Emotions are so hot right now
It’s gotta be a sensibility rather than a set of rules but I have been asked before about how a straight mang with ‘emotional maturity’ might actually manifest in a relationship. I tend to shy away from this question because I don’t want to come over all didactic (and I also tend to think … well, work it out for yourself!). But what the hell … it’s Friday, I have twelfty PhDs to write and it’s humid.
Emotional maturity in the straight mang is not, as the cuddly Steve Biddulph once put it, ’simply about being willing to sleep in the wet spot’.
It *is* being comfortable with being vulnerable, aware when you feel uncomfortable or threatened by intimacy, and being able to articulate this and take responsibility for it. This includes being willing to say no to intimacy when it’s not something you want, rather than just going with it for fear of ‘hurting her feelings’ and therefore being ‘an insensitive non feminist man’ (think about this. just.think.about.it.).
It is also being willing to think about how certain man behaviours can make ladies feel (which many ladies will be willing to advise you on), even if you haven’t the foggiest idea what they’re talking about (one of the things about privilege is that you don’t have to be aware of how you affect others because your position is just taken for granted. So when you’re confronted with it you can just say ‘Sorry, I don’t know what you’re talking about’).
It is also being willing to think about this stuff in a lifelong sense, that is, not just thinking that because you aren’t the boyzclub gangrape type or Some of Your Best Friends are Feminists or you have been seen giving your man friends a hug in public means that you don’t need to think about your position as a mang in a patriarchal society (patriarchy is thousands of years old and intersects with all sorts of other silly oppressions so shifting it within all of us is a fairly long-term goal). It is actually possible to, as Juan Felipe Hererra puts it in a very funny piece of writing, ‘live with a feminista and (still) be a macho’. He was mainly talking about Chicano masculinity in the US, but y’know. Some things are globally distillable.
And if you Feel Bad about yourself as a man as a result of talking to a woman from a feminist perspective, sit with that feeling for a while and see where it goes. Don’t turn it into the woman (or feminism)’s problem for ‘making you feel bad’ - this is how the loveless marriage between feminism and censorship began (e.g. women using policing/shaming tactics to shut down conversation or men not being able to cope with bad feelings long enough to actually think about the bigger picture they fit into. I truly believe that if you practice you learn to discern differences between being ’shamed’ and being ‘challenged’). Being confronted with your position is always uncomfortable - but it could develop into something better than this, like sustainable relationships full of mutual understanding and shared sarcastic gender politics jokes and dry spots (just change the sheets for fuck’s!).
There’s so much loaded into this sort of stuff that I guess I can’t avoid a rambling response. I think one of the pitfalls of trying to have any sort of relationship is that there isn’t any ‘healthy’ or ‘correct’ gendered relationship - they’re all warped by a much larger hideous cultural baggage. I guess the only way I can imagine people getting over that is if both parties are really, really keen on either living out the stupid myths and turning themselves into low grade mimics of a romantic comedy or possess enough of a capacity for critical thought to work through, and continually keep working through, the bullshit. This is one the points where I think the failure of most men to adopt and adapt the ideas coming out of feminism really comes to the fore. I think a fairly significant proportion of straight women have come to accept that giving up their independence and relying on an image of protector/master/prince charming isn’t going to work but, by contrast, a lot of straight men haven’t made the corresponding recognition that the person you’re having sex with will not necessarily provide you with your dream identity. It’s not just an issue of emotional maturity - it’s that a huge number of men are working with a system that doesn’t actually work. You look at issues relating to domestic violence and rape and, to a less extreme degree, the wide array of crap I’ve seen boys pull off around girls and you’re seeing people who are still treating their sexualities like a power game. It might make them feel temporary tough but ultimately I think it makes everyone feel shit. Sans feminism there’s not really bag of tools for unpacking this nonsense.
And worse than that, rather than ever actually consider that gender is something that affects everyone and needs to be thought about as more than a ‘women’s issue’, the most successful male centred responses to feminism have all been total bullshit. Mythopoetic men’s movement? What the fuck? Isn’t it starkly obvious that we need less essentialist nonsense not another simplistic attempt at claiming the world is divided into Men from Mars and Women from Venus? Ahh! Have you ever read Iron John? Easily the most infuriating book ever written.
Comment by Ianto — 12/5/2006 @ 9:38 am
There were two comments for me to moderate in my modearation box today.
1 was this one from from Ianto.
The other was entitled \’asian ladyboy cumshots\’.
Comment by ana — 12/5/2006 @ 11:58 am
And. Sure it\’s not *just* about emotional maturity - but I think this goes together with critical thought in any relationship that wants to be conscious of bullshit. I\’m not sure that the world needs a men\’s movement (at least they don\’t if Iron John is going to be its manifesto! IJ is so made for a television miniseries starring Kevin Costner as Earth Father and the Daddo brothers as his mythodisciples), nor perhaps do men need to consider themselves as feminists or responsive to feminism - at least, none of the above would convince me that such a man is going to be able to cut it emotionally in a relationship. I have a feeling that continually choosing to grow emotionally (e.g. understanding the uses and abuses of power as inextricable from sexuality cf trying to/pretending to remove power from sexuality) rather than falling back on the age old roles that don\’t require them to do this (i.e. because it\’s women\’s work) is one of the best contributions men can make to feminism/ending gender oppressions - it is certainly more likely to float my boat. But there\’s no accounting for taste ;-)
Comment by ana — 12/5/2006 @ 3:22 pm
Hmm. I guess, coming from fairly hardline feminist parenting and then entering into the world of boys when I hit school, I think a lot of the emotional immaturity issues relate to a gender system which actively discourages critical thought. There’s no obligation for boys to think about gender - by and large it functions to our advantage. It’s just that it also makes us think the world is one big competition and that our sexualities are about domination. And, based on my experience, I tend to find that fairly dehumanizing and alienating. The dominant model of heterosexual masculinity kind of works to give you the impression that any problem can be defeated by the ego boost of driving a fast car, biffing someone and copping a feel. Thanks to that, I think a lot of guys never really progress above the emotional age of, say, 14 or so. That’s a massive simplification but hopefully you get the point.
To that end, I’m not saying men need a ‘men’s rights’ movement in the same way feminism was connected to a women’s rights movement. We don’t. I’m saying that until gender becomes an issue seen as affecting people as a whole, rather than a sort of disability affecting women, the response is always going to be stuck at the fairly patronising level of ‘recognising privilege’ and a significant portion of the male population will always be stuck trying to act like the central protagonists in ‘2 Fast 2 Furious’ - like nine year old boys trying to out do each other by acting tough.
Comment by Ianto — 12/5/2006 @ 5:21 pm
Given the number of young women who still say ‘i’m not a feminist, but…’ and the jokes about hairy feminists (cos it’s aaallll about how we look still, yes?) it’s important to remember that this is not just about relationship equality either though - pay gaps still exist, violence against women is at crisis levels (especially against women who try to put ‘wuthering heights’ on during an impromptu dance partay), women’s caring roles are undervalued, women are still underrepresented in positions of power, rates of self harm by young women are on the rise, men can potentially ride their bikes through areas at times that i wouldn’t feel safe doing so, paris hilton and rachel zoe and john howard exist. and so on.
But on relationships - given that women’s awareness of their own physical potential and self-determination has been so constrained over time, and that an acceptable academic question can seriously be ‘did women enjoy sex before 1900′ while (academic wank word warning) narratives of male bodies or sexuality don’t ask such things - i think we’re at least 43598594958495 years off.
i’m going to join a convent (pref an order that doesn’t cook dinner for the priests and doesn’t mind a spot of late evening dancing), who’s in?
Comment by sr. marxine — 12/6/2006 @ 3:33 pm
The question is not ‘did women enjoy sex before 1900?, but rather ‘did middle class english women enjoy sex before 1900?.
I’m sure that somewhere among the fertility cults, hysteria massage, and sapphic history, some woman must have been enjoying herself.
Why else would female sexuality be so fucking subversive?
Comment by Anna Aniston — 12/19/2006 @ 7:03 pm
First and foremost, I guess no one is really able to see a present relationship in perspective. That’s what we do to very distant past relationships — not the last one before the present. And that’s where we learn most, by revisiting them with the perspective given to us by later relationships. Then, sure, there’s the help given by skillful feminists, who are able to make men realise simple things like women not being dead weight, but useful allies, and more so when we counsciously maintain that alliance. Or the fact that women usually don’t like when men try to seduce them with some of their “mannish”, objectifying manners. Reminding men of women’s agency is always a needed effort.
I can be a cripple, but in my experience I was never able to revolutionise the terms of a relationship once they’re established, usually at the very beginning. I guess the terms are in the participant’s minds beforehand, are related to their special needs, and those terms just fall into a tacit compromise, unless great effort is made to make them explicit by all parties. Which, in my opinion, allows better understanding, but not necessarily a better agreement.
I’m sorry to say that, but I think the main burden will rest on the women’s back. First, because the common sense is agains them, and nobody, men or women, are waterproofed against it. Second, because it is them who will have to sound the alarm showing that something’s wrong. Third, because it is not always simple to tell apart their feminist outrage from their patriarchal outrage.
Patriarchy is bad for both genders, but men are blind to its effect over women unless they can communicate it. Which is obviously a very difficult task.
I so much agree when Ianto says “a lot of straight men haven’t made the corresponding recognition that the person you’re having sex with will not necessarily provide you with your dream identity”. I guess the crucis of the problem is that we are having to learn to be much more humble about the expectations we could have from a relationship. I don’t mean being humble “in” or “to”, but “about”. And that’s true for either gender, I guess.
Right?
Comment by Mr.Rocks — 12/19/2006 @ 7:39 pm
Women are to blame for their treatment at the hands of patriarchy in the same way any victim is to blame for being victimised: incidentally, but ultimately.
A bully isn’t going to stop being a bully because you ask her to stop. The ultimate responsibility to stop being victimised lies with the victim. Without a victim there can be no victimiser.
Which is not to say that women are to blame for being oppressed, but this analysis makes it easy to see why combating patriarchy is women’s business. You can’t stop oppression by asking for it to stop. You can ask guys to divest themselves of the little privilege they have just because the world would be a nicer place if they did, but it usually won’t happen. It seems the best that we can hope for in this world is women get more of a chance to be patriarchal enforcers…. a goal I don’t really relish.
This year, I spent a lot of energy trying to communicate with men about patriarchy. And ultimately trying to communicate with one man about patriarchy. What I found was that while it was my role to educate others about the negative effects this omnipresent oppression had on me, those others taking it up was entirely optional. In fact, teasing with the decision to take it up or not was yet another excuciating instance of that same oppression.
In the end, the only thing I could do was to stop trying. I was caught in another instance of the familiar double-bind.
Communicating about patriarchy is one thing; dealing with it is entirely another. Learning to listen to women talk about oppression is not actually alleviating that oppression. Learning to ape women in their emotional candour only just means dumping more work onto them. It is another instance of the ‘approve of me’ game.
… Sorry, dear Ann. I’ve been ranting. Though while I’ve been doing it, something has taken shope in my head. Maybe I’ll continue in a fuller article somewhere more appropriate.
Comment by Anna Aniston — 12/21/2006 @ 11:58 am
Ranting yay! That is why I have a blog ;-)
I hope the new thing is taking shape beyond a dynamic of victims and perpetrators … that can be a hard place where we give ourselves and each other quite the hard time methinks.
Comment by ann — 12/21/2006 @ 5:04 pm