ProPublica (which is awesome investigative journalism! Send them money! Unless you don’t have money, in which case don’t!) has been running a series called Brain Wars: How The Military Is Failing Its Wounded.
Traumatic brain injuries are the “signature injury” of soldiers fighting in Iraq and Afghanistan: roadside bombs release shockwaves that ripple through soldiers’ brains. Although they leave no marks, traumatic brain injuries can have serious mental and physical effects lasting for a lifetime.
The American military, however, has shamefully failed to support soldiers with traumatic brain injuries. Although 115,000 soldiers have suffered traumatic brain injury according to military statistics, ProPublica investigations show that tens of thousands have gone undiagnosed. Some soldiers with traumatic brain injuries have been denied the Purple Heart, which is supposed to recognize injury in combat, because their wounds “weren’t serious enough.” The Pentagon’s primary health plan, Tricare, refuses to cover cognitive rehabilitation therapy, despite its endorsements by top neurologists.
The military is an incredibly masculine organization. Even as it has included women within the military (not without a fight, of course), it has kept its adherence to the traits of hegemonic masculinity: courage, hierarchy, strength, toughness, authority, violence. Many of these are positive and necessary for fighting and winning.
However, in addition to the positive traits of masculinity, the masculinization of the military has preserved many of its most destructive traits. NSWATM has covered, ad nauseam, the gender conditioning men receive to “tough it out,” to not go to the doctor, to refuse to take care of their health, because injury means weakness and weakness is unmasculine. The military’s attitude towards soldiers with traumatic brain injury exhibits the same nasty belief. If they were real soldiers (compare: real men), they wouldn’t have these injuries– particularly injuries they might as well be making up, since no one can see them.
One of the key insights, to me, of the concept of hegemonic masculinity is that maleness is not privileged; certain kinds of maleness are privileged. Nowhere is this more true than war. War is old men talking and young men dying, white men talking and men of color dying, rich men talking and poor men dying. Hegemonically masculine men can send (some) less hegemonically masculine men off to die for their wealth or glory or political power. And in general they don’t give a fuck what happens to the disposable men once they’ve been used up.
But now it’s gender-equal! Now poor women and young women and women of color can die for the greater good of hegemonically masculine men too! We are also free to ignore their injuries once they return! Yaaaaaay!
The “disposable male” has become the “disposable soldier.” This is the wrong fucking kind of gender equality.
Commendably, thanks to ProPublica’s investigation work, many of the problems suffered by soldiers with traumatic brain injuries have been ameliorated. The director of the Defense Center for Excellence, which researches and treats brain injuries and PTSD, unexpectedly stepped down. More that 70 US senators and representatives have called for Tricare to cover cognitive rehabilitation therapy; congresspeople in districts close to Fort Bliss, covered in ProPublica’s story, have sent a letter demanding answers from medical officials about the treatment of soldiers. New guidelines on the award of the Purple Heart will make sure that soldiers with traumatic brain injury are not denied the medal they deserve.
Most shockingly to me, new Pentagon policy states that soldiers must have 24 hours rest after a mild traumatic brain injury (also known as a concussion) and a complete neurological exam after three concussions in a year. I’m not sure whether I’m more pleased that they’ve created this policy or disappointed that this is apparently new. The health of our soldiers should be one of the military’s first concerns, as opposed to its hundred and first.
However, I encourage the Americans in our audience to write to their congresspeople about the importance of proper treatment for soldiers with traumatic brain injuries and to encourage them to keep the pressure up on the Pentagon.
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No, Seriously, What About Teh Menz? 
I’m pretty optimistic about this. The repeal of DADT has shown, to my mind, that the military is slow to change itself, but quick to accept changes forced upon it. The only problem is that we often fail to see important issues to force.
A friend of mine who’s in bioethics regularly rants my ear off about the US military:The way your military takes care of any kind of wounded is…atrocious.And let’s not mention the way rape reports are handled. The IDF is way better on these fronts but suffers from the usual Israeli disease of doing great in a crisis but doing incredibly badly when faced with routine stuff.
My partner is actually in the military and we have Tricare for our health plan. I have to say that the medical treatment family members get and what the actual military members get are totally different things. It’s not just brain and head injuries that are ignored. I think that, in most cases as I’ve heard it explained, the servicemember must go to a corpsman for review and treatment and if the corpsman doesn’t choose to refer them out to a doctor or specialist, they simply can’t get the treatment. If they choose to see a doctor of their own accord for any injury without being referred by the corpsman, it’s considered skipping the chain of command and they can get sent to mast for it.
My partner hasn’t been allowed the time to visit the dentist in over a year and has an increasingly damaged ear that the corpsman keeps improperly treating and further damaging, but won’t refer him to someone who’s qualified to treat ears. However, he’s currently being tested for hearing loss all of a sudden because if it can be proved he lost his hearing during his service to the military, he’ll be compensated. (See how it’s suddenly important to assess the damage if it means they might have to pay for it, but not to give him access to treatment?) We know people that have served for months with spinal damage, knee damage, and other incredibly serious and painful injuries without being given treatment or being told to get back to work over and over by a corpsman. In fact, there’s a running ‘joke’ that if you’re a servicemember and you need medical help, you’ll get Motrin. Got a broken arm? Motrin. Got cancer? Motrin.
Whether it’s that ‘invisible’ injuries are given less attention than visible ones or not, in general I find that the treatment of many armed service people is atrocious. The working conditions are horrific, food marked ‘not for human consumption’ is regularly fed to them, my partner has been forced to drink and shower in water tainted with jet fuel, members have been held in detention for weeks after military trials in which they are n ot offered legal representation and evidence is simply the word of someone higher up, and more. It is a completely different world and not only is it all legal, the community itself supports it. I actually had a serious falling out with someone because I questioned how a person could be effectively jailed with no lawyer or jury and the person informed me that people need to be made an example of and I had no right to disrespect the way the military works. I was then labeled a “bad military wife” and have been ostracized from a society I really tried to avoid belonging to in the first place. My partner was also harassed on the job because I objected to the mast process in the privacy of my own home in general conversation.
But back to the medical stuff— The families of military members are much better taken care of, but considering the amount of money spent on the military and how much of that goes to the comfortable quality of life of officers and of military family members, it makes it all the more apparent that those comforts are earned on the backs of abused military members. And since there is also preferential treatment and access to services and care for military members that fit into the military society, are pro military, Christian, and support the patriarchy and hierarchy within its cultures, those that don’t behave within expectations or who are known to be gay, not Christian, not fill-in-the-blank are less likely to receive medical treatment for any injuries (regardless of what they are), be granted leave, be given fair trial, or work reasonable hours or have reasonable conditions. I can’t really cite any studies for that, so feel free to consider it just one person’s experience and observations into what happens in her immediate community. It may be different elsewhere, although Ozy’s article does help suggest otherwise. Ehem.
I have a fundamentally different view of the military (disclaimer: I served in the Marines). I don’t see the military as a hyper-masculine structure. I see traditional masculinity as hyper-militarized. This may not make a difference to some people, perhaps especially to feminists, pacifists, etc., but it is a hugely important distinction.
Yes, the military will unavoidably attract people with a hyper-masculine mindset who aspire to own their own private collection of tanks after they retire. But there are also hyper-masculine NRA idiot-clowns like Ted Nugent who have soiled their pants and walked around for days without a change of underwear to avoid serving in Vietnam. I was at a Ted Nugent concert in Missouri one time where he wore dog tags and claimed in front of thousands of military members that he served in the special forces (he confessed that he was just “joking” about 25 minutes later, after soaking in all the applause). More importantly, the military community itself is actually more progressive than society as a whole, more tolerant, etc. If you look at history, you’ll find that servicemen have often protested against their own unfair treatment only to be denied by society itself. During the Vietnam Conflict, when the general population was pro-war, the military community itself was the only segment of the population that was consistently anti-war. Yes, that is a fact and it shouldn’t be lost on anyone. The “hippy” types were generally protesting in favor of what the military service members’ view of the war actually was.
It’s society that puts service members into that double bind, viewing them through a conformist, hyper-masculine lens, not seeing them for the people they are. Let’s do a thought exercise: poor blacks => liberal, poor blacks => military. Therefore, military => conservative?!? Most people I have ever talked to, especially pacifists, have had an incredibly hard time explaining this. As a result, I when I have described some of the difficult aspects of military life to some of my pacifist friends, their retort has often been, “well, then why did you join up?”. This is a similar reaction that I have seen from feminists, if I describe something that is difficult about being a man, their response essentially boils down to, “well, then why are you a man?” My point is that militancy and masculinity are two wholly separate things, even if they share some of the same features. There are more things about “masculinity” that are inspired by militancy than the other way around. For example, short haircuts for men that were influenced by the necessities of combat, blue colors for boys that were influenced by military uniforms, chivalry which was influenced by military etiquette, and even the disposable male which was in many ways influenced by the military need for individuals who self-sacrifice. Ironically, self-sacrifice is the most cooperative, survival-of-the-group behavior, typically the most “feminine” of behaviors, but when men do it we view them as stupid idiots, murderers, or worse… at best we blow them off as being “poor” and “misinformed” men who don’t know what it is they’re getting themselves into.
Oh yeah, so, my comment addresses many of the problematic parts in the framing of Ozy’s post as well as comments like that of dancinbojangles.
It’s funny, because DADT was a law passed by Congress and signed by a Democratic president, not by some military generals. So DADT was what had been forced upon the military, not the other way around. To those who have served in the military, it probably doesn’t come as a surprise that the changes would be adopted quickly.
Good post, Ozy. Glad to see more light being shown on brain injuries. We know that they are a big problem in many sports, and I’m not surprised to hear about them in the military also.
@dungone,
Interesting perspective. Now that I think about it, it makes a lot of sense to say that masculinity is militarized, rather than (just) saying that the military is masculinity. It’s quite possible that some aspects of masculinity emerged way back in history in order to help men serve military needs.
Oops, that should read “saying that the military is masculinized.”
@Hugh Ristik, thanks and yes, there is a lot to this. Look at the Civil War, where Southern soldiers who were defeated by Northern black regiments actually realized that black men were not “lesser” men as southern society had claimed, but every bit as capable as the best white warriors. That had created such a change of heart in the defeated men that many of them actually changed sides and joined the Northern forces in order to defeat slavery. Meanwhile, their society had largely ignored the experiences of those military members and remained racist, continuing to celebrate the “glory days” of chattel slavery even 150+ years later. Incidentally, slavery was used for cotton, which was used to create cheap textiles for the fashion industry. I have very often found it slightly ironic when I go to a feminist website and see post after post about fashion trends mixed in with post after post about violent men who ruin the world (Patriarchy). Which gets me to another point…
When you think about masculinity as being militarized, think of the Order of the White Feather. When I read accounts of it, I have read about women who have shamed military veterans with severe battle injuries because they had made the mistake of not looking like a military member after they got home from the front lines. Is it any wonder, then, that the hyper-conformist militaristic fashion trends for men came into existence as an outcome of WW1? That’s where blue=boys, short hair, etc., originated (I found that out from comments on FC, by the way 🙂 ).
To me, it just doesn’t jive very well with the “hegemonic masculinity” stance that Ozy proposes (I did say I have huge problems with Ozy’s post). Yes, there is that aspect of rich, powerful men exploiting weaker men. But it’s not just rich powerful men. I find that to be the major downfall of theories such as Kyriarchy that basically end up being a softer gentler way of blaming everything on men. For example, I just took my girlfriend on a vacation to Europe and something very problematic she said to me one night is that even though she’s grown to see me as an “amazing man”, that I’m still “too nice” to people and that this annoys her. She said that I’m too friendly to the wait staff and that this behavior “works if you’re a woman” but that it’s unbecoming of a man who, in her opinion, should just say what he wants in a resolute, uncompromising way. My girlfriend isn’t a radical feminist who goes around handing out white feathers to guys who don’t have half their face blown off from a war, but she is still telling a decorated military war veteran who served in combat and killed people, who took her on an all-expense vacation to Europe that he is still too much of a “Nice Guy” and she doesn’t find this trait to be attractive. And, ironically, she is a self described pacifist who has for years had trouble with my decision to serve in the military. Until she couldn’t fit everything into her suitcase and close it on the way back so I did it for her and she said, “damn, you military man!”
“NSWATM has covered, ad nauseam,”
I don’t think anyone here is nauseated yet. I know that instead I am grateful.
I just wnat to second every point Dungone is making here. But Dungone, you might consider getting a new girlfriend. That one you describe sounds like a spoiled idiot.
And if anyone thinks the Order of the White Feather is ancinet hisotry, just think of all those godamed yellow ribbon decals you see on gas-guzzling SUVs (full of kids who will never come within a hundred miles of serving in the military) out in the ‘burbs that make all these oil wars inevitable. Think of “patriots” like Sarah Palin and Michelle Bachmann who will staunchly defend this country to the last drop of MEN’S blood. There’s a reason why the Celts had war goddesses instead of gods – war was a woman to them.
@Jim: Regarding the order of the white feather. Wikipedia leads me to believe that the idea originally came from a dude. I am getting the sense from you that you blame women mainly for warfare, which is a bit oversimplified. I don’t see how you can say that Bachman and Palin are responsible for war without mentioning people like Bush and Cheney too. After all, the former two were not officeholders when the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan began, and the latter two were.
The idea that this Ozy’s discussion of hegemonic masculinity is a means of blaming everything on men might have some merit. After all, it was largely Margaret Thatcher’s own personality that created the need for a Falklands War, and she is decidedly not male.
Nonetheless, the number of Thatchers and Thatcher-like figures in history is small. Is it truly a bad act if I point out that, in history, a handful of very powerful men have been responsible for a lot of unnecessary suffering? It’s an indisputable fact, and I don’t think that it’s a slander against my gender. Focusing on the fact that these few powerful men have harmed both male- and female-bodied people is a way of ensuring that the ‘men vs. women’ narrative is not perpetuated. As I see it, that’s why NSWATM is valuable.
@Leo
Assuming that it is inherently or uniquely male or that males have more a predisposition towards it is the slander.
Males might have a cultural predisposition towards leadership roles (pushed towards it, even if very few make it, while women pushed away from it, and gain little from it social-status-wise). This doesn’t make them more war-like because they took decisions concerning wars. It makes leaders take crappy decisions from the point of view of the people sent to die.
@Schala: Thanks for the clarification. If someone did state that men have some biological need to send other men off to die unnecessarily, that would indeed be insulting. I can tell you that I have never wanted to do that.
I have to say, though, that Ozy does not seem to be making that argument here. The people who consistently occupy leadership positions are wealthy, white… (other characteristics truncated) males. It is not because they are wealthy white (oct) males that they are taking crappy decisions. They are taking crappy decisions (as I believe you said) because they are leaders. Their crappy decisions have the capacity to kill large numbers of people without harming themselves, as yours and mine (presumably) do not.
When they make those crappy decisions, such as not caring enough for soldiers because they will never serve nor will any of their relatives, it is worthwhile pointing it out.
Jim and I were not discussing the fact that men start wars and do bad things to other men, which is a well established fact. We were discussing the rather pervasive notion that women never have anything to do with it. We were pointing out that yes, in fact, women do rally for war and support a society that treats men as disposable objects, down to even the tiniest details of men’s daily lives. Speaking of Palin, she was in fact an officeholder when war broke out, or at least playing politics and pushing the same politics that those men were, if not even more radical than theirs. In fact, Bush Jr. has actually denounced the radicalization of the Republican party brought about by the Tea Party types, if any of us can actually wrap our minds around that mind bending fact. Furthermore, Palin became a paid Fox News employee. And some of the key journalists who sold the war to the American public were women, who permanently damaged the reputation of some of the most well-respected newspapers in the world in doing so. Think about that.
@dungone: I’m having a little trouble following you. You disagree with the idea that hegemonic masculinity is a major problem in our military/society… but isn’t your girlfriends discomfort with you being “too nice” a reflection of hegemonic masculinity? I apologize if I’m reading you wrong, somehow.
A man I was seeing, and who remains a good friend of mine, is currently in the military and was in Iraq. He also has a brain tumor of sorts that he had to keep secret in order to remain in the military (I don’t know why he wanted to). However that tumor (fortunately benign) developed, he and others believe, from these things called burn piles. Apparently, that KBR (?) doesn’t want to pay for the proper disposal of the earthly remains of enemy and civillian dead. So they make these burn piles which are exactly what it sounds like; they’ve taken their toll on the military members.
I can’t say I admire any institution that puts so much effort into building somebody up and turning on a “switch” without first taking the necessary steps to ensure they will not be broken down and will be able to turn of the switch once they return home. I don’t think the default idealization, hero status, and the possible glory is justification. I don’t trust the military industrial complex.
No, it’s not.. “Hegemonic masculinity” is a fancy made-up term that says that no matter how many problems men face in life, everything is still the fault of someone who is in charge and is, by necessity, male. My girlfriend’s discomfort is a reflection of her privileges as a woman and has nothing to do with men who are in charge of anything. It’s her desire to have a man that makes her feel secure and constantly enforce his dominance over others that is a problem and nothing else. It’s got nothing to do with some fancy made-up term that tries to redefine her own personal desires as the fault of a stereotypical hyper-masculine alpha male who controls all of society and every thought and emotion that anybody ever has. This is a question of personal responsibility, of people who are not practicing the golden rule, people who ultimately have some growing left to do in their lives, as we all do, ultimately.
Yet as Ozy defined it, hegemonic masculinity means, “That guy– and there’s about five of him in the entire United States– generally has it pretty good, to be honest. The entirety of the kyriarchy was set up in favor of him, so he’d better.” That’s fine, it fits the term, hegemonic masculinity quite well, and that’s the problem. Ozy said, “Having an entire social system set up in favor of one dude in Ohio somewhere seems like a pretty bad plan to me.” Which is why one should stop and think about just how ridiculous this entire concept is. My girlfriend was not benefiting some guy in Ohio, she was benefiting herself! How freaking obvious is that? Well, it might be difficult if you’re trying to reconcile feminist theory with reality, but there you have it.
@dungone: I don’t think the idea is that your girlfriend’s philosophy was benefitting that guy in Ohio, I think the idea behind hegemonic masculinity is that your girlfriend was uncomfortable because she thought *you* should be more like that guy in Ohio.
@suturexself, just one more thought about this. My girlfriend actually had a great insight last night. She was talking about the difficult, depressing life her mother had after she divorced her dad and she said, “You know, this whole feminist thing about strong independent women is such bullshit. It would make sense to the one or two women who became a rich CEO or something. But to try to tell the average woman that they don’t need a man in their lives – at all – it just ruins everything.”
The interesting thing about her insight is how true it is of men as well – not every man gets to be a CEO, either. But just like feminism, it would be a stretch, to say the least, that it’s a system that is set up specifically to benefit those at the top. The notion of hegemonic masculinity is as ridiculous as the notion that feminism was invented by a woman CEO somewhere to oppress other women who don’t make it quite as far in life. Yes, there are some powerful men, yes, it’s not all men who are privileged but the 1% who are in charge who really have all that power. But it is a leap of logic to go from there to the point of saying that if someone benefits from a system then it was designed to benefit them. It’s kind of like saying that because the winner of the state lottery becomes a millionaire, then the state lottery was designed in order to benefit lottery winners. This is a sort of fallacy where someone might look at the outcome of a system and try to infer from it what the goals of it war. In the case of the lottery it wasn’t designed to help the rich, it was designed as an idiot tax for the government to raise some extra cash in a politically expedient manner. Likewise, “hegenomic masculinity” is nonsensical because it seems to really confuse the outcome of the system from the goals of the people who created it. In this case, the goals may very well include women who benefit from seeking out high status men to do their bidding and those women may very well be the ultimate beneficiaries of the system whereas the top 1% may just be there for show in order to entice people to keep playing the game.
I agree with you about what her goals were. But that’s why the term “hegemonic masculinity” mislabels the entire exchange in such a spectacular fashion. What it was is in fact more like “hegemonic femininity” because it had to do with her exerting control over me for her own benefit. We had discussed it afterwards and I pointed out that this desire of hers had something to do with her own insecurity, her fears that she could not get what she wants on her own so she really feels like she needs a man to be her protector. She agreed and thought about it. She mentioned that she knows some other men who scream at other people and treat them like shit and that sometimes it seems like they get what they want. I reminded how one of those men used racist slurs and threats of violence in front of another men who owed her a lot of money how as a result of this she no longer has any hope of ever seeing her money again. Plus I convinced her that because I was actually more successful than any of those jerks, anyway, than I can be as nice to people as I damn well please at a restaurant or anywhere else. So that’s it, I convinced her that she hadn’t thought this through at all. And she took it back. But we both agreed that this is what a lot of women are taught to look for in men.
Mostly agree, but a couple minor quibbles:
white men talking and men of color dying
This does not appear to fit the statistics, given that 76% of the fatalities were classified as white, 14% above their weight in the general population. Maybe someone from the services can clarify otherwise.
… for the greater good of hegemonically masculine men
While we can blame these 500 odd men (and women) for the war, the truth is that it was the general populace that wanted it even more, The vote in favor was just 69% in the house, contrast that against the mere 25% of men and 23% of women that opposed the invasion.
It sucks that we won’t dip into our pockets to automatically extend early social security/medicare benefits to veterans of a war a sizable majority of the population happily walked into.
U.S. Military Casualty Statistics:
Click to access RS22452.pdf
2002 Support for War:
http://www.gallup.com/poll/7243/gender-gap-varies-support-war.aspx
“But we both agreed that this is what a lot of women are taught to look for in men.”
Assholish behavior towards wait staff? Chief Gordon Ramsey-like behavior towards cashiers and retail workers?
@Schala, what we had been talking about were superficial displays of male dominance that would reassure her that she was with a man who could take care of her if needed. As far as I’m concerned, in her defense, it’s a hell of a lot better than some of the more “aggressive” women I’ve been with who pretty much got off on guys who got into fights over them. One rather ridiculous example was of a girl I went out with on a double date to go bowling. This was the first time I went bowling in my life. It turned out that there was quite a rivalry between the two female friends, so when all my balls went in the gutter and we lost the match, the tension and anger created by my failure to be the better man wasn’t lost on anyone. So in my experience, the vast majority of women I have ever dated have had at least some secret test that they randomly picked up from the trials and tribulations of their childhood that they depend on to gauge the fitness of their male companions. It just so happens that in my current partner, being rude to the wait staff is a way she perceives high status men to behave. But unlike other women I’ve dated, she seems to actually want me to “succeed” and is actually giving away all the secrets, being good at communicating what it is that’s going through her head so we can actually have a constructive discussion about it so that our relationship might actually work out instead of turning into something altogether ridiculous.
It’s only in the past decade or so that concussions have truly been taken seriously by anyone, military or no. That’s because concussions, while an obviously physical injury, affects your brain and behavior and thus seems like a mild mental disorder in some effects, and we all know anyone can get over a minor mental problem by themselves if they just have determination*, spirit*, and a can-do attitude*.
Legend:
Determination = a job position secure enough to sustain any blows in productivity or time off
Spirit = an understanding, supportive, and wide social circle that only 10-20% of people have
Can-do attitude = money
@dungone,
“… she seems to actually want me to “succeed” and is actually giving away all the secrets, being good at communicating what it is that’s going through her head so we can actually have a constructive discussion about it so that our relationship might actually work out instead of turning into something altogether ridiculous.”
Whatever her other faults may be, this above makes me feel that she’s fundamentally honest and a better person than most out there, at least when it comes to relationships.
You know her better than I do, of course.
@dungone: I think you’re misunderstanding the concept of hegemonic masculinity. Or, I am. But, for now, I’m betting you are. ( 😛 ) I don’t think hegemonic masculinity is a matter of wanting to benefit the guy in Ohio, but the idea that the guy in Ohio is the best person possible, because they have all the prefered characteristics (which does end up benefitting him). This is harmful to both men and women – to men because approximately zero percent of men fit the discription, and women aren’t even in the running.
“I agree with you about what her goals were. But that’s why the term “hegemonic masculinity” mislabels the entire exchange in such a spectacular fashion. What it was is in fact more like “hegemonic femininity” because it had to do with her exerting control over me for her own benefit. ”
I don’t think it was about her ‘goals’ so much as her ‘expectations’.
Actually I think we’re on the same page about what the concept is. I don’t think it’s a matter of setting out to benefit the one guy in Ohio either and I feel that I have painstakingly explained this (please re-read my analogy to the state lottery). You’re not addressing my point about hegemonic masculinity, which is that it benefits the woman who places this expectation on the man whether or not it’s realistic and 100% achievable.
Which is why it shouldn’t be called hegemonic masculinity when this is something that women often force onto men. It would be silly to say that it’s harmful to women when women do it to men when in fact the women who do it are doing it in order to benefit themselves. Why would it benefit women if they, too, could become the man-slave errand boys who do women’s bidding? I mean, that’s just stupid.
“You’re not addressing my point about hegemonic masculinity, which is that it benefits the woman who places this expectation on the man whether or not it’s realistic and 100% achievable.”
Earlier you wrote: “We had discussed it afterwards and I pointed out that this desire of hers had something to do with her own insecurity, her fears that she could not get what she wants on her own so she really feels like she needs a man to be her protector”
It benefits a woman that she’s made to believe that she can’t get what she wants on her own, and needs a man to be her protector? That doesn’t sound beneficial at all.
@suturexself, right there is perhaps a fundamental difference in point of view. We all have fears, you see, men and women, even Marines such as myself worry about going it alone. The difference is, women are allowed to worry and act out on those worries. Men are not.
I’ll point you to girlwriteswhat’s checklist of female privileges: http://owningyourshit.blogspot.com/2011/05/female-privilege-checklist.html
“It benefits a woman that she’s made to believe that she can’t get what she wants on her own, and needs a man to be her protector? That doesn’t sound beneficial at all.”
it benefits me if I believe I ought to have someone else do the heavy lifting for me, and that they ought to volunteer it of their own, too (before I ask), or they’re not worth giving affection/sex to. This notion is pervasive, and represents what dungone was speaking of (his worth as a mate conditional on being an asshole to wait staff, because it makes him *useful to her*).
[This is from someone who has never taken a sociology class and is relying on memory.]
I don’t think that Ozy gave a good description of hegemonic masculinity as it exists right now. Ostensibly hegemonic masculinity is meant to explain overall male dominance in society as well as oppression of particular men and boys. However it’s been studied a limited number of areas, such as schools, the working class, criminality and sports, which generally don’t contain the dominant members of society. So the traits of hegemonic masculinity that have been gleaned from these studies don’t actually correspond to the traits of the dominant members of society.
In any case, I don’t think a woman telling a man how they’re meant to preform masculinity ina restaurant is incongruent with the existing concept of hegemonic masculinity as women (those perform what is called complicit femininity) have an important role in upholding a hierarchical system that inherently places them below men that perform hegemonic masculinity, but which places them above all other women and many other men.
@machina,
I think you are successfully explaining what the concept of hegemonic masculinity is getting at, but I think your explanation actually reveals flaws in the theory.
I think we could look at this same phenomenon, and explain it with a concept of “hegemonic femininity” and “complicit masculinity” upholding a hierarchical system that places men with complicit masculinity below women who perform hegemonic femininity, though above other men and women. To me, both explanations sound strained and ideological.
Hugh, that’s moving away from explaining observed phenomena towards arguing for them.
@ dungone
You said: “It would be silly to say that it’s harmful to women when women do it to men when in fact the women who do it are doing it in order to benefit themselves.”
But the thing is that when a man behaves in a way according to “hegemonic masculinity,” even when shamed into it by a female partner, it is often NOT beneficial to the female partner. In your example, a man who is assholish to the waitstaff is (at least in my experience) usually assholish to other people, including their partner. Men who are stoic in a traditionally masculine way often have difficulty communicating their needs to their partner so that both people end up miserable. Etc.
The thing about hegemonic masculinity is that it is painted as a magical cure all (ie. people who act in this way will have no problems) and some traditionally masculine behaviors are quite adaptive. But others are quite maladaptive, both to men and people who love men. That’s why I don’t hold much truck with hegemonic masculinity, and think that women like the white feather brigade need to take a looong hard look at their behavior.
I can’t say a lot about the treatment of American veterans, since the Danish system works differently, but in regards to hegemonic masculinity, the wikipedia definition says it’s “the belief in the existence of a culturally normative ideal of male behavior. Hegemonic masculinity posits that society strongly encourages men to embody this kind of masculinity.”.
This to me sounds like the idea is that it’s not so much masculinity in general that’s favoured by society, but a rather a specific kind of masculinity, which is labelled hegemonic masculinity. The article continues saying “it is not necessarily the most prevalent form of male expression, but rather the most socially endorsed that always contributes to the subordinate position of women they perceive. Proponents point to characteristics such as aggressiveness, strength, drive, ambition, and self-reliance, which they argue are encouraged in males but discouraged in females in contemporary Western society, as evidence of the existence of hegemonic masculinity”.
From what I can tell, that fits pretty well with what it sounds like suturexself is saying. Dungone’s girlfriend appears to buy into the idea of hegemonic masculinity, in that she expects/demands/encourages/prefers traits like “aggressiveness, strength, drive, ambition, and self-reliance” in men. And dungone is bothered by this and thinks she’s wrong, but he still doesn’t see a problem with hegemonic masculinity. Which I think is a bit contradictive.
@M Dubz, you are right that once in a while it hurts women and you have basically nailed down the #1 complaint of the Nice Guy. But does it hurt women in general? I don’t know, but to figure it out I would strongly consider things such as almost all workplace fatalities being men, men dying sooner, women being able to choose lifestyle over earning potential in their careers, and other things of that nature. I would also take a really good look at all the contradictory things that women might expect from men (i.e. a man who is a violent brute who rips his enemies limb from limb yet is a cuddly teddy bear with the woman’s kids). A man is expected to know the difference between his wife and the wait staff, after all, even if he married a waitress. Otherwise he’s no good, either.
@dungone, when these types of discussions come up I always think about something my history teacher told us about feudalism – “Just imagine, you were born, you knew exactly what your place is, you acted out your role, and then you died”. He used this as a contrast to the too-many-choices dilemmas we often face today.
When I think about the benefits of strict gender roles, that’s what I think of. Not trying to figure out what would benefit which gender and what would hurt each gender. Actually the costs and benefits of a role-bound society are of the same type to each gender, imo. People “know their place” in a society like that. They act in predictable ways. If they don’t, others can use their inability to act out their role to shame them, ostracize them or get them back in line. It’s not their fault if they exploit others and they don’t have to think about it too hard. If someone is exploiting them, there’s usually a supposedly good, values-based justification for that, like “a woman’s place is in the home” or “boys don’t cry” or “you should be thankful for your job”.
All that stuff is a cost and a benefit at the same time.
As for the female privilege lists – yeah, I find them relevant to my life, but I’m a white, young, middle-class woman. I really wish that there were some kind of more intersectional approach to the “female privilege” concept because the current ones remind me waaaaay too much of the white plantation wives’ diaries in Mothers Of Invention (this is a great book about a very bound society btw).
Also for real, who puts up with a person who treats waitstaff like crap? I might be biased here but I feel like that is the #1 universal dealbreaker I hear from both men and women. Oh man there is a story I have about this that I should tell on the Open Thread someday…
AB, read Hugh Ristik’s response to machina that mentions “hegemonic femininity” as well as my comment where I make the same parallel. Saying that I don’t see a problem with hegemonic masculinity is about as wrong as you can get about it. I see huge problems with it, left and right, it’s a theory that’s full of nonsense. In fact, this is pretty much a case of Words That Mean Things, being used by people who don’t seem to know what the words mean. So, from Wikipedia:
If my girlfriend “buys into” (a problematic phrase) this prevalent notion of masculinity and pressures me to adopt those behaviors then guess who she is, then? The hegemon. Yes, really… if you want to apply the word “hegemony” to a scenario where a ruling person dictates the behavior of their subordinates, then you would have to name the hegemony after the ruling person in the scenario. In fact, whether you use my scenario or any other, you must identify who the hegemon is in order to call it a hegemony. You can’t say that masculinity itself is the hegemon, that makes as much sense as saying that culture is a hegemon when the culture is what is being forced onto others by the hegemon. And you can’t say that the “one guy in Ohio” is the hegemon because as we clearly established, just because he benefits from the scenario doesn’t mean that he has anything to do with forcing the culture onto others. Honestly, we have 50% of the earth’s population who pretty much by and large expect strong, aggressive, self-sacrificing men and everyone’s beating around the bush refusing to call it what it is.
@f
Completely agree. I’m guessing the only type who really want their friends/partners to treat waitstaff like crap are those who engage in it vicariously.
@dungone, I freely admit that I haven’t much interest in the existence or non of a “hegemonic masculinity” but you’ve got to think about the imperial aspects of hegemony a bit. It wouldn’t be too much of a stretch, if we were to take the construct “hegemonic masculinity” as given, that your gf is in some ways “colonized” by a particular hegemon. And enforcing that hegemon’s standards upon you. You don’t have to be the hegemon to buy into it and to enforce it.
I mean, one obvious problem with this concept is the question of scale. If you are a man who doesn’t give two shits about what “hegemonic masculinity” expects of you, but your girlfriend does, and is constantly pulling an enforcer routine, then that could create a certain type of reversal of power roles in your interpersonal relationship, where you basically don’t benefit from this society-wide, large scale “hegemonic masculinity” b.s. in the least. So yeah.
Uhh, basically when it comes to analyses of power I’ma stick with my Foucault and de Certeau ok? French postmodernism 4 lyfe.
@ dungone: I think that, for a given value of “hurts women,” hegemonic masculinity does hurt women in general. It’s an outmoded way of relating to life in which men are required to be the brave, disposable, emotionless provider because they have to support women who have no power of their own. However, that is not the case any more, since women generally have the ability to support themselves and control their own property.
For me, as a woman who is very career focused, what I am looking for in a partner is someone who can support me emotionally. If my partner is unable to express grief, or talk about his feelings about our relationship, or feels uncomfortable parenting our children, or is unwilling to try things in bed that are a little unusual that I might want, or takes a dangerous job and dies because of it, or refuses to seek medical treatment and dies because of that, of course I lose. I lose a good life team mate and partner. And all of those things are caused by the bullshit expectations that we as a society heap on men.
The thing is, I know that I lose because what I want from a partner is an emotional support. There are some women who are not interested in that, and they would probably be horrified by my choice in men. The thing is, I am genuinely sad when my gendered upbringing or a partner’s gendered upbringing get between us relating to one another as team mates and partners in life. Your experiences may differ.
@ M Dubz,
Not to be glib, but if your partner dies, I think that’ll hurt him a lot more than you.
@ Ed. Oh absolutely! I’m not trying to argue that hegemonic masculinity hurts women MORE than men (clearly it sucks for men more) just that it hurts women too. In a world of shitty gender binaries, EVERYONE loses.
@f, I didn’t say that she expects me to treat wait staff like crap. It’s much more specific than that, what she wants is to demonstrate dominance, more about expressing some mythical level of self-assured-ness. But more importantly, I never said it made sense. Women have expected me to be dominant at things that I thought were downright stupid, like video games or bowling. It’s ridiculous… I mean take the typical “male task” of navigation… I led hundreds of troops and millions of dollars of equipment thousands of miles across the Iraqi desert, through sandstorms and mine fields, but if I make one wrong turn driving to the mall, suddenly my manhood is in question. That’s the sort of thing about dating that really used to make me want to tear my hair out for a long time after I got back from Iraq. And I’m pretty sure that if I got to know you, I would likewise pick up on something silly that you expect men to be self assured about.
@M Dubz, yeah totally, from a similar perspective. I have had a relationship end at least partially because my ex was concerned about me having more ambition and earning potential than him, and thus he would never be able to “provide” for me. It sucked.
He was also so stoic that he actually ended up in the hospital with stress-related symptoms a few times. Basically his doctor told him he could no longer afford to bottle it all up, for his health. He didn’t listen and I don’t know how he is doing health-wise, today 😦
@ Ed Sparrow, “not to be glib” doesn’t really cancel out the glibness of that statement dude. Do you think that the early deaths of men who work dangerous jobs, don’t have a profound effect on their families? I mean have you ever been around a mining community that suffers from the slow constant loss of its men? It’s awful. Obviously most awful for the dead, but a death causes ripples upon ripples of pain. Discounting that is ridiculous, it discounts a substantive reason why (largely male) fatalities in work, in war, and from suicide are so incredibly sad.
@dungone, dude that suuuuucks, I think I misunderstood a comment somewhere in there.
Anyway good lord. Is it possible to talk to her about how you feel about this, or is that just also a totally not manly enough way of dealing with relationship issues?
It sounds like you have the main fact about this aspect of your relationship figured out, she does indeed expect a “mythical level” of masculinity from you, and it pretty much sounds like the goalposts will never ever stop their constant shifting unless y’all can get a handle on this dynamic.
I’m not gonna lie, when it comes to the pursuing / being pursued part of initiating a relationship, I am not so much into being the initiator. That’s probably my contribution to perpetuating gender roles. All I can say in my defense is that it stems from a deep-seated fear of coming across as “clingy desperate woman” and scaring men off. Um, at least I know it’s something to work on?
@f.
I didn’t intend to discount the suffering of families and communities, and I apologise if I appeared to do so. Two of my brothers have served in the military, one of whom now works in the mining industry. While my family is lucky not to have lost either of them, I have no intention of dismissing the pain of those who have lost loved ones.
If anything, I think I felt more defensive that anything when I made the comment – were I to lose one of my brothers, or my father, on account of their work, the last thing I would want was their own suffering to be ignored or downplayed in light of how it impacts others. I’m not suggesting you, M Dubz or anyone else has done so, but as a knee-jerk reaction, I sought clarification.
I apologise for communicating poorly.
@ Ed, I gotcha, also nice sparrow-tar! I hope your brothers are well. My little bro really considered the military, but ended up choosing college instead. It was pretty intense to just imagine him going to war, so yeah, I can’t really imagine what it must be like to have family in that situation. Mostly I just have friends at war.
@f.
Ah, but what if this hegemon has a girlfriend, too, who is enforcing hegemonic masculinity on him? Even the men at the top, the supposed hegemons, are still “colonized” in a sense by the preferences of the high-status women they interact with. Actually, perhaps that’s a big part of why they are hegemons in the first place.
If women on average didn’t care so much about status in men, then there would be no incentive for men to compete to become hegemons. (Likewise, if men on average didn’t presently care so much about body hair in women, there would probably be a lot less competition between women to be hairless.)
@f.,
No one in my family has deployed to the Middle East, which is a relief, but it’s still weird to wrap my head around them being in harm’s way like that. My older brother handles explosives regularly as part of his mining work, but it’s honestly became somewhat normalised within my family – intellectually, we understand his work is quite dangerous, but no one really thinks about the possibility of something going wrong. That said, I doubt anyone at the mine would be actively trying to kill him, which is very different situation than if either of them served overseas.
I hope your friends are safe, and I wish them all the best when they come home.
@Hugh, the hegemon isn’t like, some dude or a group of dudes though. It’s the whole power structure! These types of theories tend to assume that power is something diffuse. It’s everywhere and nowhere all at once, it is basically really difficult to pin down and shows up most clearly in a relational way. To use a race/gender intersectional example, it might not be particularly obvious what advantages I have as a white woman until I receive a piece of legitimate criticism from a black woman, burst into tears, and get tons of sympathy from everyone around us because she is SO MEAN and MY FEELINGS ARE HURT. All at once, bam, that moment makes something clear. And just as quickly, it’s gone.
Anyway I really can’t get too deep into this but I recommend Deleuze’s book “Foucault” if you want to understand the context of theories like “hegemonic masculinity” – I can honestly say that it is some of the coolest shit a person can read on the subject.
As for power and dominance being “what women care about” I completely agree with this, there are a ton of cultural influences saying that a man should be able to care for a woman. But it is pretty damn ahistorical to ignore where this stuff comes from. For a long time, women were barred, then discouraged, from the majority of careers. Women in the upper classes were expected to be dependent upon their husbands. Even engagement rings started out as a sort of “insurance policy” in case a man dumped his fianceé, at least she’d have a nest egg as represented by that ring.
Now things have changed a ton but what do you know, the stink is still clinging to us all…
@ Hugh, I also think it’s pretty disingenuous to say that men adopt traditionally masculine behaviors and power plays ONLY at the urging of other women. Men encourage their fellow men to stay in the masculinity box as well. Just as many women’s bodies are most heavily policed by other women, often men’s emotional displays are most heavily policed by other men.
@M Dubz, mmm hmm. That is just as silly as “men enforce feminine behavior upon women”. Both genders police their own so, so much.
It was a nice “Aha!” moment when I realized women were not primarily dressing up for men in everyday settings, but for other women.
@dungone:
OK, that clarifies it a bit. I still disagree though. I’ve seen a lot of the stuff women get pressured into (and which seems to come from and benefit men just as much as you claim hegemonic masculinity does women) being labelled ‘feminine’. I don’t think there’s anything wrong with using a name focussed on the performer instead of the person they perform for. I suspect the difference is in what value we place in masculinity/femininity, in which case we’ll probably never agree.
@dungone:
Hmm, I need to come up with a name for this phenomenon. It seems like half the time someone is criticising feminism, they make some arbitrary distinction between CEOs and everybody else. Like whenever someone mentions that men on average are wealthier than women on average, the first answer is almost always that not all men are CEOs. But I bet that most of the time, the original speaker wasn’t think of any professions near the level of CEO. Just looking at my father’s siblings, one is a doctor and the other is an unskilled labourer, and that difference alone is enormous, basically life-altering. And even smaller differences are significant. There’s no need fro CEOs to ever enter into it.
Anyway, I think it’s BS to dismiss the notion of independent women on the grounds that it’s an all-or-nothing deal, and that anything short of being a CEO doesn’t affect your independence. A lot of marriages end in divorce whether people want to or not, and if that happens, it’s going to make a lot of difference whether you’re unskilled and need to start from bottom, or whether you have an education and a stable job already. Not to mention that some people never marry. Or marry people of another sex. Or lose their spouse to other circumstances.
It’s not just a choice between having to count on finding a man who can provide for you, or become a CEO, with nothing in between. There’s also huge difference between just being able to provide for yourself, and having to base your decision on who to marry on how much your partner earns because his income will determine your lifestyle far more than your own. It’s a small but important distinction, which is so often forgotten by people who argue that women can just choose to focus on their home life over their career.
And independence is so much more than career and marriage. Whenever I mention having guys help me with something, my feminist father always reminds me of the cost there is to the help if it means I never develop my own skills. While it’s very convenient that I can get a guy to patch my bike, but if it breaks where there’s no helpful guy around, I’m screwed. I have a lot of male computer geek friends, but that wont help me if I need to operate a computer in a school or work related context myself. Not to mention that it creates a social dependence, and prevents you from potentially discover new talents which can benefit you in the long run.
And the same goes for men. One of the earliest feminist books I read (which I didn’t even know was feminist at the time) was about how the men of previous generations who never learned how to cook, make a home inviting, or keep in touch with friends and relatives tended to suffer from it, especially if they found themselves alone. That’s not to say every person is, or should be, an island, but the issue is not that men and women need each other, it’s that people need other people. And it’s good to recognise that we do. But artificially inflating that need, or directing it so strongly towards a single member of the other sex that they end up defining your whole identity, should not be presented as the default way of life just because you happen to be born with a certain set of genitals. And goes even if you never have the slightest chance of becoming a CEO.
@f, long before I ever discovered feminism and took up issues with it, I had discovered Foucault and other postmodernist philosophers and took up issues with them, thinking them to be frauds and sophists. As a matter of fact, feminism itself tends to build very heavily on postmodernist philosophy, so if you disagree with postmodernism on philosophical grounds then chances are that you will also dislike feminism.
@ dungone, ehh, I have to say I am basically coming at this way more from my background in a spatial discipline than any kind of gender studies perspective. I first read that kind of thing in the context of analysing urban spaces, which are both constructed by some very diffuse types of influences and quite definitely real and tangible. So, makes sense to me. I don’t think one has to buy into any idea fully in order to benefit from thinking it through, either. I just thought that as long as we are talking “hegemonic masculinity” it might be helpful to point out that this idea doesn’t assume there’s a Masculine Hegemon, like some kind of Illuminati of Manliness, out there making the rules on gender.
On the actual theory that hegemonic masculinity is a thing, uh yeah, your mileage may vary.
AB, just as Hugh Ristik argued and even according to your own arguments here, the decision to call it “hegemonic masculinity” is ideological and relies on a good amount of sophistry. As f brought up, it’s a very postmodern concept and as such, it is a counter-scientific turn of phrase. Very Foucaultian indeed, relying on people to understand “power” as something that comes into creation as an independent entity. For example, Foucault at one point discusses Bentham’s Panopticon and the way the architect designed a prison wherein the prisoners themselves police each other’s behavior with one single guard being required to police them all, and Foucault basically said that the power no longer being the guard but the whole system, building and prisoners and all. Anyway, it would take a long discussion for me to explain why I disagree with Foucault, but in short I found it to be meaningless rubbish that restated the obvious without adding anything of empirical or analytic value. Likewise here, it’s very much meaningless postmodernist gibberish, whether one says “hegemonic masculinity” or “hegemonic femininity,” which is the point that both Hugh Ristik and I were making. It’s neither hegemonic masculinity or femininity, they are both wrong. For what it’s worth, this entire discussion is also why “hard science” people are so often critical of the “soft sciences” such as sociology, because of their penchant for coming up with evidence-free theories that don’t test alternative hypotheses. When a sociologist says “hegemonic masculinity” he might as well be saying “the egg that came first” to the age old question of chicken or the egg.
@f, I agree with you that in order to understand the term “hegemonic masculinity,” one would have to rely on postmodernist conceptualizations of power in order to understand who the “hegemon” could possibly be in this theory. I think you’re spot on. I’m actually really glad you recognized that and brought it up, otherwise I wouldn’t have thought of why I disagreed with it so much. But if you just put aside Foucault for a minute and look at the words and what they mean, you’ll have to agree that it’s a very egregious turn of phrase that stretches the meaning of “hegemony” well past the breaking point. In other words the phrase requires a postmodernist deconstruction in order to merely understand how someone would have even thought of putting the word “hegemonic” in front of the word “masculinity.” It just doesn’t make any sense .
“It seems like half the time someone is criticising feminism, they make some arbitrary distinction between CEOs and everybody else. Like whenever someone mentions that men on average are wealthier than women on average, the first answer is almost always that not all men are CEOs.”
Nah, then it’s because the argument from that feminist was that women are a minority of CEOs. The feminist no doubt brought it up in his or her argument. It didn’t come from thin air.
“One of the earliest feminist books I read (which I didn’t even know was feminist at the time) was about how the men of previous generations who never learned how to cook, make a home inviting, or keep in touch with friends and relatives tended to suffer from it, especially if they found themselves alone.”
I probably suffer from it when alone, but I find the “making the home inviting” so much bullshit playing into social norms. My decoration is either functional or sentimental (and then it’s likely to be in my room) in most cases. I’m good with learning to cook, but my cooking level being “I can reliably make shepherd’s pie that is good to eat” is fine.
I don’t need or want to lookup special local or exotic recipes, unless I especially like the food (like I found I like Thai Red Curry sauce and Indian Tikka Masala sauce). I’m very unlikely to make a meal that has more than one course. And I like it simple like that.
My boyfriend likes to cook, can make his own pasta sauce and many other things. He likes doing it, though he doesn’t like that I can’t eat many kinds of foods (thankfully, the things I don’t like are usually ‘extras’ to a meal, and not the basis – like mayonnaise, mustard, ketchup, relish, pickles, beets – can’t eat those, I’ll just be sick on the spot).
@Schala:
EXCUSE ME? I mentioned the example argument in question. It didn’t include CEOs, and most of the other arguments I’ve heard haven’t either. They’ve been a lot more general, concerning statistical differences and wage gabs, not CEOs. Are you telling me that I’m lying? Or that I’m somehow incapable of distinguishing between an argument about the amount of male CEOs and an argument about something much more general? Because that’s the only two interpretations which can explain why you feel comfortable saying that you know better than me what an argument which I’m the only one hearing was really about.
It’s not your place to tell me what I heard or didn’t hear. This is not a matter of interpretation, it’s not about what you think an unspecific argument was really about, or what the general sentiment among feminists is, or how you’ve had different experiences than me. This is as specific as me telling about my experiences in Berlin during the Festival of Lights, and you responding that I wasn’t in Berlin at the time, and the lights I describe were just a large neon commercial for a shaving product. And as usual, you’re going to completely deny what you did and hide behind your usual façade of the innocent victim. You know, I think those never-present transphobic feminists you keep complaining about had a point in not wanting anything to do with you.
You were present there half the time? You have the power of omnipresence, congratulations.
I hear those arguments (men are wealthy) and the representation as CEOs and congresspeople in list of grievances about inequality all the damn time. On blogs, on forums, wherever you want it. And from feminists, too.
@Schala:
And I think what you find to be bullshit reflects your usual narrow attitude. Not everybody gets anything positive out of making home-cooked meals, or keeping in touch with friends and family (especially in the way older women tend to, which is more about keeping distant family connections and wider networks, and less about talking with your neighbour once in a while) either. That’s why I said the men who didn’t learn these things tended to suffer from it, instead of just saying they were suffering.
When my house is clean and tidy, when I’ve remembered to open the windows to let in fresh air, when the colours around me match and are chosen based on my preferences, when I’ve a bouquet of flowers on my window still, etc., etc. I tend to feel more comfortable and at ease. I know many other people do too. Just because it plays into social norms doesn’t make it worthless, let alone BS.
You play heavily into social norms too, often in ways which shelter you from a lot more negativity than just keeping an inviting home would do. And while I would like for you to recognise more how privileged your conventionality make you, it doesn’t mean I would call it BS. And if I did, it would for a lot better reason than how it just happened to align with social norms.
“You play heavily into social norms too, often in ways which shelter you from a lot more negativity than just keeping an inviting home would do.”
You mean my having long hair and growing my nails (I never use fake nails, but my nails are not an ideal manucure either, they constantly break)? Or my staying home 99% of the time?
What social norm that I play heavily into shelters me from a lot of negativity?
@AB, Schala may have misread what you were saying (ever so slightly) but you yourself completely misread what my girlfriend was saying and thus her entire criticism of the Strong Independent Woman went right over your head. Yes, she mentioned that not all women get to become CEO’s, but she was in fact talking about the everyday woman and why the notion can be toxic to them.
I read the Feminine Mystique and so I have a good idea of where a lot of the subsequent feminist rage against the machine is coming from. Feeling depressed? Isolated? Your life is unfulfilled? You spend all day worrying about things that you realize Do Not Matter? Solution: divorce your husband, run away, go ahead and become a Strong Independent Woman. Put on that pantsuit and you go girl! Correct me if I’m wrong, but that’s the Feminist Mystique in a nutshell. So pray tell me, what do a bunch of lesbian separatist say to a depressed mother with mental health issues who is struggling to find happiness? Do they say, go get some therapy, your problems lie within yourself, you need to fix them and learn how to be happy so that you are better able to meet your commitments to your children and husband? Did you ever hear a feminist say that? No, no you haven’t. This is what this woman realized (mind you, a woman who actually had a dual major in women’s studies at an all girls’ college, not me), realized. A woman who suffered through her childhood at the hands of a depressed single mother who threw away her marriage because of a notion of becoming Strong and Independent, a woman who realized in her 20’s that she was the victim of parental alienation as she rediscovered her father and realized that he was a good man who was really hurt by her mother’s unresolved mental health issues and abusive behavior. A man who nevertheless said, after the mother died from cancer, “I wish your mother didn’t divorce me… we could have had a real family and worked everything out.” So when this woman says, “all that feminist advice about the Strong Independent Woman only makes sense to CEOs,” what she’s talking about is the general pursuit of happiness and that families are important, and love is important, and that women shouldn’t have to go at it alone, and neither should men. I know, a very radical, anti-feminist notion. From a woman.
@AB, please don’t tell me that you have 5 or more cats…
One time I got invited to come to a Take Back The Night rally by a bunch of feminist girls in my Tae Kwan Do class. So I went, and after experiencing about 3-4 hours of disturbingly sexist anti-male anger, I wound up at a gathering at one of their apartments, which sounded strangely like yours with the flowers on the windows, where the girls were drinking wine and laughing amicably about how awesome “Bob” and “Eugene” and a bunch of other people I never heard of were. I thought good god, what a relief, they don’t hate all men. So I walked up and asked who these guys were, were they their boyfriends? No, it was their cats.
@Schala:
I don’t have the power of omnipresence, but I do have the brain capacity to figure out that I know better than you what my own experiences are. If you wanted to say that in your experience, feminists mentioned CEOs when they talked about things like wealth, you could have done so. It wouldn’t have had any value (which I’ll explain below), but you could have said so and it wouldn’t be completely arrogant bigotry like your original post was.
But instead, you chose to say “Nah, then it’s because the argument from that feminist was that….” which communicates that a) I was using a specific argument from a specific feminist as my example and b) despite having no way of knowing which/whose argument I was referring to, you know what it was really saying. There are a lot of nasty words about what the kind of abuse and bigotry that sort of argumentation is, but considering your disregard for anyone not born with a penis, I suspect you don’t care.
This does not mean the feminists you love to attack are the ones to distinguish between CEOs and all other people. I know this is probably hard for you to to understand (though it seems perfectly easy to most people who aren’t just looking for excuses to attack feminism), but “Men are generally wealthier than women, there are more male CEOs, transitioning from man to women tend to lower a person’s income in a way transitioning from women to man doesn’t, there’s a gap between the wages of the different sexes, traditionally feminine jobs are underpaid, etc.” is NOT the same as “There are more male CEOs than female CEOs. This means that all men, even the ones who aren’t CEOs and don’t make any more money than average women, are collectively wealthier, and it is the sole issue affecting the sexes financially”.
The first is about stating an issue, in this case a general (average/median) gap in monetary wealth between the sexes, and giving examples of why that is and how it manifests. You said it yourself, you hear it in “list of grievances about inequality”, which implies that there are multiple examples. So why choose to focus only on one example (the differences at the top) and present it as the be-all and end-all of the argument, or of feminism as a whole? Well, I can think of some reasons, but none of them reflect very kindly on you, so I hope you can give a better explanation.
Not to mention that even the arguments about the top are not solely arguments about the top. When blacks and black rights activists where ecstatic about Obama becoming president of the USA, it wasn’t because they thought that the only way in which black people were socially and politically disadvantaged was that none of them ever got to be president. Neither was it that they thought black people were socially and politically disadvantaged simply because none of them had ever gotten to be president (except the most naïve, no one seriously thought having a black president would be enough to stop all discrimination against blacks).
And yet I don’t hear them being told “This is stupid. The chances of a black man to be elected president is in no way connected to the opportunities of black men in any other venue of society, so it really only makes a difference for the few black congressmen and governors who’re high enough in the hierarchy to have a shot at presidency.” Because it’s simply not a very valid argument. Bringing up the people on top as a symptom of a more general phenomenon is not the same as saying that the phenomenon only affects those on top. The latter would be putting the cart before the horse. Black men aren’t expected to refrain from bringing up the people on top as part of their grievances, and they aren’t strawmanned as heavily when they do, so why should it be different from women, of any colour?
It’s funny because in another thread, you’re arguing that you know exactly what all MRAs believe and that any man who believes otherwise doesn’t have a clue about who MRAs really are.
““There are more male CEOs than female CEOs. This means that all men, even the ones who aren’t CEOs and don’t make any more money than average women, are collectively wealthier, and it is the sole issue affecting the sexes financially”.”
It certainly is the argument made about rape culture. It “benefits all men by putting women in a fear of being raped”. So I’ve also heard the “you benefit even if you’re not a CEO, because it’s shown as something you can do/attain”, which is a pretty direct contradiction of you saying it never happens.
And the pay loss for trans women is mostly due to transphobia. If you had solid creds pre-transition, they’ll still be solid. If she might be doubted more in auto repair and plumbing or typically male-typical jobs, I bet they wouldn’t doubt her in IT. She’s likely to be more doubted in female-typical jobs like daycare worker, because everyone knows trans people are perverts, and pervert=pedophile.
@dungone:
It wasn’t her reading of my post I was angry about (bad as it was, as usual), it was her reply. She was making a statement of fact (not interpretation, such as “it was hostile to men”, but specifically about which subject was even brought up) about a specific argument which I have experienced and she hasn’t. If she just erroneously thought I was referring to feminists who talked about CEOs, there would be no need to explain to me what the argument from “that feminist” from my post was.
I can see from your example that you’re talking you’re talking about a very specific use of the words strong independent woman. This is not the use I’ve seen from a lot of feminists, so presenting is as the feminist interpretation of that concept is pretty confusing and narrow-minded, especially when you’re using to a phenomenon which is at least 30-40 years old to categorise a movement which is still active and developing. It’s a bit like criticising the left-wing for supporting communism. Sure it happens, but in my experience, the average left-winger gave up on the idea of communism as a working model decades ago.
Actually, I believe I have. It was a theme in what was quite possibly the first feminine piece of writing I ever read. Not in the “none of your issues are valid, you’re just being stupid and selfish” way you expect, but rather about finding inner strength and happiness to make the best of the situation. And I think that’s an OK take on it, because it’s not really the focus on feminism. Not to mention that I have yet to see an anti-feminist, least of all you, ever tell men that they need to stop pretending there’s an issue with anyone but themselves just because they’re unhappy, and they need to get over it so that they can focus on supporting women and children.
I also read some articles, I believe they were from The F-Word, or linked to from there, criticising the trend of (primarily female) self-indulgence, like the kind portrayed in books like “Eat, Pray, Love”. One of them touched on how damaging it could be to make it a matter of self-esteem (e.g. “If you don’t buy our expensive wellness products, it means you don’t really love yourself, which is terrible! So it’s actually a moral failure if you don’t consume enough (of our products), because loving yourself is the most important thing in the world”). And how unrealistic it was for most women to expect to be able to just take a year off to “find themselves”.
Breaking away from the specifically feminine social obligations which defined many women in the past was a necessary part of feminism, but I haven’t seen it taking centre stage in my lifetime. You and your girlfriend obviously have, but I still think it’s a very narrow perspective to take, and a pretty shallow basis for critiquing feminism in general.
I think you’d be surprised at what my home looks like 😛
AB, I’m going to call you out on that. It’s double barreled. Anti-feminists criticize feminist organizations such as NOW for their stance on issues such as child support, which effectively puts a legal obligation on men to support women and children. Why would an anti-feminist turn around, then, and suggest to men that they need to suck it up and pay child support? It would be the same situation if a feminist were to tell a woman she better shut up, lose the shoes, get pregnant, and cook dinner.
As a matter of fact, there is no shortage of propaganda aimed at men, with magazine articles on Father’s Day lamenting about deadbeat dads and the President of the USA making speeches about how black fathers need be more responsible to commemorate such an occasion. Why would anti-feminists have to say the same things in order for you to consider them valid? Oh yeah, never-mind… I get it.
But do anti-feminists really never say anything to men about changing themselves? You’ve never really heard of it at all? How about PUA? I know as a matter of fact that it has been pointed out to you directly that PUA advocates teach men to accept women as they are and change their own behavior, to the point where it becomes a point of contention between PUA and the MRA people who feel that women should change more.
@dungone:
I said that MRAs are generally focussed on being anti-feminists more than anything, and that they rarely care about victims of DV except as means to attack feminism. Could I have added more of my usual “I think/it’s been my experience”, but then again, I wasn’t making any more of an absolutist claim than the average poster here, including you, or Schala who also made an absolutist claim about what the MRM was.
But where did I say anything about how people who believe differently than me don’t have a clue? And where did I even mention men? It sounds to me like you’re doing some really heavy interpretation here.
Also, there’s a difference between me saying that the MRM generally don’t focus that much on male victims of DV except as a weapon against feminism, and me responding to someone talking about instances of MRAs getting attacked when dealing with DV by claiming that it must be because those specific MRAs weren’t really talking about DV but rather about false rape accusations.
First, 30-40? It’s not nearly that antiquated and it certainly hasn’t gone away completely. But regardless, in that case it would still make perfect sense in my example because, well, that divorce took place 20 years ago. If feminism was capable of screwing up people’s lives then, then it’s quite possible that it’s still able to do so now. So the mother tried to bring up her daughter using those “antiquated” standards, and the girl went on to an all-girl’s college women’s studies programs and experienced more of the same “antiquated” teachings, and this led her having her own relational issues that led her to eventually tell me that she feels like she has made mistake after mistake and searched for all the wrong things until she had finally “found” me and realized what she was really looking for. This led her to conclude that there is something wrong with the “Strong Independent Woman” narrative. So where exactly does your rebuttal fit in, again? Because it sounds awfully like no matter what I will say, no matter if it comes from me or from a woman or from a women’s studies major, you will just respond by saying “well, no true feminist…” It’s sort of like you repeatedly saying that you’re not a feminist when anyone criticizes you, but then you defend feminist theory all day and night.
@AB, go read Father’s and Families. This MRM organization is focused primarily on issues of family law and victims, domestic violence, and men’s health (i.e. circumcision, prostate, etc). They never mention feminism unless it happens to be that a feminist organization such as NOW is actively lobbying against a Father’s and Families initiative for shared parenting or something related to this. Think about the recent brouhaha about circumcision and HIV… based on entirely faulty research… that has been championed by many women’s rights groups (funny, no?) much to the detriment of men in the developing world. So as much as I would love to refute you completely and say that there are MRM activists who completely ignore feminism, but it happens to be the case that MRM activists are under constant attack from feminists both in the type of disparaging remarks that you make about them on this blog and in the activist world where feminist organizations frequently oppose any progress on men’s rights.
@dungone:
Then why expect it of feminism?
I have also seen plenty of materials about all the way girls and women are failing. Concern about girls’ performance in certain subjects in school, criticism of young women for choosing the wrong educations, a lot of stuff about how women are dominating harpies in their romantic relationships and need to learn how to settle, young girls having the wrong role models and imitating the wrong behaviour (Paris Hilton, Twilight, etc.), etc..
Not only to politicians talk about it, but it permeates a lot of popular culture. The major channels here have a lot of programs about giving men more power in the relationship, and one even had a program which basically consisted of famous and unknown men bitching about women and everything that was wrong with them. I’ve also seen older feminists criticising younger women for being too gender conforming, Muslims and traditionalists criticise women in general for not being gender conforming enough, women in high positions talking about how the only reason other women aren’t in the same position is that they’re lazy or too demanding, anti-feminists and father’s rights activists criticising women for being oppressive, etc. And from what I’ve seen from the US and UK, it’s really not that different. You have expressed plenty of such ideas yourself.
With all that, why would it be necessary (not to mention logical) for feminists to focus on how women who were dissatisfied just needed to get over themselves and concentrate of taking care of men and children?
And? PUA is not about ideology as much as getting men what they want, which in the case of PUAs tends to be the sexual compliance of conventionally attractive women. So they talk about how to get it. I’ve also seen plenty of advice to women (some of it feminist) about how to stand up for themselves, how to have a more successful career, how to earn more money, how to get out of abusive relationships etc. That’s also about changing oneself, so if PUA count, so should these kinds of advice. Not to mention that things like Cosmo’s many “How to wrap a man around you little finger articles” would be downright progressive in that light.
You seem to judge men and women very differently. It’s like the time you said that I “failed to make the men around [me] feel good about themselves”, as if it was my responsibility. You were pretty much demanding that even though I might have completely identical feelings for a man and a woman, I owed it to the man to make an effort to make him feel good, in a way I wouldn’t do for the woman, simply because he was a man. The idea seemed to be that it didn’t matter if a guy complimented me because he figured it was the fastest way to get into my pants and not because he had any interest in my well-being, and it didn’t matter that a lot of those compliments aren’t actually that flattering (negs come to mind), the only thing that mattered was that some men gave compliments to some women, and this gave women a collective moral obligation to men.
But if that’s really the case, women who follow Cosmo’s articles about how to make oneself more attractive to certain men ought to count too. And if PUAs who often recommend tactics specifically aimed to make women feel uncomfortable, insecure, and unwanted (e.g. freeze-out, negging, showing active disinterest) count as men realising that the mistake lies within themselves and that they shouldn’t change women, then so should the advice to women about not wasting time on a guy unless he lives up to their demands. You can’t just claim that everything men do in their own self-interest is good as long as it’s not about changing women, but at the same time call it inadequate if women don’t specifically concern themselves with their moral duties to men.
@Hugh
Very Foucaultian indeed, relying on people to understand “power” as something that comes into creation as an independent entity.
Nah dude, just no, that is not a thing.
@dungone, yeah I guess some people don’t much get with postmodern ideas about power, but uh… I basically say, whatever helps me in the design process. If I can grind it up and make a delicious sausage out of it then it’s going in the grinder.
OK I am now done white-knighting for Foucault but seriously, poststructuralism. SERIOUSLY.
@f, one of the interesting things with postmodernist deconstruction is the loose-goosey way in which someone can take the theory and apply it to anything. So in an English Lit class I took once, I had to read an entire book on Foucault and then write a postmodernist deconstructions of Jaws, A Nightmare on Elm Street, and Aliens (the movie with Sigourney Weaver). I wrote them and got perfect scores, acing the class. Then one day I was sitting around drinking a beer and began to wonder… how do I know that Freddy Kreuger was really an exploration of spaces and powers along Foucaultian lines… what if it was just a rehashing of prior horror-flick movie tropes? How do I know that the directors and screenwriters were really exploring postmodernist concepts? Did I do any research to verify that this was so? Then why the hell did my professor give me a passing grade? As I sat there I thought, “Oh my god.. I should have failed – everyone should have failed – oh my god… that professor taught the entire class how to be gullible, anti-scientific thinkers!” Unfortunately I was taking an art history class at the time and I applied my new-found realizations into my essays… I had to take that class 3 times before I passed with a D-. My essays on the tests were like, “well, these two paintings are 300 years apart and we know very little about what the artists said their influences are… so they likely have absolutely nothing to do with each other… putting them up next to each other on the screen does not allow me to make a single empirically based observation about what they have in common except for, maybe these colors look the same and such…” This is what happened after I refused to engage in postmodernist thinking.
On the other hand, if you’re designing a space using Postmodernist ideas, then I would be allowed to critique your work by saying that you designed them to achieve some sort of balance of power in that sense. That would be accurate and based on facts… But still, what you’re really thinking about is what is known as a design pattern. You may recognize it as a postmodernist interpretation of power structures, but in reality it’s just another design pattern – we know that you don’t put a toilet in the living room, that’s one design pattern, and we know that security cameras in the lobby should be pointed at the main entryway to see who goes in – just another design pattern. It just makes sense to achieve a common design goal.
@Collette
“A man I was seeing, and who remains a good friend of mine, is currently in the military and was in Iraq. He also has a brain tumor of sorts that he had to keep secret in order to remain in the military (I don’t know why he wanted to). ”
This is an important piont you have raised. What reasons does he give for staying in?
“However that tumor (fortunately benign) developed, he and others believe, from these things called burn piles. Apparently, that KBR (?) doesn’t want to pay for the proper disposal of the earthly remains of enemy and civillian dead. So they make these burn piles which are exactly what it sounds like; they’ve taken their toll on the military members.”
Burn piles are not for burning human remains from what I have ever heard. What they are is a sub-standard way of disposing of trash, some of it toxic. KBR is a hot mess. The whole subject of using corproat contractors is a mess.
“I can’t say I admire any institution that puts so much effort into building somebody up and turning on a “switch” without first taking the necessary steps to ensure they will not be broken down and will be able to turn of the switch once they return home. I don’t think the default idealization, hero status, and the possible glory is justification. I don’t trust the military industrial complex.”
Good. That’s a start. Now start looking at the same dynamic in the rest of society.
@M Dubz,
Ok, then rather than saying “If women on average didn’t care so much about status in men, then there would be no incentive for men to compete to become hegemons,” let’s pretend I said “If women on average didn’t care so much about status in men, then there would be less incentive for men to compete to become hegemons.”
@f.
I realize, I was just riffing on your analogy that dungone’s girlfriend is “in some ways ‘colonized’ by a particular hegemon.”
I realize that there is a power structure, and that perhaps “hegemonic masculinity” is the form of masculinity promoted most strongly by that power structure. However, like dungone, I still don’t like the term hegemonic masculinity, because it portrays men with such masculinity as more powerful and “hegemonic” than they actually are. For instance, if a woman is pressuring a man into enacting this sort of masculinity, then I have trouble seeing him as “hegemonic”, even if a hegemony is being served. Unfortunately, the term “hegemonic masculinity” implies that he is hegemonic.
That makes sense to me. In the situation between dungone and his girlfriend, I think this relational perspective would clearly show her power to judge his behavior.
I’ll check it out if I ever get into the postmodernists.
Historically, men’s desires for power and status cannot be disentangled from women’s desires for men with power and status. We don’t know which came first, but I think that I think that if we take a historical perspective, we would see both men and women creating and enforcing these norms since day 1. I think this perspective is consistent with your notion of “diffuse” power relations that are hard to pin down.
Some feminists talk as if some male tribal elders invented this power structure and enforced it on women, turning women into future enforcers. I think that’s the ahistorical perspective, which fails to examine how women supported (or required) men to have the sort of power to determine cultural norms, and tries to pin everything on men.
Side-note. I find it ironic that in a post about the failure of our society to properly care for wounded war veterans, we’re having a side-discussion about how societal power structures are designed to benefit men over women. Very ironic! Thank you feminism… FYI, I am a veteran and as far as I know I might also be wounded, but probably not, but who knows? I have been inside of vehicles and structures that had been “blown up”, been exposed to depleted uranium, jet fuel, etc. So I actually take a particular interest in this issue. Who knows, maybe I’ll find out someday when I have a deformed kid or something.
@dungone, we are far afield here but a city ain’t a film. The vast majority of configurations you find, while they tend to work fairly well according to some type of logic, are a total patchwork rather than the result of one designer’s work. They’re also shaped by forces that are highly abstract – War. Flows of capital. Peoples’ lifestyle desires, centuries ago. Religious significance. Tradition. Safety concerns. Outdated aesthetics. etc.
What I find useful about Deleuze’s idea of “rhizomes” or some of what Certeau says about the construction of spatial relations in “The Practice of Everyday Life” is, things like that offer a framework to analyze stuff that is shaped by multiple influences that all act in highly disparate ways, plus an ever-present Multitude that carves its own grooves slowly through repetitive pursuit of each individual’s particular interests. I get that it might not be relevant to every field, but damn if a good flowchart of power-relationships doesn’t get my mind revved up when I look at a city block or a suburban development.
Plus, it sounds like your assignments were an invitation to play a certain type of film analysis game – probably I think you’re right, in the end there was no real point except to get you looking at the film from another, specific angle. That can be pointless. As a designer though, I need all of the goddamned angles I can get. A certain part of the process is like a game. You have to play with things.
When it gets down to where the sewer grate is gonna go, well yeah, things get way more mundane. But on the other hand a sewer is like this gigantic flow of everyone’s shit, rolling along peacefully below the city like a super-disgusting aquifer and enabling us to feel nice and clean here up above?
dungone I thought we were working on your relationship problems WITH FOUCAULT.
Massive thread drift o_o
“Not to mention that I have yet to see an anti-feminist, least of all you, ever tell men that they need to stop pretending there’s an issue with anyone but themselves just because they’re unhappy, and they need to get over it so that they can focus on supporting women and children.”
This is a very very conservative position. Why would you want dungone to hold it? It’s the default position of the Republican party, and of people who deny men have any reason to complain, too.
@f, actually I find the Foucault part to be a fascinating aside… but it all started with the chicken-or-the-egg discussion about hegemonic masculinity, which is the part that I find ironic.
As for urban planning, I will readily admit it makes more sense to think of it that way – I have another concept for you, though – chaos theory. At the same time that postmodernists were forming their wacky way of looking at the world, scientists were realizing that when you add an external source of energy into a system, the system can take on a self-organizing nature. This works with inanimate objects such as solar systems, DNA, bacteria, as well as cities. If you want to really see how absurd postmodernism is, try using it to explain evolution.
Granted, the “a city is not a film” remark is valid and it makes much more sense to “deconstruct” urban spaces using Foucault’s philosophy than it does to do that for, say, horror flicks. After I had asked myself if the directors were influenced by postmodernism and admitting to myself that it probably had more to do with copying earlier movie tropes than philosophy, I asked myself the next question – could my postmodernist deconstruction of power structures in Freddy Kreuger be valid after all, because the history of movie making itself had led directors to create films that explored Foucault’s theories? That’s when the ridiculousness of postmodernism really hit me.
@dungone:
So you argument is that because people’s notions of empowerment aren’t always constructive in the concrete situations they find themselves in, and many notions of female empowerment have (for good or bad) been found in feminism, some of which hurt your girlfriend 20 years ago, it means that talking about strong empowered women today is wrong?
First off, she’s using a very broad concept in a ridiculously narrow way. Strength and independence are many things, and many of them are benevolent. In the privacy of your own home, where both of you know exactly what meme she’s talking about, it’s OK to use that way. But saying that your girlfriend realised the error of the concept of strong independent women in a place like here, without bothering to clarify which specific concept you’re talking about, really makes it sound like she’s just against strength and independence in women.
And secondly, there are people who make a mistake when they break up with a long-time partner and head out on their own. But concluding that just because she thinks her mother was one of them (and because there really isn’t an argument against it, I choose to believe it), it means that the whole notion is bullshit (and worse, the whole notion of being a strong and independent woman is bullshit), can have just as destructive a result as concluding that the notion is always valid can have.
Actually, your girlfriend is the one engaging in the whole “well, no true feminist…” line of thought, by indicating that when feminists talk about strong independent women, they must be talking about a specific way of life which will never work for anyone but a CEO. In my experience, they don’t. In fact, I’m so far away from “well, no true feminist…” that I’m currently arguing in another thread that I think bigots can count as part of various [insert group]’s right movements, as long as they fit the basic premise of believing group x is oppressed/unfairly discriminated against and wanting to to change it.
I think it’s fair to say that there’s a feminist ‘thing’ about strong independent women, but the specific kind of strength and independence which says “Leave your husband even though you don’t have the means of providing adequately for yourself and your children, and try to keep him out of you and your children’s life even though he’s not abusive” is, well, very specific. And it’s definitely not the notion I’ve heard from a lot of feminists. I’m not denying it exists among some feminists, and I’ve even debated it in a more general sense with my feminist father. But it’s far from the end-all and be-all concept your girlfriend makes it out to be.
@Schala:
Who says I do? I’m just pointing out that he’s demanding a lot from women which he’s not willing to do himself.
@AB, Do feminists really, and I mean really use a “very broad” definition of Strength and Independence? Because in my experience it’s an extremely narrow and often contradictory one to begin with. So now you’re saying that it’s actually really broad. What do you mean by broad? How is the feminist definition of a Strong Independent Woman broad? Here’s the thing, though. I never said that she said that concepts of “strength” or “independence” were wrong ideas for women. If you are saying that this is what I said then you are really misreading or even putting words into my mouth. What I said that she said was that the feminist notion of a Strong Independent Woman are misguided, and have been misguided over the many years/generations for which they have been used by feminists. That’s a making a very specific statement about a very specific thing.
So now you’re saying that asking women to look inward at potential problems with themselves before concluding that “the personal is political” is the same as putting men into a repressed traditionalist box? And that’s your response to Schala? You don’t see any problems in your logic?
Mods… I feel bad, these comments should really be moved to an open thread… could you help us out?
@AB, oh, yeah and I can see you using the “but there are so many kinds of feminists” approach to deny that feminists can have bad ideas. Even if a String Independent Woman is a broader concept than just the idea of leaving your husband, it’s not that much broader. “The Personal Is Political” is practically a feminist slogan and nobody else’s – not MRAs, not anyone except feminists – and the idea of a Strong Independent Woman intersects with that slogan in a very particular way, which is the way that my girlfriend had inferred from all of her experience with feminism. Again, you are skirting around what I am telling you… that my girlfriend was educated in feminism on a collegiate level which I believe that not even you have been.
This is your semi-regular reminder to please keep the discussions civil and clear of personal attacks. AB, do not accuse Schala of having a “narrow attitude,” say the transphobic radical feminists had good reason to dislike her, etc.
Unfortunately, we can’t move comments to the Open Thread, but if you wish to discuss hegemonic masculinity and Foucaultian power relations, that is where you should do it. Any further comments on this thread about hegemonic masculinity or Foucaultian power relations will be spamfiltered.
Getting out of modvoice, I have two comments: one, trans women experience a larger drop in income than trans men do post-transition– one of the explanations of this is men tending to earn more money (others include transmisogyny and trans men in general being better at passing); two, I have no idea why anyone would think that women could not enforce hegemonic masculinity. I mean, uh, duh?
@Ozy, thanks but… shouldn’t you have been spamfiltered yourself? 😉 You kept talking about… ah never mind. It’s a pity that the comments can’t be moved.
Thanks for keeping the plight of Servicemen and Women suffering from combat related TBI in the spotlight. My Son was one of the Soldiers with a TBI interviewed by Propublica and NPR at Ft. bliss, Texas. My Son was the Soldier who stated “the Army was sweeping them (Soldiers with TBI ) under the rug”. All 3 Soldiers interviewed were being treated at a civilian impatient neuro-rehab center…..because Ft. Bliss was not in a directed state of readiness as mandated by the Army / DOD to function at their TBI Treatment Designated level. We were part of the group that filed a Congressional Complaint that lead to an investigation. The Commander of William Beaumont Medical Center was “reassigned” to his “new duty station”. The Army Neurologist who was following my son never documented he had a Traumatic Brain Injury, never made any referrals for advanced neuroimaging tests to possibly identify areas of brain injury that could be causing the grand mal seizures, or anything else. This was the same Neurologist who had been following one of the other Soldiers in the article. After the Congressional complaint was filed…. The Neurologist apparently stopped seeing Soldiers, completed his clinicals to obtain his Board Certification, and was given a Fellowship.
My Son was injured April 8, 2008 while en route to a mission site somewhere north of Taji. He was a Military Police Officer/ K-9 Explosive Detection. The Stryker vehicle he was riding in took a direct hit by an IED … Directly behind my Son. In addition to taking the full force of the concussion blast…. He was launched headfirst into the radio mount, and knocked unconscious for about 15 minutes. After a brief hospitalization, he stayed in Iraq until his tour of duty was completed. When he returned to the States, the ongoing residual effects of TBI began to come apparent. Memory problems, cognitive deficits, seizures, depression etc. Almost a year after his return to FT Bliss, a physician from Physical Medicine finally DOCUMENTED in my Sons records he had a TBI and made referrals. My son spent a YEAR in Neuro-Rehabilitation Hospital in El Paso…several weeks for inpatient therapy…..and the rest of the time for Supervised Living. This was because my son could not function safely and independently.
My Son went through the Med Board discharge process to be medically discharged from the Army and obtain his disability rating. Result? “due to GLOBAL DOCUMEnTATION problems at the Command Level, theMed Board acknowledged the Treatment Facility’s identification of a TBI… But the major symptoms they noted were headaches, and therefore not ratable for disability”. The Grand Mal seizures were rated alone, and not as a consequence of a TBI. But he “does” have PTSD,so they will give him “Temporary Disability and reevaluate his disability rating in one year….since he would be expected to improve.”
Now mind you, this is AFTER a Congressional Complaint was filed! Coincidence? Retaliation? Hmmm mm mm.
We are currently struggling with the VA system. The VA has rated him as 100% combat disabled with a TBI and PTSD. We still have to prove to the Army my Son has a brain injury. Standard neuro-imaging tests such as CT and MRI are u reliable to show areas of blast related brain injury. The Army, VA, DoCE etc have numerous articles and research position papers regarding these tests. Their own recommendations are in support of other advanced imaging studies such as PET scan, SPECT scan, diffuse tensor imaging, and MEG scans. The new multi-billion dollar Intrepid Center of Excellence that just opened with the latest and greatest therapy treatments, recommendations, and resources…including the above diagnostics.
Bottom line? Who gets access to them? We have requested advanced imaging studies for my son by the VA in Loma Linda, California. My Daughter-in-Law was told he would only get a PET scan if he needed neuro-surgery. A request for a MEG scan inSan Diego was denied by Tricare managed care….it’s to expensive….and considered experimental.
Bottom line it’s all about money….. and the fact that the Iraq War has left a boatload of injured military personnel who will be needing healthcare services for a long time….some for the rest of their lives. That translates I to a LOT of money. What better way to save bucks than to throw the Walking Wounded Warriors with Traumatic Brain Injuries under the bus. They walk, talk, and don’t have any necessarily obvious physical injuries. Who would even know? Blow it off to PTSD.
It is a pathetic situation these Warriors and their families are having to endure. It’s pathetic they have to argue and beg for help. And it’s totally wrong how the Army in specific is trying to turf these Warriors
@Rebecca, thanks for sharing.
I read your entire story and felt okay until I got to this part, and this is what really made me angry. I remember back in 2003, when I was about to get deployed to Iraq for the first time, I would pull into a gas station in my uniform and a random stranger went in to the attendant and paid for my gas. What happened since then? How come we as individuals can be capable of so much kindness, but when it comes time to vote for the politicians and the policies that run our country, it’s all about me, me, me, and the people who truly do this country’s bidding get left out in the cold?
Mod note: I am serious about this derail. Stop it.
@Rebecca,
Thanks for sharing all that. I wish you the best of luck in getting that PET or DTI scan so you can prove your son’s injury.
Are they seriously not accepting a non-empirical diagnostic evaluation from a neurologist of some kind? The insurance company too? Demanding you pay for a $2000+ procedure to prove you need money is ridiculous… keep telling people your story and hopefully one day the fear of public embarrassment will get them to crack. Best of luck…