom Matlack.

Well, if your heart’s in the right place, Tom, then of COURSE you get to spew a lot of inaccurate damaging stereotyped shit, refuse to back it up, whine about being victimised and then expect sympathy afterwards when you aren’t even trying to defend the original claims any more! It’s the natural job of us ladies to love you, after all.

Was it true about your friend living in fear of his wife, or was that bunkum too?

So it’s much more difficult to take the level of personal attack, and frankly organized piling on, by so-called feminists. Sure it hurts. It hurts a lot. But that really doesn’t matter in the end. What it really leaves me asking is, “Where is all this personal bashing getting us?”

In all seriousness, perhaps it should have left you asking, “Why do so many feminists feel belittled and offended by what I wrote?”

Could you maybe ask that instead?

Please?

Pretty please?

Tom, why aren’t you concerned that your male friend is the target of psychological/physical abuse by his partner?

He doesn’t call her “Sweetieface”, does he?

Tom, I somewhat sympathize with your pain and the fact that men do not know how to talk about gender and how it effects them (although I think it is because “male” has sort of been seen as the normal, default gender that didn’t need to be discussed) and, because of the toxic gender norms of the past, men are not allowed much space to talk about their feelings generally, but Amanda really wasn’t personally attacking you; “define your terms” is pretty debate 101. As for other random commenters, I do not doubt that you have received some pretty vicious attacks, but the internet is just a really mean place and you can’t take it personally—believe me that people who write about women’s issues get a lot of really ugly shit too!

why it is that women want to talk about manhood so much more than men do?

Because women are overwhelmingly the ones who have to suffer from the results of it.

And I’m very happy for the woman who learned not to fear men anymore. I’m glad you realized that your role in the world is to eat men’s bullshit and call it ice cream.

I also love how he’s decided *he* gets to demote Amanda to “so-called feminist” status, for objecting when he makes nasty, evidence-free generalisations about women.

the internet is just a really mean place and you can’t take it personally—believe me that people who write about women’s issues get a lot of really ugly shit too!

In a lot of ways, the internet is where you find out what people really think of you. There’s a good argument for taking it personally.

Oooh, look, a call to CIVILITY! Folks, let’s be CIVIL! Don’t get your panties in a bunch! Well, isn’t that fun? The “stuff said on both sides” horseshit again. But since you brought it up, the worst vitriol by far, is flung by the MRAs. Most of the feminists don’t make threats of violence and death.

Tom says, “I asked in my original piece which caused the world to turn upside down is why it is that women want to talk about manhood so much more than men do? We see it right on GMP with our evangelists. The most insanely dedicated are for the most part women.”

Because MANHOOD is considered the default. The norm. If you’re not a white man, you’re the OTHER. Have you even read “Unpacking the Invisible Knapsack?” You don’t notice your privilege. This is very basic Feminism 101. For a so-called feminist, you sure don’t know the basics very well. Non-feminists are often not interested in talking about “manhood” in this way because why would you want to challenge the status quo when the status quo involves everyone bending over backwards to suck you off?

That’s why “it hurts a lot.” You’re being challenged and it’s painful and humbling to realize your own douchebaggery.

Just because your CEO is a woman doesn’t make you a feminist. That’s like claiming you can’t be a racist homophobe because you have a gay black friend.

Also I notice you’ve basically invoked the old catching more flies with honey than vinegar crap, too. At least you could TRY to avoid all the elementary anti-feminist tropes? That’s to be expected from someone who hasn’t even passed Feminism 101 but calls himself a feminist.

Amanda’s attacks are NOT vicious. She has asked 2 very basic things of you that you have not provided, without betraying your precious civility. The fact that you label them vicious and put yourself in the same category of those who have been the recipients of truly vicious MRA threats just screams your unnoticed privilege loud and clear. You think you are the victim of “vicious attacks” by Amanda. Get some fucking perspective about what that says about you. You sound like an MRA now.

I used to read GMP faithfully and send people over there. No more. You have shown your true colors. You had an opportunity to learn and you have instead covered your ears and started singing your own praises instead. I am SO disappointed.

The fail is strong in this one.

A reasonable request.

I’ve said it before, but that honey and vinegar thing isn’t even true.

That’s why “it hurts a lot.” You’re being challenged and it’s painful and humbling to realize your own douchebaggery.

Exactly. When MRAs don’t like you, it means you’re doing something right. When feminists don’t like you, it means you’re doing something wrong. Even this idiot realizes that. He knows who he respects, and whose respect is worth having. Good for him. Now if only he would learn to stop shooting the messenger, and realize why he feels so ashamed and hurt when called on his bullshit by people who value evidence and honest argument.

Okay, in all seriousness, Tom, I’m a woman.  I’m a mother.  My first marriage was ruined partially because my ex could not deal realistically with the changes that happened to my body—at nineteen fucking years old—after childbirth.  Could not deal with it.

Seeing your post in which you sympathized with your friend over his wife’s “ruined tits” has destroyed your case, to me.  You can’t put yourself in the shoes of someone who possibly has carried the child of some ungrateful piece of shit who thinks that he’s entitled to look at perfect breasts (whatever the fuck that means).  You’re sympathetic with your friend who is just so fucking unfortunate that his “beautiful” wife’s tits are ruined.

Fuck yourself.  I’m serious.  Go fuck yourself.  You are not a feminist if you can’t, at the bare minimum, consider the level of body policing that women, and particularly mothers, go through.  Do you know what it’s like to read that and be reminded of the fact that so many men feel like they are entitled to have a woman carry their child AND to said woman looking like a supermodel when they’re done?  Are you even capable of conceiving of that?  “Good men” aren’t so emotionally devastated by sharing their wife’s tits with their fucking offspring that they go to strip clubs in order to avoid fucking someone underaged.  And “good men” don’t enable pieces of shit who rationalize that.

You feel as if you’re entitled to feminist cookies for acknowledging that women are people (but not that women just may have feelings about the loads of literally physically impossible expectations that have been loaded upon them), and this is while you post things like that (as if men are incapable of lusting after bodies that aren’t sixteen years old) or compare feminists to MRAs, when the worst I’ll tell you is to fuck yourself while I’ll have random commenters on my blog tell me to die for posting about how shitty it is to raise a daughter in this fucking kyriarchy.

Please.  Live a day with “ruined tits” and a partner who doesn’t manage to contain their scorn for your postpartum body.  Live a day as a female blogger who receives death threats and rape threats.  Please.  I’m serious.  Find somewhere and get a female alias.  Live a day in the shoes.

And stop calling yourself a feminist.  You don’t deserve to come within a mile of the feminists, male and female, whom I am privileged to know.

Smartpatrol’s link made me chortle, but I’m also irresistibly reminded of this.

Wow. I’ve never been a minion of a vast, organized army before.

The thing is, there is a fairly widespread movement that serious gets off on beating up men with regard to their relationships with women, and especially their foolish incursions into the domestic sphere. You see it on TV all the time, and its name is not feminism, it’s Backlash Patriarchy.

I would also note that feminism is not only the radical belief that women are people.  Feminism is also the radical belief that men can be fully actualized human beings who are entirely capable of a full range of empathetic reactions.  The post on male lust didn’t reflect that and the post about how it IS good to be a dude despite all women being screeching harpies sure as shit didn’t reflect that.  Both of those reflected the idea that men are just so gol-darn different from us wimminfolk that they are left scratching their heads because they’re inferior.

Fuck that noise.  I love men.  I think men are better than this.

1) I wanted examples of these “differences” between men and women that Tom alluded to, but didn’t describe.

Although it’s confusing reading, the work done by feminists on phenomonology and embodiment have (I think) given women access to an understanding of gendered differences that’s beyond Kindergarten Cop.  Whereas the explosion of neuroscience and subsequent study of embodiment just assumes the male default and doesn’t give any insight into gendered experiences at all.  So men (in my observation) attempting to answer 1) always fall back on cis anatomy and the busted extrapolations that follow.  This is not to say feminism has it figured out; the essentialism of the self-proclaimed radfems is alive and well.  But feminism has thought about it; it had to in order to define itself as a school of thought.  I think maybe male/men’s attempts to do the same are hindered by this blind spot simply b/c they haven’t had to think about it.  Or maybe they are in the thinking part right now.  But I’ve been consistently disappointed with sites claiming to focus on “men’s issues” all eventually ending up at the same “Gosh, men and women are different, and breaking that down is hard” place.  There does seem to be a genuine desire to talk about it, but it’s stuck in this boring, shallow loop.

Amanda—

You’re talking as if what is going on at the Good Men Project (and other sites like it, like “Seriously, What About Teh Menz”) is some sort of aberration.  I think it was inherent in what they’re trying to do, and it just took a while for it to become obvious.

The problem is that all these “men’s” sites are still trying to support the idea of “masculinity,” by which I mean a set of virtues and characteristics which men should seek to have and honor which are distinct from what non-men should have or honor.  But once you have a different standard of Good for men than for others (i.e., women), sexism and then misogyny are inevitable.

Ultimately, Western idess of “masculinity” are about oppression: about training men to be part of an oppressor class, either by actively oppressing, or by supporting oppressive social structures and practices.  I have yet to see any characteristic which is touted as a “masculine” virtue (and isn’t equally praiseworthy in women) which isn’t ultimately about maintaining a culture of oppression.

Sites like the GMP can’t effectively police MRAs because they are simply different faces of the same die: the die of sexism.

(By the same token, “femininity” is about training people to be part of the oppressed class, but that’s a different rant.)

Tom, seriously, you began screaming “Attack! Attack!” the minute you got any push-back on your original piece, but that doesn’t mean you WERE being attacked. You were being challenged on the claims made in your piece, both in the Twitter convo and in Amada’s responses to it, her most recent being admittedly more heated, but can you blame her? Your original piece had points worth discussing, absolutely, but you did an absolutely shit job writing it. It was poorly argued and was utterly offensive in the gross generalizations made towards women. Your CEO said above that it was part of a larger package on male guilt and your piece had gaps the others filled in, yet there were no links to those pieces when it was appropriate. As a reader, I shouldn’t have to connect the dots by looking for a supporting argument in the bowels of your (poorly designed) website.

Your followup, while filled with personal stories aiming to show your sensitivity side (to appeal to us ladiez, no doubt) was just more of the same, only this time, your generalizations were about the feminists who dared to question you. You are not actually interested in discussion, that much is clear. Your repeated insistence that anyone who questions you should “read your work” at GMP is the same as a white person who defends themselves against racism by saying they have a black friend. The secondhand embarrassment—oh, it burns!

Dude—may I call you “Dude”?—the original piece wasn’t good. It’s okay. Good men make mistakes. Good men get it wrong. And good men have the courage admit as much and learn a thing or two.

99.9999% of the time, “men and women are different” means “men get to do whatever they want, and women have to suck it up.” Also “men can judge women negatively for doing the same things men do, but women can’t judge men for anything.” Almost no one who makes that statement has anything more interesting to add.

Sorry, lisa, but that’s not going to cut it. Tom made very broad, generalized statements about how men are treated and women behave, and implied he was speaking for men as a group. He claimed men are blamed for “everything”. Those are very serious accusations that need to be addressed.

Tom, qualifying “feminists” with “post-modern” in order to prejudice people against us isn’t going to cut it. MRAs don’t hate post-modern feminists. They hate feminists, and mostly they just hate women. That your site is awash in bile from them and you don’t see that is alarming, and demonstrates an aggressive unwillingness to get it. The reason everyone is so mad is this feels like a betrayal. We were courted as feminists, told that this is a project of getting men to interrogate masculinity, and now we’re being fed the same anti-feminist crap and scolded about our “tone” when we protest.

There’s a lot of good feminist writers at GMP, and this whole thing just makes them look bad.

Also, as for the “vicious attacks”, mostly they’ve come from MRAs and from yourself, Tom. Putting on the “aw shucks, I’m a victim of the meanie feminists, women never let a man get a word in edgewise” act is passive-aggressive and aggravating. You wrote a piece that basically accused me and others of destroying the legacy of what you consider real feminism, presumably with our “post-modern” blah blah. That’s after you accused women of silencing men by demanding that they be “like” us, whatever the hell that means. Those accusations are far nastier and crueler than what I’ve accused you of, which is basically making a prejudiced argument that you can’t back up with evidence because you have none.

Stop pretending you don’t know what my two basic requests are. They have been spelled out, repeatedly. You keep pretending I’m “attacking” you, or somehow destroying feminism. No, I’m saying very clearly: You made a risible argument, but supplied no specifics, no definitions, no evidence, and no real examples. Please provide those things if you’re so sure you’re right, and if you can’t, admit you were wrong and apologize to the women of the world that you accused of not accepting men.

Amanda, I think the ones he’s accusing of demanding that he “be like us” are the ones like me who demand that men be held accountable to some basic standard of fucking humanity, like not openly bitching about the tits of the woman who has born his friend’s child or openly talking about how much it sucks that all these women, many of whom have been or will be raped, are afraid of men.  You know, little things like that.  Basic humanity and empathy are too much to expect from non-feminists, and this dude is no feminist.

*borne, godsdamnit

I want to take the time to acknowledge a couple of good points addressed to me:

Nobody in Particular: You’re right. I wrote that and really struggled with the fact that even saying men have penises/women have vaginas is essentializing. I probably made the wrong choice to go with it anyway, but my point—-which you clearly get because you aren’t riding me hard about this—-was that these are concrete examples of differences that Tom could have pointed to, but didn’t. Mentioning trans or even gay people as examples of where the gender binary falls apart is always a risky move, because defenders of the binary tend to bracket those folks aside as outliers, or even exceptions that prove the rule. I wanted to avoid that and address my arguments to the groups that Tom was basically talking about (and said directly he was talking about, because in his first piece, he basically declared them outliers, pre-emptively shutting down that argument): cisgendered straight men and women. But it still bugs me; I should have put more care into how I phrased that.

AMM, I believe you’re right. What About Teh Menz is a site I read like three times and gave up. They fall into similar traps. I just don’t get men who refuse to see that homosocial policing is the primary form that oppression against men takes. They live it in a direct way women don’t, so they should see it. I learn a lot from genuinely good guys about the ways that men are controlled by the “don’t be a pussy/don’t be gay” mentality, and some of it is truly distressing in the way that street harassment is for women. Maybe I’m wrong about them, though. It’s been awhile since I’ve read it. They also, IIRC, spend a lot of time trying to draw false equivalences between what women suffer in a patriarchy and what men suffer. Like my genuinely good guy friends tend to say, “Dude, it’s not like being raped. Jesus.”

INT, yeah maybe. We will never know, since he won’t say what he meant. But your points are well-considered. You’re never going to read an essay from a woman who says, “My husband gained a slight beer gut, and now I have to spend all my time at Chippendale’s so I don’t run off with a high school student.” That’s something that bears very serious consideration.

I read the other articles about blaming men and some were good and some weren’t, but mostly they avoided arguing that there’s some intractable and delightful quality called “masculinity” that women are trying to nag out of existence. There were even some really nice pieces, like Hugo’s explaining that it’s unfair to expect women to pretend that we’re not in pretty much constant danger of getting grief from strange dudes, when we are. Which should be common fucking sense. I mean, you’re not going to scold someone who takes other basic safety precautions around strangers.

Looking over What About Teh Menz now, it seems okay. Maybe I caught them in a bad week or something.

Tom:  “One of the things I asked in my original piece which caused the world to turn upside down”

No, the world didn’t turn upside down!  LOL.

You are not the world, not all men, not even all “feminist until it steps on my privileged toes” men.  Most people on the planet have no idea what happened to you and for those who do know it wasn’t an earth-shattering event.  Part of your world just turned upside down.  Big difference.

But thanks for confirming your Tom-centric worldview.

Also in that post, I had put out an offer to any women who wanted to learn everything I know about becoming a CEO of a national brand. How to get there, how to raise venture capital, how to write a business plan, where to start. 3 people took me up on it. I have already helped one of them put together an investor pitch deck. I told her I’d go on a VC pitch if that would be helpful.

This is not bad for a day’s work. And get this—if 3 women became CEO’s of Fortune 500 companies, that would actually change the percentages of women who are CEO’s. That’s what a f*ing feminist does. They look at the numbers that need to be changed and they take the actions needed to change them.

And guess who I learned everything I know about becoming a CEO, raising VC money and creating a scalable business?

Tom Matlack.

You can say that none of that makes any difference to the subject at hand or you can say again how “he’s got nothing.”

I’m not buying it. And I’m just not buying that what we’re doing is not helping both women and men.
Comment #56: lisahickey on 12/19 at 08:34 PM

Helping women into suits and boardrooms is a necessary but by no means sufficient definition of feminism.  And I notice that while he helped you, you helped those three people.  Who showed Tom?  If Tom gets credit for your work, who gets credit for his?  Oh wait, men are the source, women are the conduit.

Anyway, that’s really not relevant.  That’s not what the discussion is about.

If Tom’s not willing to answer the simple questions Amanda posed then, yes, he’s got nothing in that argument.  Other “good” things he’s done don’t erase the dismissive stereotypical crap he wrote.

You will just have to face this:  The GMP has now been outed as a masculoturfed pseudofeminist site.  While it will probably not disappear, it’s going to be to feminism what smooth jazz is to jazz, what Christian rock is to rock—feminism for people who don’t like feminism.

Every time I’ve checked out “What about teh Menz”, I had the impression that while the writers seemed to be engaging with these issues respectful and in good faith, the community reading them had TONS of resentment and bitterness that few were willing to call out. Looking at Good Men Project in the last few days, I’m alarmed that Matlack isn’t repulsed by the defenders he’s attracted. I’m looking at it like I did the Lowe’s situation. How is this person not disgusted at who is rushing to back him up? How do they not look at that hate, and not reconsider the position they’ve taken? The dissonance with Matlack’s reaction and the reasonable criticisms that inspired it is just so stark if he’d just step back. I get how he feels. I get that way sometimes, too, when I’m called out. What I try to do, though, is take a breath and step back before I get into a huff over it. Uncompromising disagreement is not proof of disrespect, but generalizations and broad characterizations indebted to the stigmatization of feminist discussion ARE disrespect.

Believing that the whole world is out to get you is some weapons-grade narcissism (or borne from untreated paranoid schizophrenia). It’s also a good excuse for a narcissist to pretend that his/her shitty behavior isn’t the actual cause of getting blowback from others.

“a variety of points of view about manhood, masculinity and the male experience.”

If any of those points of view are using the phrase “the male experience”, they’re doing it wrong, because it assumes monolithic masculinity. It doesn’t matter how “various” the POVs are, if they all contend that their experience of masculinity is “THE experience”, they are by definition discrediting those who experience it differently.

My dad (who has somewhat MRA-ish tendencies unfortunately) and I were discussing this last night. He was trying to tell me that no male enjoys being called “cute” unless he is gay, and that he knew this because of his years of living “the male experience”. I knew he was wrong because the kind of guys I like to date (they are normally effeminate or submissive, but not always queer, and obviously not exclusively gay since they were dating me) respond very well to it, but I didn’t really want to bring up that personal experience, so I just ended up saying “but not everybody has the same experiences as you!” repeatedly. It was a light-hearted argument but still a little frustrating.

“the sum total of those POVs creates a body of work that is honest, not idealized, and seeks to explore in a very real way how guys are experiencing the world. Tom’s view was one of those… people are open enough to discuss the world as they see it.”

Honestly, I agree with you in one respect, that we have to contend with the fact that some men define their masculinity or “see the world” in toxic and misognistic ways, and it’s better to read honest accounts from these men as well as accounts from trans men, gay men, feminist straight men, etc.

But these men should not be at the forefront of the intellectual feminist/masculinity studies movement, because if they are only interested in shoring up their own beliefs and experience, their accounts are only useful as case study materials for actual thoughtful people to look at. Maybe Matlock is one of these thoughtful people and he just had a slip-up, but the right thing to do in that situation is to read and learn from the criticism of the community, not respond with the tantrum above.

It doesn’t matter what else you’ve done that’s good for the movement, if you make an egregious mistake that could hurt both men and women, you fucking learn and apologize. We didn’t give Hitchens a pass for his misogyny because of his militant atheism, and we won’t give a pass to Matlock for this post because he helped you become a CEO (and really, is helping one woman to become rich even on the scale of spreading ignorant ideas that negatively impact millions?).

Treefinger :

If any of those points of view are using the phrase “the male experience”, they’re doing it wrong, because it assumes monolithic masculinity.

I don’t know, does it ? The thing is, that’s often the problem people have with discussions of privilege and the fact that different groups (women and minorities in particular) have a different experience of the world than the majority and dominant groups, and it’s something I used to agree with, that such discussions assume there IS a “female experience” or “black experience”, thus making those groups monoliths.

As I see it, while acknowledging that everyone is an individual and has different experiences - and indeed there are a whole lot of things “women” experience I’ve never experienced (and, to be fair, a lot of things “women” experience I thought I’d never experienced until I realized I actually had, I just promptly forgot about them because they were so alien to what I consider “my life”) - there ARE things that people of certain groups are significantly more likely to experience than others, or that ONLY people of certain groups are significantly likely to experience, and using “the X experience” to cover those things is a useful shorthand.

Which is not to say the phrase can’t be used to imply the whole group is a monolith, or to refer to experiences that are characteristic of the speaker but not of the group they purport to talk about; in those cases I try to go after the rest of the argument that implies that, not the specific phrase.
But I know little about this stuff, so what do you think ?

there ARE things that people of certain groups are significantly more likely to experience than others, or that ONLY people of certain groups are significantly likely to experience, and using “the X experience” to cover those things is a useful shorthand.

It’s not, though.  It’s part of the same essentialist argument used to deny trans people their genders by insisting trans women “retain male privilege” from some mythical experience of being “raised male”, and to argue for the inclusion of trans men (and subsequent exclusion of trans women) from women’s spaces, b/c of some gross “assigned a girl, always a girl” magical thinking.  So no, it’s really not useful shorthand, as it reproduces at a base level the very sorts of essentialist gender policing we’re working against.

it’s really not useful shorthand, as it reproduces at a base level the very sorts of essentialist gender policing we’re working against.

I second you, bomberE, on the ultimate unhelpfulness of talking about “the X experience.” I think the only way it works is when we’re talking not about the experience of X group of actual people, but instead about cultural stereotypes that get applied to people who are perceived as belonging to X category of people. So for example rather than saying, “all women are oppressed in heterosexual marriage,” or something like that, we could talk about the gendered expectations which our society places upon women married to men. Which is a way to talk about the ways in which women are treated as a class that applies to all people who are read as het, cis women—regardless of their own personal identities and experiences.

And even that is quickly complicated based on time/place/socioeconomic class/religion, etc. But I do think there’s a place to talk about the expectations and stereotypes a culture places upon certain groups of people based on characteristics that group of people are believed to share.

Yes, even that breaks down in situations pretty quickly.  I try to think of socialization as a one big stream of information that culture, operating on the binary system, expects a person to sort into discrete categories of “applies to me” and “does not apply to me.”  The “X experience” meme is based on the assumption that all people assigned to a gender will interpret the information the same way, internalize it, and use it to police others.  But everyone is exposed to the entire info stream, and depending on identity, class, race, etc, might well absorb messages that don’t “match” the gender they were assigned.

Tom Matlack said:

As I told Amanda directly on email before her last round of vicious attacks on me, you all are way too organized for me to mount a one man campaign to try to prove you wrong. I am not a debater. That was never my aspiration. My aspiration was to sit in Sing Sing and listen to a man tell me what happened. That brings tears to my eyes and moves my soul.

Oh, my stars and garters. Those were pretty much love taps compared to the verbal blows Amanda unleashes on people she’s really mad at.

In the beginning this was about first person story-telling. Men telling their truth in a way that inspired and opened up the conversation to others. It was an attempt to find common ground among men, and women if they were interested in listening to men’s stories. When a man talks about losing his job or his wife or his child or his arm in war, feminism and MRA are no longer even part of the conversation. It is about hearing some guy talk about what remarkable, challenging, courageous, painful, joyous thing has happened in his life. It is about making men feel less alone. It’s about getting away from sports and porn and digging deep into the heart of the matter. Something for which I think many men yearn.

This is all well and good, but it’s not exactly an unfilled need. It’s not really hard for me to find stories, fictional or not, about men going through those relatively universal experiences.

What is harder to find would the thing Amanda seems to have been hoping the Good Man Project would be, which is basically “This is how and why the patriarchy sucks for men, by men.” I dunno, I haven’t read the site, maybe there’s a fair amount of that.

But the article she linked was just something written by someone who doesn’t understand the world I live in. And seemed to try to be speaking for me as a male by throwing out the nonsense Amanda righly flagged as nonsense.

The sort of construction of maleness in this society is lame and boring to me and I’m not going to join in something that glorifies it. The advertising targeted as men mostly just convinces me that Jim Nance (remember the Bud, I think some pissy beer, Super Bowl commercial about the put upon man underwear shopping with his girlfriend) needs his ass kicked. See also who that guy I can’t quite place who’s trying to get me to drink Diet Dr. Pepper because it’s not a “lady drink.” (Diet Vernors is where it’s at, for men, women and everyone, I think.)I see it as saying I’m supposed to knuckle under to this version of what men and women are supposed to be (what the ol’ feminists call the patriarchy) and ignore the values my dad and mom taught me. Which, with regard to gender, was respecting and dealing with people equally and as you’d like to be treated. And accepting that people get to make their own rules for how to be a man, or a woman, or a dude or whatever. And don’t be afraid to do some laundry. Seriously, my dad was built like a mountain gorilla and he was able to notice when we needed to run a load and then hang it up afterword. He didn’t have to wait for a woman to do it and he didn’t think it was his divine right to have dinner made for him. He and my mom didn’t split everything 100 percent equally, but nothing was split with the assumption that it was woman’s work or man’s work. The idea that society has rules for how I, as a male, or my sister as a female, need to behave and the general sense that things should be roughly as they are now with men having more power is what I mean by patriarchy.

I’m just not on board with the idea that I necessarily have something in common with you because we’re both male. We may or may not. Are you currently re-reading a trilogy of Star Wars tie-in novels and lamenting the college football bowl system’s elevation of clearly inferior, lucky hype-beloved teams that wear yellow and blue unis to BCS games over clearly more deserving teams that whipped said team during the season and wear green and white? Or waiting for the library to get you a copy of the first volume of The Walking Dead? Or trying to come to terms with needing to find a new career, because your wife doesn’t like the hours you have to spend at the current one, and you don’t like it that much, but are sort of scared of jumping into something new? Trying to come up with an enjoyable way to get exercise when it’s become a little cold out for bike riding? Hoping your wife likes her X-mas presents? We’ve got a list of fairly stereotypically man’s activities there, so it’s not like I really want a life that’s all that different. Maybe I’m deluding myself that I’m a special snowflake, but the construction of man and woman we have in this society are mostly that kind of delusion. So I figure mines as good as anyone else’s.

(cont’d)
I’m telling you, Tom, how to run your website, I realize, but I think the essence of being a good person is to consider how you impact those around you. Don’t take a step unless you’ve seen whose toes you’re going to step on and whether you’re okay with that. And as a man in the 21st century U.S., understanding patriarchy and how it sucks for both men and women is necessary, in my opinion.

But is it possible for a group to address oppression without resort to some essentializing?

For instance, immense social pressure was placed on African Americans to abide by bus boycotts.  Workers who have no interest in striking are called scabs and shunned, or worse.  It is harsh, but is it possible to have a social movement without these tactics? Has there ever been one? Can there ever be?

BStu:

I’m looking at it like I did the Lowe’s situation. How is this person not disgusted at who is rushing to back him up? How do they not look at that hate, and not reconsider the position they’ve taken?

Well, Lowe’s is a big corporation, so odds are they’re going to care more about their bottom line than anything else. With an individual who is not ensconced in a giant corp, you tend to expect or at least hope for better.

Amanda: Thanks for your reply. By the way, after reading the revelations in this post and at comment #45, I would never again give Hugo Schwyzer the benefit of the doubt on anything.

@Jon S, that’s a real question, but it’s not germane to the current discussion.

@AMM: I have a real problem with “masculinity” websites for the same reason, mainly because any advice that’s good for being a “good man” is generally just repackaged advice for being a good adult human being.  The only utility I have for such websites is when they:

1) disseminate basic information on how to be a successful adult in our society.  Basic etiquette, basic house maintenance.  Yes, these are just as valuable for women, but they are inherently valuable, so whatever.

2) take on the Patriarchy directly.  That is, talk about why men’s lives are harmed by the hierarchy and emotional distance which the Patriarchy demands.

I’ve seen (2) happen occasionally.  In that case, a “men’s” site is meaningful, because the Patriarchy uses different tools to bring cisgender men into line than it uses on other categories of persons.  It is also useful because it can be a safe space in which men can acknowledge the pleasure that does come from domination as part of a process of putting it away because of the harm it does.

RE: the question Caravelle raised and others have answered (including Jon S’s question):

My answer is that you don’t need to use “the ___ experience” to describe privilege or oppression. Just say “having experienced male privilege” or whatever, because that privilege is only part of your experience as a male. I think it’s fine to operate on the generalizaton that certain groups are privileged and certain others are disadvantaged. The reason I gripe with “the ___ experience” or “the ___ viewpoint” is because usually it assumes that all people of a social group only belong to that group and not others- i.e. “male experience” is modified by race, sexual orientation, your gendered presentation, other aspects of your sexuality, your class and many other modifiers. It’s still fair to say that these people all experience male privilege, but it is not fair to say that (whether it’s the result of male privilege or “biological hard-wiring” as an MRA would argue) “all men think x and do y, or at least they should”.

In other words, it’s a form of essentialism normally used to police other men (or women) rather than combat institutional inequality.

bomberE suggested trans people as an example of how monolithic categories can be unhelpful. That’s true, but I think that’s because cis people misunderstand how closeted trans children and adults experience gendered socialization differently from them. All privileges come in external and internal forms, IMHO, and while MAAB trans women can certainly experience some forms of male privilege before they transition, they are unlikely to respond to the same media messages as cis boys and men. To wit, a pre-transition trans woman is as unlikely as the average cis man to notice the ways in which they might be treated better than someone perceived as female by say, a potential employer, but is a lot more likely to watch a sexist show and take the representation of the female characters personally (and all the baggage and hurt attached) than to brush it off or laugh at it. Transphobic radfems tend to acknowledge that transition disabuses trans people of the idea that people perceived as men and women are treated the same, but they believe they have some sort of residual internal male privilege (or lack of esteem, in trans men’s case), that they were never emotionally beaten down by being told by various forms of media that women (they) are worthless. I don’t think that’s true, for the reasons stated above.

Hm, I guess what I’m trying to say is that the concept of privilege can probably be improved on by splitting it up into two different forms that roughly correspond with primary and secondary types of socialization.

@Comment #64: Tom Matlack on 12/19 at 09:46 PM

I realize that post-modern (for lack of a better term) feminists and the MRA hate each other with tons of venom. The stuff said on both side quite frankly is not civil. It’s personal and ugly. I feel like I have dipped my toe into the wrong pond only to find it charged with electricity.

Oh, cool, the heavy artillery comes out now! Now we’ve become “post-modern”, and therefore beyond the pale. What will we be next, Stalinist RadFems? The Society for Cutting Up Men?

@#104

A while ago I was arguing with some garden-variety misogynists and trolls in the backwaters of the internet. I mentioned Schwyzer as an example of a male feminist, among others (I liked his posts about how men can have trouble with feeling undesirable a lot, which is why he came to mind). One of them immediately started talking about bad shit Schwyzer had supposedly done, such as having an affair and then conspiring with the woman to make her partner believe he was the father of the child the affair produced, as well as the evidence can be found in the link you provided (though it’s very telling that this dude was so much more concerned about the parental fraud than the attempted murder). I was honestly taken aback since I didn’t know about it, and had to concede a point to the troll. Another person I admired turning out to be gross :c

  So…a member of an incredibly privileged class takes potshots at a still-down underclass and whines that they’re being mean to him?  Yeah,  I can’t see why kicking women when we STILL haven’t attained anything like quality isn’t making women flood to the barricades—-on the side pointing the weapons at them.

#104, I saw that and I couldn’t believe he thought he deserved….something….for that.  A cookie?  Then again, you’re familiar with the true victim of rape confessionals going around aren’t you?  That’s where a guy talks about how he saw or witnessed a rape——like that guy at Penn State——but he didn’t do anything about it,  and he feels really sorry,  but he barely mentions the victim or criticizes the attackers at all.  McQuarry is probably doing that with his friends and family right now.  I’ve seen two or three of them now. 

  The thing about guys like Tom and other MRAs is this:  they spend more time complaining about strawfeminists and defending horrible men than they do criticizing those men for what they do to women.  Faced with something horrible happening to women,  they either cry liar or declare that it hurts men too,  but, really, isn’t it worse and more important when it has an effect on men?

  That’s kind of rambly, but what I’m trying to say is,  when these guys spend all their time complaining about feminists and offer only, “Yeah, sure, MRAs are bad,” (if at all) in response to something men commonly do to women,  they’re sending a message whether they acknowledge it or not.  Feminists are always supposed to soothingly say, “Yeah, women do it too!” but the MRAs never get around to their part of the discussion, in which they admit that men do lots of bad shit.  Never.  It’s not part of the dialogue at all; it’s not even a dialogue.  I’ll be damned if I know how these guys can claim men are being unfairly accused and punished when there’s so much resistance to even admitting anything at all—-and it’s all blamed on women anyway.

#108—-Treefinger,  I’ve seen that paternity post being used as being proof of how evil women are.

@Comment #108: Treefinger on 12/20 at 12:32 PM

I mentioned Schwyzer as an example of a male feminist, among others (I liked his posts about how men can have trouble with feeling undesirable a lot, which is why he came to mind). One of them immediately started talking about bad shit Schwyzer had supposedly done, such as having an affair and then conspiring with the woman to make her partner believe he was the father of the child the affair produced, as well as the evidence can be found in the link you provided (though it’s very telling that this dude was so much more concerned about the parental fraud than the attempted murder). I was honestly taken aback since I didn’t know about it, and had to concede a point to the troll. Another person I admired turning out to be gross :c

I don’t understand why it’s important to admire only non-flawed people. Wouldn’t it maybe make more sense to understand that Schwyzer is a guy who has done bad things in his life but also has some good things to say, and very admirable qualities?

Walking out on a check is a bad thing. Trying to kill somebody is a wee bit more serious.

dopus dei, 6:

He thinks that men are just deficient, that only women are born with the necessary equipment to make that extra effort and fold that laundry.  His kind of anti-feminism begins with a low opinion of men.

More to it than that, I think: he thinks that the way men are—biologically, naturally, inevitably, immutably—has been declared deficient by feminists, and he’s trying to fight back and show why it’s not deficient.

So there is a tiny island of right in that vast sea of wrong (one of those Far Side ones with a single palm tree): sex, beer and football are totally ok. Just, feminists, certainly nowadays, don’t generally disagree.

MissPrism, 34:

Why’s his friend “joking” that? It describes an abusive relationship, and Tom says the friend is being truthful here.

Ok, so it’s not just me.

Except everyone knows™ men aren’t abused, I guess.

Mosey, 50:

I’m sure we’ve all had experiences with those behaviors in feminist comment sections: a guy shows up, spews apologies and flowery condemnations of “his sex,” before he begins his POV comment, as if you must approach feminists are scary or as if you could tame a nest of wild feminists if you approach on bended knee with a silver offering plate of castrated male genitalia.

Four comments above yours, in fact.

That’s annoying, so when feminists don’t react with especial gentleness to they guy their judgements are “confirmed.” It’s like a preemptive tone argument on steroids.

“Preemptive tone argument” is a great way of putting it. I have to wonder, do they actualy think feminists think like that or are they trying to prove some sort of point (which I suppose also presumes feminists think like that)?

Matlack, 64:

So it’s much more difficult to take the level of personal attack, and frankly organized piling on, by so-called feminists.

Why do you think it’s organized? The mere fact that three people tell you the sky is blue, is not really evidence of a conspiracy to deny the orangeness of the sky.

atheist, 111:

Wouldn’t it maybe make more sense to understand that Schwyzer is a guy who has done bad things in his life but also has some good things to say

He says them in such a smug, ashamed-of-his-penis way that it comes close to negating the good.

What ginmar said, atheist.

Amanda is a flawed person (and who isn’t?) who has made some mistakes, but I respect her and what she has to say. Learning of Schwyzer’s actions, and the way he writes about that murder attempt, have gotten rid of the small amount of respect I still hadd for him after that argument with the troll.

He’s so damned proud of himself, too——but he took care to ask his lawyers if he could still get away with it.  It’s not about the girl he tried to kill; it’s about hissuffering that led him to try and kill somebody else.  Not her. Him.  That’s more than a little masturbatory right there. 

  Guys like him benefit from the bar being so low that you can step over it because it’s flat on the ground.

OK, fair enough, I’ll read the link you posted. I didn’t know he had attempted to kill someone.

atheist: trust me the SCUM manifesto has come up, um, IN EVERY SINGLE CONVERSATION THEY HAVE ABOUT FEMINISTS.

Also no one ever links here or to feministe or to any of the other mainstream feminist blogs - or even to Twisty Faster, who says plenty of stuff that would make a good out-of-context strawfeminist - but apparently there’s some radical feminist community on hubpages that I’ve never heard of that sums up the soul of our movement. Which is to castrate men with our shrill shrill voices while sapping them for child support etc.

/someone just spent all night on that blog and is really regretting it. My boyfriend encouraged me to see it as a very very baby attempt at engaging with the entire idea of gender and then close the window and go outside. I think that’s wise, but jeezy creezy it’s never going to get any better in there if it’s just a bunch of MRAs basically backpatting about how they’ve never personally committed sex trafficking.

@Comment #117: purpleshoes0 on 12/20 at 02:40 PM

atheist: trust me the SCUM manifesto has come up, um, IN EVERY SINGLE CONVERSATION THEY HAVE ABOUT FEMINISTS.

I guess it’s got that perfect balance of famousness and sexiness and craziness. Perfect for fascinating a bunch of mostly stupid people.

Am I the only male who became feminist-sympathetic because I sensed all the ways in which men have privilege in society and thought it was unjust?

Really, I don’t mind men talking about gender issues. I do it too, and sometimes get flak for what I say. Fine. And sure, men have legitimate complaints about certain issues. We don’t live in a world where women are saints and nothing that anyone ever does to a man is ever wrong.

But I don’t think I could stomach listening to a bunch of guys complaining about how terrible gender politics makes their lives. Get me the world’s tiniest violin.

Among other things, I don’t have to walk around worrying whether someone’s going to rape me, or sexually harass me, or judge me because of my weight, or because I didn’t wear high-heeled shoes, or because I look too conservative or too “slutty”, or think that I am not up to the job, or think that I need everything explained to me, or think that I am no good at math or engineering or driving or science or whatever, or that I spoke up too much and was too assertive or “bitchy”, or that I might have to carry a child for nine months, or that my employer might think I might want to quit my job to become a mother and won’t be “loyal” to him, or that I’m only getting paid 75 percent of what men make.

That’s right, I’m a male, and I don’t have to worry about any of those things that 51 percent of the population does have to worry about. And that’s called privilege.

To me, one of the major takeaways of feminism is the recognition that over half the population is getting the short end of the stick. Are there things that are bad about being a man? Sure there are. But nothing comes close to that list that I just enumerated.

Unexamined privilege is at the root of a lot of these men’s problems.

atheist: I read it for the first time last night as a result of hanging out over there and DAMN it’s crazy. I guess it’s time to hold us all accountable for something super nutsy someone said 35 years ago! It’s a good thing we have these MRAs to hold us accountable!

Dilan: What crazy-makes me after spending all last night staring at the comments section over there was the number of things that people complained about that one would guess are the result of, um, the actual patriarchy. For instance: poor work-life balance, the extreme suspiciousness of women when approached randomly in public, the assumption that all men are rapists, and the idea that men are helpless doofuses in home and family life. Last I checked, there was an inverse correlation between the statements “I am a feminist” and “they’re just helpless babies, really”.

It was a deep, crazy well of bad and sexist. I am going to try to block it from all my computers and forget it ever happened.

@121: Purpleshoes, you haven’t seen all those quotes MRAs like to dredge up,  have you? All of them are unverifiable, or misquoted or misattributed,  or just plain made up——and all of them forty or more years old.

I once saw a dude argue about feminists by citing….one of the Susan B. Anthony’s contemporaries.  He’d just googled and hadn’t checked his dates. The book was a hundred years old.

@122: Ginmar, I am generally so good at not seeking out people on the internet whose opinions are just going to make me angry that I haven’t, no. God knows one full scroll through a Good Men Project comments thread on ANY TOPIC INVOLVING FEMINISM was a survey course on that sort of thing, though.

*sigh* I just got done with a fierce two-week skirmish with these creeps on my blog. (http://resistingthemilieu.wordpress.com/2011/12/08/the-so-called-false-rape-society-attacks-me/)
I tried my best to debate well, but often was overwhelmed with exhaustion and emotions just dealing with the non-sequiturs, character attacks, ad hominem and unchecked assumptions. Paul Elam posted my name on the False Rape Society and smeared me by manipulating the comments on his page to misrepresent what I said. Luckily, I was able to catch Paul lying and publish it on the post listed above. He sent some really nasty emails (which he denied sending—and I published for all to see.) After disgracing himself thoroughly, he ended up sending a bunch of lackeys to flood my comments section in order to subdue me. I answered every comment I could and kept up the best I could, but often I was just so pissed and exhausted that I couldn’t keep up. Ahhhh! The brain melts…

Wowza - what a bunch of tools you are dealing with there, Ben.  My sympathies.

I’d like to inform people that I made a major mistake in the article I linked to above; when searching domain names I became convinced that Elam held the FRS domain, when in fact I had confused the register-her.com and FRS domains. Corrections and an apology to Elam are on the blog.

And Helen—thanks for the kind words.