Men's Health Feminist Blog

This made my day.

Yeah, you read that right: Men’s Health magazine, full of “how
to have better sex” and “how to lose the belly fat!” advice for men, has a blog
for men about feminism. This unequivocally rocks for three reasons.

First, it’s a sign that the feminist blogosphere has moved into the
mainstream. When feminist verticals like Broadsheet and Double X are either
disappearing or folding back into their original publications, it’s a good
indicator for the future that a mainstream popular men’s magazine has taken up
the feminist cause.

Second, hopefully a blog like this can help de-stigmatize the label “feminist” for readers.
...

Finally, the blog could help bring men to the movement. For men, feminism and what it entails is rarely discussed outside of a historical context...

You can read the Men's Health Feminist Blog here.

Feminism and Men

Tired of hearing how advances for women can only mean an impending "End of Men"? Well, so is Hugo Schwyzer at the Guardian. He wrote a great article about what feminist advances may mean for men, my favorite bit of which can be found below.

Traditionalists warn that women who exercise "too much" sovereignty over their bodies (by utilising contraception, availing themselves of abortion or new reproductive technologies) risk making men irrelevant. And men who feel irrelevant will behave like perpetual teenagers, refusing to make lasting commitments, cheerful in the certainty that whatever happens sexually, a "woman will take care of things".


We socialise women to be afraid of one thing more than anything else: being alone. The anti-feminist opponents of progress are masters at exploiting that fear, urging women to resist the siren song of technologically assisted autonomy lest they find themselves growing old without a man. The anecdotal evidence that a great many men in Britain and the US do seem stuck in what the scholar Michael Kimmel calls "Guyland" – an enduring adolescence that seems to last decades – seems to legitimate the shrill jeremiads of the traditionalists.


But the opponents of progress are wrong.


Leaving aside their wrongness on the larger questions of women's autonomy and reproductive ethics, they're wrong about men. They're wrong in their insistence that with female vulnerability, men will rise to responsibility, while without it, men will invariably sink down to drifting, predatory fecklessness. While it is absolutely true that we've raised men to believe that their worth is contingent on how well they take of vulnerable women, it's also undeniably true that traditional gender roles have exacted an enormous cost from men.


Male privilege is not a guarantor of either happiness or health, and trying desperately to play the part of protector and provider has robbed generations of men of both. Feminism, in concert with these many new and exciting reproductive and contraceptive technologies, offers men a chance to rethink and re-evaluate their worth and their purpose. It offers them an opportunity to be intimate allies with their female partners, to forge relationships based on more than duty and dependency. It gives men a chance to be loved for the wholeness of who we are, rather than solely for what we can provide.

I am so glad that there are voices against the outdated "traditionalist" thinking Hugo cites. To read more about traditionalism and why it is short-sighted, read the full article here.

Sexual assault, triggers, and the problem of male privilege in activism

**Trigger warning: sexual assault**

Over the past month or so, a lot of talk about sexual assault has been happening on my college campus.

Here's the situation.

I am president of a feminist group at my school, Students Against Sexism in Society (SASS). Last term there were several reported incidents of sexual assault on campus. These (rightly) caused an uproar among students who wanted to see immediate and concrete action taken by the administration after several years of pressure to see certain changes by groups like SASS. The outrage felt by students was displayed in ways ranging from student organized open forums, zine creations, students attending faculty meetings and speaking out about their concerns, and even some anonymous actions.

It was one such anonymous action that provoked a large amount of controversy. One day, early in the morning, large banners were hung up in a high-traffic building on campus. The banners covered most of the windows leading up to the cafeteria in that building and were difficult to ignore. The banners made exclamations about the state of sexual assault on campus, saying things like “2 sexual assaults, one weekend: where is your outrage?” and "Knox is no exception to rape statistics." (For more information on these banners, click here*).

The reason for the controversy over these banners focused on two things: The way they presented the problem of sexual assault and their placement in a high traffic area of campus and the possibility that they may trigger survivors of sexual assault.

The latter was an issue we discussed at a SASS meeting the week the banners went up. The group knew the meeting was going to consist of a lot of discussion about sexual assault, but what no one was prepared for was the behavior of a male student who showed up to the meeting. He is not a regular member of SASS, and right away he attempted to dominate the discussion by talking at length about topics of his choosing without letting others give their input. This behavior forced me to cut him off at several points and he did not take kindly to that.

When a woman brought up the issue of the banners being triggering to survivors of sexual assault, the male student appeared ignorant of what the term meant and said that it shouldn't matter if the banners "made a few people uncomfortable" because it was more important that people be aware of the problem.

This attitude prompted many at the meeting to try to explain to this student that triggering a sexual assault survivor was more than just making them uncomfortable and how it is important to offer a trigger warning when a discussion may be difficult for survivors to hear. The male student listened to everyone, but did not seem to completely understand. He then went on to accuse students, by name, of rape. The group listened uneasily to his stories and a discussion took place about using names when accusing people of such crimes when they have not been found guilty of anything. However, the male student stood by his conviction that it was important to "warn the campus" about these people who he was personally convinced were rapists.

Then he went on to name another male student by name and told, in great detail, about the supposed rape he committed. All of this without a trigger warning. This act triggered a member of the group and I had to leave the meeting with them. The meeting was called to an end during our absence as most of the group was, as I found out later, very upset by the male student's behavior. The atmosphere was uneasy at best and felt downright unsafe at worst.

I spoke with this male student after the meeting. I told him that if he wanted to be a productive member of these sorts of discussions, he needed to educate himself on how to talk about them appropriately. He told me that he wanted to educate himself. He apologized to me and the other student that had to leave the meeting. He said he wanted to be part of the solution. Despite this student's good intentions, this meeting brought to light some important issues facing women activists working for solutions to problems regarding sexual assault.

First, the necessity for male activists to check their privilege at the door. During the SASS meeting, the student's male privilege showed in the way he handled himself. He disregarded other (female) members' attempts to add to the conversation, as if he had more right to speak than they did, and he ignored their explanations about triggers before he told unverified stories that hurt people who were listening. This was the most infuriating part of the whole ordeal to me. This student walked into a meeting that was meant to be a safe space, especially for the women there, and totally disregarded the feelings/advice of those he should have been working with, people he had a hard time even allowing to speak. Overall, his attitude and actions created an atmosphere in which producing meaingful activism seemed difficult.

Second, the importance of taking survivors into account when coming up with solutions. The male student was not a survivor of sexual assault, and was not well-educated when it came to understanding how survivors might feel about some tactics that he was ok with using. I understand that there is some contention over the idea of survivors being treated as fragile vs. trying not to revictimize survivors, but this experience made me believe that work on the issue of sexual assault that does not take survivors into careful account (providing trigger warnings, getting their input, etc.) is not work I want to pursue.

Has anyone else ever had a similar experience? I'm curious as to how this male student can be integrated into a working solution about the problem of sexual assault on this campus, or if he should even be allowed the chance after his behavior. Opinions?

*The article from The Knox Student quotes me as president of SASS. For more information on the situation at Knox last term, visit the school's student newspaper for coverage of the events.

Masculinities

Check out this fascinating collection of pictures titled Masculinities by Chad States (some NSFW). When finding subjects, he intentionally left it open to people of all genders. It's a complex picture of the ways people interpret their masculinity. Here are some choice quotes from his subjects:

"The first thing I do when I walk in a room is figure out which male could kick my ass and which female I would like to fuck. Sometimes this is so subconscious it is alarming." - Andrew

"To me, it's about being comfortable with myself. I like the way I look, am comfortable with myself and enjoy being a man." - John

"When I wear men's clothes I feel more comfortable and confident in how I look on the outside which now matches the inside." - Liz

"I am masculine because I abandon women after taking their love. Because when you study Freud you don't let him study you. Because I study philsophy not literature." - Luke

"I want to show that, despite stereotypes, gay men can be masculine too." - Mike

via Jezebel and The Morning News.

She's good at soccer. She plays like a boy.

This week I’ve been helping my mom with a soccer camp for kids in our town. It’s a Challenger British Soccer Camp, where British coaches come to the United States to teach soccer and British culture. In addition to teaching skills of the sport, there is also a World Cup tournament in which the kids are put into teams and they pick a country to represent as they play the other teams.

Yesterday, my mom and I were watching the kids play one of their World Cup matches, and I remarked that two of the teams seemed to be rather unevenly matched. My mom replied that the team that was winning by a large margin seemed to have all the good players – several boys who were very talented at handling the ball, and a girl, who my mom said was good because “she plays like a boy.”

The comment caught me off guard, but I quickly tried to get my mom to realize what she had said by asking, “So you have to play like a boy to be good at soccer?” My mom answered, “Well, she’s tough.” I thought to myself how absurd of an idea that toughness was somehow inherently absent in girls unless they behaved like boys, but the conversation stopped there.

This one comment by my mother, a woman who was a dedicated athlete, playing soccer as the only woman on a men’s team when she was younger, completely blew my mind. I plan on having her read this post when I am finished with it so maybe she can see more closely the problems with comments like this.

First of all, it buys into the idea that being tough is the opposite of what is expected of a girl. The idea that girls are supposed to be passive, gentle, and nurturing has been used to shame girls into restrictive gender roles for years, keeping them from being able to accomplish all they are capable of, simply because society can’t seem to handle having too many “tough girls.”

When I was younger, playing in a youth league on a co-ed team, I remember my father, an avid soccer fan and coach, telling me to stop saying I was sorry whenever I ran into someone, stepped on them, or hit them with a ball. He used to say this to me so often that even eleven, twelve years later, I still can hear him telling me, “Stop saying you’re sorry! You shouldn’t be sorry! This is soccer!” Looking back on his words, I can see that he was trying to get me to focus on the game, be unashamedly tough, just as a boy would be. The boys never said they were sorry, my father would tell me. When I didn’t show the proper signs of toughness, I was told off by my own father.

I played varsity soccer for three years in high school, and during one match my senior year, I was hip checked by an opposing player. The hit was hard and I fell to the ground. I got up and was in pain, and as I tried to walk it off, I was limping a bit. The father of one of my team mates noticed that I was limping and he yelled at me from the sidelines to stop limping and just shake it off. The comment angered me because I was legitimately hurt. In fact, the same injury still bothers me from time to time two years later. But how dare I show pain. Pain is for sissies. For girls.

The second issue with associating being a “good” athlete with “playing like a boy” is that it plays into a huge problem when it comes to sports (and other aspects of life) – using the female as an insult. “You play like a girl!” and “Sissy!” are some of the biggest insults that one can throw at a young athlete, and both of them are so insulting merely because they equate said athlete with a female.

Females have the added struggle in this country (and most countries, I would think) of having to carve out a space for themselves in a sphere of life that had been, for ages, dominated by men. I will say here that I acknowledge that perhaps women and men have different physical abilities, but I would like to point out that just because men were allowed to participate in sports before women doesn’t mean that it is right to say that playing like a man is the only way a woman can be considered good at her sport. People of all genders could easily emphasize different aspects of the same game and all be good at it for different reasons. And who decided that being tough is a strictly male characteristic, anyway?

But until these problematic attitudes disappear forever, the girls and women who go out and play sports will be the real winners for taking on such ideas without even knowing it.

"Dirty, filthy, rotten girls": My role in rock culture

This past weekend I attended a concert in Rockford, Illinois. Wing Ding is an annual rock concert in the Rockford area that brings together several bands for a day-long event. This year's event is rumored to be the last Wing Ding ever.

Since my freshman year in high school, I have really been into rock music of all kinds, and have been to nearly thirty concerts since I was fourteen years old. I have seen bands like System of a Down, Korn, Rage Against the Machine, Alice in Chains, and Sevendust.

Each show seems to bring a unique crowd. Some create a sense of united purpose, usually fueled by a shared passion for the music. At these kinds of shows, I have been able to get to know the people around me, talk to them, share a good time with them. But other shows have tended toward the opposite.

At these other shows, I have felt very much like an outsider as a woman in a mostly-male space. That's the thing about rock music: liking it as a woman is inherently challenging to the feminine/masculine dichotomy we are taught to abide by. Rock music, with its hard-hitting guitar riffs, the sharp drum beat, and the powerful vocals, is not associated with being a female. The overwhelming power (and often brutality) of this kind of music is something that women are not supposed to possess or utilize. That means that when women do show up at these kinds of concerts, where this power and brutality reign above all else, they are often treated as outsiders and are reduced to objects (typically breasts) for the pleasure of the men in the crowd. I have heard "Show your titties!" enough at the concerts I've been to to last me a lifetime.

At Wing Ding last Sunday, I saw Powerman 5000 perform, and at one point during their set, the vocalist said that he was going to dedicate a song to all the "dirty, filthy, rotten girls" in the audience. With those words, he effectively turned the women in the crowd into fetishized "naughty girls." As I stood in the crowd, I could feel the implied sexuality dripping from his words, and I didn't feel at all like they were aimed at women, but were aimed instead at the men listening. They made me cringe, but still I stayed there for the remainder of the set.

Without going into many more examples, I will say that I'm still trying to get my head around this. I have taken part of rock show culture that doesn't treat women as full human beings. I still like bands that make these sorts of attitudes possible. It took me too long to realize that I was part of the problem, and I still can't say I want to give it all up. The brutality inherent in most rock music, especially metal, is something I can relate to and can easily connect with. There's a lot to be pissed off about in this world, and sometimes it feels good to be able to connect with music and other listeners who are tapped into that same sentiment. But the fact that most of the music I seem to be interested in attending concerts for comes with this troubling atmosphere makes me feel uncomfortable.

How can I be a good feminist while I'm cheering for a band that attracts the kind of crowd that yells, "Show your tits!" and cheers when women pull up their shirts? It wasn't until last Sunday that I really starting thinking about these things, despite the several shows I have been to since I started identifying as a feminist. I'm still trying to figure out exactly what it is about hearing this kind of music live that I can't seem to give up. If it's the atmosphere, how can I justify it when often times its so blatantly sexist? I'm not quite sure.

From Fortune 500 to the PTA

Yesterday I found this article in the Fashion & Style section of the New York Times website. I thought the placement of the article was a bit odd, so I began reading about men in Pelham Manor, New York, who are dealing with losing their jobs in a recession which is leaving more men unemployed than women.

In this intimate town of 5,500 in Westchester County, with a median household income of almost $137,000, the streets are lined with meticulously landscaped homes with an average value of almost $1 million. These days, though, for-sale signs are popping up all the time.

The article followed several men who had lost their high-paying jobs and are now spending more time with their children and doing more parenting. But throughout the article it was made clear that these men all seemed to have lived experiences of masculinity in which providing was the most important aspect of being a good man/husband/father.

Other research shows that men tend to get more depressed than women when they lose jobs, but in cases where people are laid off in waves, such as when an entire plant closes down, they often experience less angst than those who are laid off individually.

Of course, this particular article concerns men with a kind of monetary security that is not at all common for most families in this country, but what do you think about the recession and the implications of differing gender roles due to unemployment levels?