To be honest, I’ve avoided active feminism as a result of one negative stereotype in particular: the idea that feminists fault men as individuals for male privilege as a class. BetaCandy’s phrase “the patriarchy hates men” is a spark of hope for me. In my heart, I know I am a feminist. I agree with the goals and terms of feminism, but I’ve resisted feminism out of an aversion to generalizing male privilege–because, I guess, my father exemplifies the soft-spoken, hard-working, struggling citizen, who didn’t have the luxury of education and who has never expressed a word or act of oppression.

It’s true, the patriarchy hates men! The patriarchy takes away the voice of male victims. While feminists can–and should–point out inequities of gender, many men can’t point to their exclusion from power, because there is ostensibly no reason for it. This is the patriarchy’s trick on all of us. It sets up a group of powerholders; and people who are visibly identifiable with that group are taught to respect that power (after all, they might be lucky enough to share in it one day, they are told), OR they resent the power but have no voice against it. If we are all given the chance to pursue positions in that structure, we will all be in the “shut up and work harder” boat. It is a system that depends on oppression, using any pretext. So how do we change that? (I don’t know).

I’m sorry if my response got a little long or noisy–I do get swept with enthusiasm, especially because I realized that stereotypes have kept me at arms length.

That’s much more specific and to the point, and truer.

Offline, I’m surrounded by people - women and men - who think women are so lucky they can just make men do anything they want by granting or withholding sex (except undesirable women, and who cares about them?). It takes a lot of soundbytes to break through the crust of the closed mind and get them listening. I know with some of them it’ll never work. But I try anyway.

The first problem with that tactic is that it accepts the accusation of man-hating as a valid one. Denying that it is true of feminists in order to deflect its aim leaves it all of its potency as an attack.

The second problem is that you’re playing a very tricky card with the assertion that “patriarchy hates men”. Patriarchy is a system that benefits men, setting them up above women as a class (or establishing individual male dominance within specific hierarchies). Its ideological forms may seek to disguise that fact by various means, and in its intersections with other oppressions it may create hatred toward subcategories of men, but it is an invalid generalisation as it applies to the class dynamic between women and men. Furthermore, translating the equation “women hate men (and it is wrong)” to “men hate men (and it is wrong)” should lead men to love themselves more, which will hardly impinge on men’s sense of superiority, because they are not in a class conflict with themselves on the same basis as women are!

(The third problem is that you’re attributing emotions and beliefs to movements and systems, which are not people. Personifying feminism and patriarchy like this idealises them, and that only makes political analysis more difficult, because one must be able to identify the agents within a movement, the relative entities within a system. Women live inside patriarchies too, and “the patriarchy”, in its alternate meaning as a given body of men who may be in power at a particular time, is not a concept that necessarily provides vital information about the political system which also includes the people those men oppress.)

If our role in feminism still requires that we like sex with men, that’s really not much better.

This is part of why I’m a bit more concerned with teaching girls that it’s ok and good to find pleasure in sex period - not so much with the subset of “sexual pleasure” that necessitates sex with a man. I sometimes feel like a corrupter of innocents for harping on about things like “girls should not be ashamed to masturbate!” - but I do think it’s vital that we separate out sexual pleasure and finding sex with men to be pleasurable.

Of course, sex should also not be the most important issue being discussed, much less the only thing being discussed.

And BetaCandy - that’s a great answer to the common “man-hating” charge, not the least of which is that it cuts off the unproductive version of “the patriarchy hurts men too!” before it even has a chance to come up.

That pretty much sums it up.

I even worry about this when I say that feminism is not about hating men or considering women superior, because it’s both a clarification of my movement’s goals and a potentially reassuring comment. So what I usually say is, “Feminism doesn’t hate men - the patriarchy does” to open a dialog about patriarchal messages that make men out to be unsophisticated brutes (in order to lower women’s expectations) while feminism both believes men capable of more and expects more of men. Which I hope is not overly reassuring.

Because even when the truth is reassuring and the reassurance is truth, it invokes the framework of the dominant group being entitled to reassurances while the rest of us are not only not reassured, but met with confusion and anger at the very thought that we shouldn’t just accept the lessened rights and stripped identity that come with not being the dominant group.

The distancing reflex is a scapegoating strategy.

Disclaimers about not being “man-hating” are reassurances from an oppressed class to their oppressors, and are just as toxic as the homophobia in selling out lesbians, because they pre-empt the validity of an emotion about men as a class and disguise the class conflict in a gendered system. (The “man-hating” strawfeminist also goes hand in hand with essentialist constructions of gender which posit the sexes as natural categories and equate hatred of the oppressor with hatred of the oppressed on that basis, and as such is profoundly harmful to political analysis.)

A problem, I might add, that is reinforced by feminism lite’s well-intentioned but unfortunate focus on showing how much feminists love heterosexual sex.

Thanks for this too - Purtek did a nice job of breaking down much of what was wrong with reactions to the report which said that feminists have better sex lives than non-feminists, but this is important to note, too: our role in patriarchal culture is defined as giving men sexual pleasure and incubating the next generation of humans. If our role in feminism still requires that we like sex with men, that’s really not much better.

The other thing about the ‘revival’ and ‘rebirth’ part is that it seems to imply that other contemporary feminists (or perhaps feminists who are not part of the FFF ‘revivial’? who knows) are somehow misguided or unproductive in their feminism, which is pretty insulting. Come on people, just because you learned something new doesn’t mean you’re reinventing the wheel.

But then again, I’m just a hairy-legged dyke, so what do I know?