Are you a man? Do you feel marginalized? Oppressed? Do you feel this patriarchy thing just isn't providing the pleasure and zest in your life that you expected when you signed up to it? Well, now you too can form your own persecuted and subjugated white middle class able-bodied heterosexual hegemonized minority group with your other able-bodied white middle class heterosexual chums.
Bitch about patriarchy, hug, talking about Carl Jung and the animus (not a band), gaze longingly at pictures of Jordan Peterson, hug and talk about how oppressed you are.
In an opinion piece in The Guardian Richard Godwin asks: Men after #MeToo: ‘There’s a narrative that masculinity is fundamentally toxic.' Can a new men’s movement bring a positive shift?"
This blog necessarily touches on sexual violence so a trigger warning.
Godwin joins a men's group to get to the bottom of his masculinity and learn "how to “get vulnerable” with Rebel Wisdom, a newly formed men’s collective. “In today’s world, for men to be vulnerable and speak their truth is an act of rebellion,” says its chic new age website. “We exist to fuel this rebellion.”"
Speak their truth? A slogan co-opted from civil rights via Oprah. For middle class white men. And what are they rebelling against? What'ya got?
Godwin is (at the start at least) writing from a somewhat distanced, ironic(?) stance: "In practice, this meant we were going to spend a day doing breathing exercises, talking about our fathers, pretending to be tigers, leaning on one another, working out which Jungian archetypes we vibed with, and trying to articulate why we all felt so defensive and angry and misunderstood so much of the time.
But first we had to stand in a circle and say how we were feeling. And one by one, the men – mostly in their mid-30s, mostly straight, mostly white – said they were afraid."
I'm not surprised, a room full of men pretending to be tigers would scare the crap out of me too. Working out our Jungian archetypes would make me snigger.
Rebel Wisdom's website is like a teenager's bedroom wall...
oops...
One assumes these wise rebels spend all day scribbling "We heart you Jordan" on their notebooks.
It is full of the same rebel wisdom that their charismatic leader spouts online. Their "collective" mission statement:
"Rebel Wisdom is a growing collective of men sharing their skills to help other men to grow up and show up more in the world."
Because white men are just so invisible. The collective's wisdom is the same new age gobbledygook of their hero (they literally call him this, see below), internet celebrity self help guru Jordan Peterson:
"We can only speak from our experience from doing this work for many years, which is that men and women have different challenges and experiences of the world. We are all impacted by society (what some call ‘patriarchal culture’) but we are wounded in different ways." my italics
I feel your pain, dudes. And so begins the long tiresome conflation of patriarchy with other ideologies, class, religion, race, etc. While patriarchy is one of the most dominant ideologies of our society, society is not patriarchy. These fellas seem to really struggle to grasp that being economically poor or disadvantaged by class isn't about patriarchy. Unless you're a woman.
Back to the revolting wisdom: "Many of the world’s oldest wisdom traditions, from Buddhism to Taoism to Hinduism, have concluded that the world manifests itself fundamentally as polarities, yin/yang, masculine/feminine.
Taking our lead from the great psychologist C. J. Jung, our experience is that everyone contains both a masculine and feminine side (what he called the anima and animus) – and that it is only by consciously and deliberately developing both of them that we become fully present and embodied.
But this is not the same as gender neutrality, quite the opposite – instead of seeing gender as a ‘spectrum’ – we can see it as two spectrums, an inner masculine and feminine in each of us."
The man rainbow of feelings and the woman rainbow. Gender is a social construct so how can you have two genders that are then socially constructed, that makes no sense. Masculine and feminine are constructs not biology. There's nothing biologically intrinsically feminine in a female. I'm all for celebrating femininity but as long as one remembers that's a gendered construction not biological. You're born male you're socialized into being a man man. Men and women are biologically different but there's absolutely nothing psychologically or sociologically different between them.
"Our experience is that true charisma comes from integrating both of these elements in ourselves, for men that means both to be able to stand in our relaxed confidence as men, and also to access our emotions and express them cleanly.
Our experience is that men need the support and challenge of other men to develop their masculine side. The kind of accountability, fierce loving energy that men can give to each other."
I'm a man, I don't need fierce loving energy from other men. We're back to the tigers again.
"Men who disrespect women are weak men who fear them, a sign that the man hasn’t yet done the work to develop his own independence (from mother) and sense of relaxed masculine confidence, so is still stuck in an unhealthy relationship to the feminine – fearful of its power."
Jordan will be proud of you. What does that mean? Violent men have mother issues? What of father issues? Violent men are fearful of their inner feminine? This really is silly. It's as if sociology never existed.
"Relaxed masculine confidence" sounds suspiciously like a kind of psychological manspreading.
I promise you I'm sitting in a manly manner as I type these words. Manly words. I'm having none of those ladylike posed words here. I should just point out that I'm a man with a penis (a truly enormous one too) and fair sized testicles, think a couple of ripe limes. Yet I feel no physical need to spread my legs wishbone wide to accommodate my giant testicular appendages. I cross my legs like a girl. I mean, like a feminine man on the male gender spectrum.
"There is far too much of this immature masculine in the world – manifesting as some of the most powerful people (yes, we are talking about Donald Trump) – and the answer to this is the need for mature men who have done the work, which then means they can support others."
Yeah, we need old guys who have put in the hours.
Though Godwin himself has an ironic distance from the Jungian animus inner energy workshop gibberish he does find:
"I don’t know if you’ve noticed, but men are not exactly giving the best account of themselves at the moment. Every week brings another high-profile reminder of unhealthy masculinity, from Harvey Weinstein to Aziz Ansari to the former Oxfam boss Roland van Hauwermeiren. Clearly, something needs to shift. Like all the male friends I’ve spoken to recently, I’ve found the current reckoning disorienting at times, shaming at others, but mostly exciting, necessary and liberating. I’ve seen the overwhelmingly positive effect it’s had on many women in my life. But there are moments – say when I’m happily cooking with my son – when the dominant narrative of masculinity as toxic, entitled, corrupt, dysfunctional and so on seems a little limiting." my italics
What intrigues me is that Godwin should now notice this narrative is limiting. That men are complete dicks "at the moment." I mean, it's not like suddenly men overnight became this "toxic brand" is it? Harvey Weinstein isn't the first man to use his powerful position to violate women. Because of course men in powerful positions have always used their power to violate women. And less powerful men use their power as men to violate women. And this is where the complexity of society and ideology seems to completely outwit so many men, including the rebel wisdomers and Godwin himself. For having shown that the "man brand is toxic" Godwin both analyzes this and reinforces it at the same time:
"If you’ve always found men such as Weinstein despicable and pathetic, it’s disorienting to find yourself in the same category as him by virtue of also having a penis." my italics
The old, not all men are rapists. I'm not and I'll prove it but reiterating that Weinstein is a monster but I'm not and feel shocked that anyone could look at Weinstein (a man) and put me (a man) in the same bracket (men). Though Weinstein has a penis and I have a penis we're completely different.
But, of course, this is the point of the #metoo campaign that it's patriarchy and men that are problematic. I'm a man. I too own a penis (see above). I didn't buy it or choose it, and by penis we are talking metaphorically about male power (just assume) rather than the actual bit of flesh dangling there. But to deny you're part of the patriarchal discourse as a man is like an old Etonian denying they're part of the class discourse because, you know, they don't abuse their class privilege. Or someone who is white denying that there is a power dynamic in society between white people and people of colour because they've never been racist. So Godwin is falling into the very trap he seems to be distancing himself from. You don't need a penis to rape, you don't need a penis to hold power but if you are male you are socialized into the patriarchal ideology, invisible as it is, we don't recognize we, as men have this dominance until the penis is (still metaphorically) dangled in front of our face, in the shape of Weinstein or whoever. Yet we dominate women by our very presence. I'm small, camp and my girlfriend laughs at the idea that I could be a threat to anyone yet when I walk down a lonely road and a woman is walking the opposite way the very fact that I'm a man makes this simple act of two strangers passing on a street an ideological act. It doesn't mean I, or the woman can't walk down streets but there is a power dynamic at play in this scenario and to ignore that or suggest it doesn't exist or that it's just as bad for men too is utterly blind to patriarchal discourse. It's the accumulated experience of every woman within our patriarchal ideology that men are potentially dangerous precisely because we are men, even if that man is small and camp.
We'll come back to this as the men cited in Godwin's piece are clearly bemused by how ideology works.
However, Godwin is clearly aware of the ideology he's exploring as he tells us: "A couple of times, I’ve begun the sentence: “You know, not all men… ” only to recall that that in itself is seen as a dick move."
Exactly. Denial that being a man in itself is about power relations is an ideological blindspot. But Godwin, of course, has the usual caveat:
"And there are clearly dissonances in political, legal and psychological notions of gender that require careful unpicking: for example, the feminist notion that masculinity is in full control of itself and consciously uses sex to cement its power doesn’t quite tally with our understanding of the subconscious."
I don't think anyone seriously argues that all men consciously control women at all times. Or do they? Patriarchal discourse, like all ideology, is mostly invisible. In its simplest forms it can mean assuming the gender neutral term "doctor" automatically means a man and "nurse" a woman. But no one seriously argues that a rapist thinks I'm doing this for mankind (except Steven Pinker...see my blog on Pinker and rape). What feminism does argue is that our patriarchal society fosters the conditions that allows men to violate women sexually, physically and emotionally and let's them predominantly get away with it and then culturally reflect back to us thus that this is acceptable and blames women for it because they walk around looking like women.
Godwin argues: "Masculinity is very rarely under control and sexual abuse is often perpetrated by men who are threatened (often by other men), vulnerable, damaged, lashing out. Not that this insight can be expected to provide solace for their victims."
What? Men rape because they feel threatened? What utter rubbish. I wonder if Godwin has read Steven Pinker and thinks he's a world renowned expert on sexual violence.
"Perhaps all the moment requires is for men to shut up and listen, something many clearly find hard. But watching the hashtags accrue – #menaretrash, etc – it’s often hard to discern any positive role for men, beyond apologetic retweeters of feminist memes."
I'm a man and I don't recognize this crisis of masculinity that Godwin is suggesting is all around us. I don't sense men are under attack in any way. An equivalent would be to suggest that bankers feel threatened by a few online petitions and some negative media. Are we going to get a get #bankertoo movement. Just because I'm a banker it doesn't make me a heartless violator of public provisions. Let's form a banker group where bankers can get together, hug, talk about their animus and anima and how they're so misunderstood, we just want to make money with no social responsibility, is that so bad?
"And there’s a wider defensiveness around masculinity...But as we know, men are not fine. Boys get worse grades than girls. Suicide is the biggest killer of men under 35; men also report significantly lower life satisfaction than women. According to statistics compiled by the Men’s Health Forum, men make up 76% of all suicides, 95% of the prison population, 73% of adults who go missing and 87% of rough sleepers. A key part of this is men’s reluctance to seek help. Last year’s cross-party Jo Cox Commission described male loneliness as a “silent epidemic”: more than one in 10 say they are lonely but won’t usually admit it." my italics
Ah, the old conflate class with patriarchy myth yet again. Rough sleeping and prison populations are (almost completely) down to being working class and poor. Over and over again you get this confusion. How can all men be powerful under patriarchy if a good number are poor and homeless and in prison (for violent crime against women?)? Because these are two separate issues. If you're a working class male then social class ideology is heavily steeped against you. You're more likely to go to prison than middle and upper class men, you're more likely to do badly at school, skip school, have lower status jobs, have mental health problems. But none of this has anything to do with being male per se. It has everything to do with being poor.
It's important to remember that here in the UK in 1918 women got the vote, a major step towards equality. But what is hardly mentioned is that working class men attained the vote at the same time.
Working class men were not denied the vote because of patriarchy. Women were. Working class women were doubly denied by class and patriarchy. Christ, this is simple stuff.
And onto suicide. Male suicide rates are falling while female rates are climbing ONS and as data starts to trickle in from developing nations we see that there is a correlation between poverty and suicide.
Oddly there is hardly any research on class and suicide but what there is suggests that lower class people are more likely to commit suicide because they don't receive psychiatric interventions as early as wealthier demographics.
Loneliness or suicide has nothing to do with patriarchy. It has everything to do with other social factors like class, like modern media forms or the way we're housed and the way we are schooled.
For reasons why boys do worse at school see Pierre Bourdieu:
"According to Bourdieu, working-class girls can more easily negotiate school life and its values since the feminine identity derived from their families also stresses docility and passivity."
The education system is based on "docility" according to Bourdieu, making children conform to set roles, rules and ideals and boys have more freedom to express themselves through things like physical play (there's heaps of evidence on how boys dominate space in the playground and how typically male sports dominate physical space, football say compared to girls skipping). Working class boys are also taught to prioritize the manual over the mental and girls are taught the opposite and these are reinforced in the media, in toys, at school, etc.
While these roles are gendered it doesn't actually benefit women if the roles offered in wider society are limited by their gender. Boys, on average, do worse at school but in the world outside of school males dominate the top jobs and careers.
“One of the problems is that in the last 10 years or so, the world hasn’t really been interested in the psychology of gender,” says the psychotherapist Nick Duffell. “What we’ve been interested in are transgender issues and free choice and pronouns and gender as a social construct and abuses of power. But one of the things I’ve been working with is how powerless men often feel in the private sphere. Men are very unskilled when it comes to relationships and dealing with their emotions. We need to train them to be better at vulnerability, better at relating – and when they begin to do that, the power they develop is more authentic.”
Men powerless in the private sphere? Again, this is conflating class with patriarchy, I assume. Does the average high powered hedge fund manager Randian superman suddenly step through his front door and feel emotionally castrated?
I dunno where Nick Duffell's been or who his clients are (young white males perhaps?) but I worked for about seven years as a psychotherapist and all issues for men were fundamentally about class. The males I saw were all white working class and did indeed feel powerless. But that had nothing to do with patriarchy (unless you count their abusive fathers, which proves the patriarchal point). They were powerless because they had just come out of prison, they had no jobs. However, their relationships were screwed because they'd been abusive, I had one stranger rapist and paedophile who had raped his daughter and another trying to get his children back because he'd being beating his partner. They were excluded socially by class but they expressed power over women and girls as men. Overwhelmingly my clients were women though and most had experienced sexual violence by men.
While the chattering classes might be discussing transgender issues (remembering that Trans people make up a truly tiny percentage of the population) the everyday conversation is about gender. Perhaps not overtly but most discussions between couples will be about gender (housework, childcare, work, pay, sex, etc.) and gender, alongside race, dominates media coverage of discrimination (disability and class are rarely discussed oddly).
Rather than Godwin attending man classes or the wise rebels group hugging and reasserting a good masculinity I would recommend reading a couple of books on sociology. The gender sections. And something by Adorno or Althusser on how ideology works.
"At the outset, David Fuller, 42, a film-maker and one of the founders of Rebel Wisdom, outlines what Men’s Movement 2.0 hopes to achieve. He has been on a personal journey these past few years, he explains, and of all the “work” he has done – from psychedelics to tantra – he has gained most from “men’s work”: men coming together in small groups, “holding space”, sharing their “fierce loving energy” and helping each other grow. Women give birth to boys, but men give birth to men is an axiom of the movement. A man must “do the work” to develop his own independence and grow into a “relaxed masculine confidence” that is not threatened by the feminine. Something magical and unexpected happens when men help each other do this, Fuller believes – and it’s something the world is calling out for in 2018."
Tantra and taking shit loads of mescalin does not sound like work in my world. The man work is still somewhat undefined. Men coming together hugging and a bit of primal scream group therapy by way of Fritz Perls 1960s Gestalt and Jung archetypes mimbo jimbo.
Beyond the Jungian new age drivel and the belief that men are such poor little darlings because they're so put upon, there is an elemental truth here that was, ironically, the cornerstone of second wave feminist belief. Whereas third wave feminism tends to harp on about wage equality or equality in the media and so on, seconds wave feminism saw equality not simply through women turning into men...
...but real equality through erasing gender sociology. In a sense that is what Fuller seems to be suggesting (sort of) in men getting in touch with their inner anima.
"“Around the election of Donald Trump, it felt really significant that a lot of issues around masculinity were being reflected in the culture,” he tells the 60 or so attendees. “How is it possible that a man who boasts of sexual assault can be elected to the most significant public role in the world? It spoke to a deep dysfunction around our ideas of healthy masculinity. But, at the same time, there’s a narrative that there’s something about masculinity that’s fundamentally toxic.” What we need to do as a society – but particularly as men – he says, is to redefine “healthy masculinity”. A masculinity that is no better or worse than femininity, but that stands as its opposite, equal pole."
This is problematic because what the hell is masculinity if not a social construct that comes paradoxically from gendered roles? What is this healthy masculinity? It's never exactly explained in the article or on Rebel Wisom's site or brother sites. Can you be in touch with your anima but still being all healthily masculine stare at women's arses on the subway?
On Rebel Wisdom this healthy masculinity is mostly a kind of Beatlemania: "Oh my god, Jordan we love you!":
"Over the last few months we have become convinced that his [Jordan Peterson's] work is nothing less than a heroic attempt to completely articulate the deep mythological substructure of western culture, and ground it in the latest understandings of neuroscience and psychology." my italics
If you don't know Jordan Peterson he mouths glib gobbledygook that sounds like wow deep man but has absolutely zero substance:
“You can’t have the conversation about rights without the conversation about responsibility because your rights are my responsibility … and then the question is what are you leaving out if you’re leaving out responsibility. And the answer might be well maybe you’re leaving out the meaning of life.”
I hope you're clearer about male rights.
"“This man could single-handedly save Western Civilization, if people would listen," claims Rebel Wisdom website.
Save it from what?
“That’s another hallmark of truth, is that it snaps things together. People write to me all the time and say it’s as if things were coming together in my mind. It’s like the Platonic idea that all learning was remembering. You have a nature and when you feel that nature articulated it’s it’s like the act of snapping the puzzle pieces together," says gorgeous Jordan Peterson.
"Responsibility binds the ideal with the truth and gives us an empirical base on which to understand the myths that have alternated like a current through civilization. But we can only come to a realization of some whole if we recognize what is missing. The visible is often the space between that which is lost and that which can be made whole once more. The Aristotelean hero may be a bird who flies alone, an outcast but huMANity is not above the law or above his own nature and masculinity can..." drivels Arkady Hughes...
You see I can vomit this shit out too...I could ramble on spouting meaningless phrases like that forever. I'm not as dishy as Jordan though.
Fuller writes on Rebel Wisdom (get that sick bucket by your side): "Listening to Peterson is to begin, or continue this journey of self discovery — to dare to learn just how much of yourself is made up from ideas you have inherited from others, and how many of the words you speak and thoughts you think are not your own. Are you ready for that journey?"
It seems that Rebel Wisdom's rationale, apart from sounding like a bad holiday brochure, is to be masculine; say wank over porn pictures, but also to be feminine, tape Jordan Peterson's face over the porn model.
But Fuller isn't prone to Peterson's oblique drivel...
"As a Jungian psychologist he explicitly links this journey to the concept of the encounter with our personal ‘shadow’ — the part of ourselves we repress or deny. He also links it to the great stories of mythology from prehistory onwards — how the hero goes into the underworld, encounters the dragon and comes back with the gold."
Oh ok. Maybe he is. Could you put this in more concrete terms maybe, how this hero journey encountering my shadow might look to me as a middle aged white man living in Manchester, northwest England?
“If you’re not using your own words, you’re the puppet of an ideology or another thinker or your own impulsive desires. You can tell when you’re speaking like that because it makes you feel weak — it makes you feel weak and ashamed, and you can localise that feeling physiologically if you listen to yourself talk. When you are speaking properly you will experience a feeling of integration and strength and when you’re speaking in a deceitful or manipulative manner you’ll feel that you’re starting to come apart at the seams. What you need to do is practice only saying things that make you feel stronger. At first you’ll notice that almost everything you say is a lie. It’s either a lie or someone else’s words. It’s very hard to find your own words — and you don’t actually exist until you have your own words.”
Wow. That sounds weirdly like Peterson's arch enemy, Jacques Derrida's claim that there is nothing outside of the text. So, there's a kind of ten commandment distortion of thou shalt not lie mixed with a Nietzchian supermanish Randian kind of self belief thang. That's about as focused as I can get it.
If you want to go on your own hero's journey you now can with your guides through the masculine ether, Will Gethin, "holistic explorer" and Alan Heeks, "natural happiness writer" or I'll tell you you're great and give you a hug for a fraction of the price on my Champion's Expedition with me, Arkady Hughes, magical mystery tourist guide (it's a real job). What does this journey involve?
On this "call to adventure" you "follow your bliss" "on the road" in "the dark wood" to seek "the treasure" and "return." Yep, it seems you can take part in your own adolescent fantasy novel with your spirit guides, Will and Alan.
Fuller adds: "Though he [Peterson} himself says it’s almost impossible to simplify his thought — a speech earlier this year came closest to doing it:
“There’s a principle at the heart of western civilisation and it’s older than Christianity and it’s older than Judaism, although Christianity developed it to a great degree. It’s the idea of the Logos — which means something like coherent interpersonal communication of the truth — and from an archetypal perspective it’s the action of the logos that extracts order from chaos.
We make order by articulating truth and then we inhabit the order. The order is the negotiated social agreements we come to to live among each other without tearing each other to shreds — which is basically what chimpanzees do to each other — so we need to negotiate the social order and we do that through articulated speech.
What Christianity did was take that proposition — derived partly from Mesopotamia, partly from Judaism and partly from Egypt and turn it into a symbolic doctrine — taking the figure of Christ, who from a psychological and archetypal perspective is the ideal man — an image of the ideal — which is the word made flesh, the instantiation of the logos in the body so that it’s acted out in the world. It’s the fundamental proposition of western culture — and we’ve lost it, and we will not survive without it.”
I think you can simplify that. Language and consciousness raises us above monkeys in the social hierarchy and we should aspire to be Jesus.
Words of deep (rebel) wisdom.
Godwin suggests "One of the themes that has come to the fore is that women shouldn’t have to perform the emotional labour of teaching men how not to harass and assault them – just as it shouldn’t be down to people of colour to call out and explain racism. Reflect. Be humble. Work this out. Admit fault. This seems compatible with the core precept of men’s work, which involves men sorting out their shit with other men. But the question is, when men get together to talk about men, do they say the sorts of things that women would like to hear?"
Of course, patriarchy runs a bit deeper than not harassing women. That's just its very visible tip.
A group of men getting together for group hugs and admitting they can be shitty to women changes bugger all.
"As the Men’s Movement 2.0 launch gets underway, I’m not so sure. There is lots of talk about anima and animus, about how men need to make peace with their inner feminine. The lack of male role models and masculine rites of passage is mourned."
What about Jesus? Or Jordan Peterson? Men have loads of role models. Surely it's harder in a male dominated media, arts and sports for women to find role models? And how does this role model thing fit if you're not white, not able bodied, not in love with Jordan Peterson? Are gay men welcome?
"Someone asks if gay men have a role in the movement. “Yes! All are welcome!”"
Yay! Well that's very inclusive. But I'm still unsure what the purpose of all this is?
"We spend a long time discussing whether Men’s Movement 2.0 is a good name."
It's like the Judean People's Front in Monty Python.
"Finally, someone remarks that it would be interesting to hear from one of the women in the room."
There are women at these men things?
“Come on, girls, speak up!”
Oh no, there are not women but very small children. No, it appears they are addressing women when they call out to "girls." And there my friends shows patriarchy in action. Come on you tiny little boys, you can do better.
"One woman says she’s been leading feminist groups for years and it’s interesting how similar the discussions are: “Obviously, there’s a different energy, and it’s complicated where the patriarchy starts coming in, and the fact you have penises and you are all monsters,” she says." Or something along that line. She was probably thinking it.
"Surprisingly, this is the first time anyone has mentioned the word “patriarchy”, and it produces a frisson."
Hopefully not a sexual frisson. Nathan Roberts of Band of Brothers (cringe) explains in full Jordan Peterson mode:
“For me, it’s about the idea that we’re equal, but different. I have a biochemical experience based on testosterone; a woman has a biochemical experience based on oestrogen. It’s a different sort of consciousness, in my belief. But there’s also a historical aspect. We as men have denied the effects of patriarchy for centuries. We can’t deny that. But if we lump all men and patriarchy in together, men end up nailed to the tree of history and feel a sense of shame that they will never escape from.”
The first bit is science, yep men have xy and women xx chromosomes. But after that, different consciousnesses? What? How? If we lump all men and patriarchy together? What? Patriarchy is male dominance how can you exclude some men from this? On what criteria? Oh they seemed so nice.
Nailed to the tree of history? Jesus. I mean, they really have a Jesus fixation.
“But the reality is, at the top of our society, the vast majority of people are men,” Roberts continues. “The question is how to differentiate that from masculinity itself.”
That sounds bonkers but that is relevant. Differentiating gendered masculinity from male sex, biology and sociology, exactly, masculinity is gendered, dominating space, being violent, looking at women's arses etc. All actions that differentiate men from women are socialized beyond actual biological functions. But these guys just ramble on and on about getting in touch with their masculinity without ever defining how that is different from femininity.
"Soon after the launch, the tensions in the Men’s Movement 2.0 inevitably rise to the surface. Everyone seems to have found Robson too aggressive. There are further disagreements about whether to call it a men’s movement at all. When I describe all this to my wife, she seem unsurprised that we lacked direction. “When women get together, we don’t talk about femininity. We talk about rights.” Perhaps with no specific political cause to rally around, men have nothing else to contemplate other than our wounded feelings."
That's the point. If you're a white middle class western man what the fuck have you to complain about? Yes, you might be economically disadvantaged in a post-crash world of stagnating wages but THIS HAS NOTHING TO DO with patriarchy.
Rafia Morgan "veteran facilitator" (does no one have a recognizable career in this movement?) tells us:
"But at one of these sessions, he had an epiphany. “I remember listening to all these polite, middle-class men, full of guilt, full of anger, full of despair… And I had this image of them sawing their own balls off.”"
Which as mental images goes is a bit odd. But it seems reasonable. Perhaps they could do it for charity, like the ice bucket challenge?
My favourite masculine male man in the Godwin article is "Robson, the Swedish guy":
“But do we really need to differentiate it? It sounds to me that there’s some sort of negative association there. What you see in the most gender-equal societies like Sweden is that it’s still the males at the top, and there’s actually a lower percentage of females in leadership positions. For me this idea that we should smash the patriarchy, that men in power are evil, this is quite misguided, you know? Western society is actually kind of OK compared with any other society that’s ever existed. And it was built by a patriarchal system. These are guys working hard to make the world a better place. Yes, there’s corruption and so forth, but actually I think we’re doing better than anywhere else in the whole world.”
As mixed metaphors mixing up culture and ideology and patriarchy goes that's impressive. Where does he get this wisdom from?
“Well, I don’t want to be fact-checked on this, but the more equal a society becomes, the greater the specific psychological difference between the genders becomes. I got that off a Jordan Peterson video, but he’s kind of an expert on the issue, right?”
Aha. Allowing for Robson speaking in a second language (if he is...or indeed speaking any recognizable language) he still might as well be speaking Swedish to this non-native speaker:
“I see a lot of good things in the #MeToo campaign, but I also see a lot of angry women. All these women are angry at the masculine and they’re angry at men, and this is not helping the guys who are already feeling insecure in their masculinity.”
Baffling isn't it?
And our friend, the veteran facilitator, Rafia Morgan has a weird understanding of how sex, choice and life work:
"He was “completely lost” at the time. His father had just died and he become a father himself, unexpectedly: a woman had become pregnant with his child, deliberately and without his consent, he says, which left him confused and angry." my italics
He was raped? By a woman? How exactly is having sex with a woman and her falling pregnant "deliberate and without consent"? I assume it means she chose whether to have an invisible jockey grow inside her or not and he was pissed that he didn't have the final say on what happened inside her body. Isn't this the complete dickishness that proves the point that there are problems with men like "men's group facilitator" Morgan?
“What it’s so good at doing is breaking down the traditional ways men are supposed to relate,” he explains. “I find men incredibly generous with one another when they come together like that. There’s an implicit support for all men, the wounded men, the insecure men.”
It's 'Nam man, you don't understand what it was like there. The jungle, the heat, the day to day facing death and uncertainty and my girlfriend having her own reproductive choices.
"The message he finds himself giving, time and time again, is that men need to work on being present. Simply listening. “I find a present man is by his nature solid, loving, kind, protective. He’s not threatened by his own femininity, or the external feminine. He knows how to make women feel valued. And the problem is, women feel devalued by a patriarchal culture that’s run by castrated men and other devalued women.”
Wow, as mixed messages go that even outdoes hero journeyman Jordan Peterson.
So women need to feel valued by men? Herein lies the problem. I don't feel any need to value any woman. I like to believe I treat women the same as men (though I probably don't). I value individuals based on their actions, deeds, personality, etc. Patriarchal discourse makes men dominant over women, making an effort to value women is reinforcing that dominance. Just treat women like bloody equals.
I applaud getting in touch with your inner feminine however, again, one must not mistake these 'feminine' virtues as being intrinsically female but socialized and as he argues anyone can change their attitudes. This isn't biology. A man doesn't need to have his balls sawed off to be a decent human being. It might help though. And his penis. And his head.
And this is the crux of this utterly bizarre ideological mens movement nonsense. The problems with feminism become incomprehensible with men 2.0. Feminism, second wave, early 1960s feminism, Betty Friedan, The Feminine Mystique of 1963 was highly problematic because it talked about women as an homogenised whole and how they must free themselves from the tyranny of patriarchy, which, as Friedan was a white middle class American mostly involved housework. It was embarrassingly white middle class-centric. It said nothing about the experience of working class women, of black or Asian women, it said nothing about disabled women, gay women. It merely pushed the narrative from women, per se, to white middle class women. And the men's movement is the same with the added bonus of men already having power. If men feel powerless it has nothing to with patriarchy and everything to do with economics.
Godwin concludes: "Still, I take some comfort from the main thing I learned from men’s groups. Not one of us has a clue what he’s doing. I think it’s one reason many men are finding this moment so hard: we are perceived to have the power, yet most of us feel powerless in relation to our own lives, emotions, relations." my italics
To reiterate, what does that have to do with being a man? Are they powerless because they are men? Well, that would be bizarre. I would make an educated guess that (and these are white middle class men) the powerlessness come from social economic conditions like job in/security, wages, debt, family, etc. It has nothing intrinsically to do with being heterogametic, having xy chromosomes, having testicles or even socialized masculinity.
And finally the best of all. Dave Pickering.
Who does actually look like a short sighted Jesus, so ironically reaching that men's movement Nirvana perhaps. There's a video here explaining his show, he seems a lovely fella. I'd hug him, I'd even pretend to be a tiger for him. Because he looks a bit like Jesus.
And sadly is just as confused, deluded and myopic as the son of God...
"The patriarchy question is one that has been exercising Dave Pickering for some time. A London-based writer and performer, he interviewed 1,000 men about patriarchy for his live show, Mansplaining Masculinity, which he is now turning into a book via the crowdfunding publisher Unbound. About 85% of the men he interviewed thought patriarchy exists; some thought it was a good thing; some didn’t; some protested about the premise of the question; others cut-and-pasted the dictionary definition (“a system in which men have all or most of the power and importance in a society or group”). But it did provoke unexpected confessions. “A lot of men talked about being unfairly promoted, and not doing enough domestic chores,” Pickering says. “But a few were really surprising. One man said, ‘I raped my girlfriend because I didn’t know what rape was.’”"
As defences go that's up there. Your honour, I murdered her but I didn't know stabbing my girlfriend repeatedly in the head was murder.
Pickering sums up the confusion around patriarchy as an ideology...
"Pickering feels one of the reasons men become so defensive about patriarchy is the idea that they are supposed to be benefiting from it when, in fact, so many of us are suffering under it. “The main breadwinner is not a pleasant place to be. The person who is expected to use violence to defend people is not a healthy place to be. More men are in prison, more men are in the army, men are more likely to hurt other men, and it’s usually because they’re policing masculinity. My mum told me that men are wrong and men are sick. That’s something I internalised. And that’s part of patriarchy. Hating ourselves is social conditioning, this idea that there’s only one way to be, and if we don’t feel that way, we should be ashamed.”" my italics
That isn't part of patriarchy. Hating yourself is probably because you feel ashamed of being a man because men do so many of the awful things in the world. We internalize ideologies, like patriarchy, or capitalism, or Judaism, and so on. Men in prison or the army has nothing to do with patriarchy, the army target young working class males not because of patriarchal discourse but because they're economically disadvantaged and cheap cannon fodder.
Clearly pickering doesn't understand how ideology works. To reiterate, this argument about "patriarchy" is as illogical as saying, as a white man, there's all this racism about, you know, black people are inferior to us white people and whatnot. yet I don't get anything out of it at all, I still have to go to work and clean my own toilet. I feel like racism is against me too, as a privileged white man. Sigh.
Patriarchy is an ideology and is thus invisible. "The idea that they are supposed to be benefiting from it when, in fact, so many of us are suffering under it." It's not a welfare system you can sign up to to get benefits from. It's pretty simple stuff. The world has over the centuries been dominated by white people, it still is, thus, say, to be white is to have an inbuilt power. It doesn't mean that being white you feel supremely powerful. You don't swan around like George III, yeah underling black slave people, I'm white, I'm your king. Though one could argue that that's exactly how men act towards women. There are numerous ideological factors in how much power you have in our society. Being white is one factor. Being male is another. Being upper or middle class is generally the most important factor. You can be a white male but effectively be on the lowest rung in society. Patriarchy is an ideology where men dominate women, that doesn't in turn mean that all men are dominant. Class, race/ethnicity, dis/ability are all factors in how much social power one has. Men don't "benefit" from patriarchy. That implies some conscious decision on mankind to have power over women. But the gendered discourse is set in stone, it's historical and present in the obvious ways in which a child is socialized from the moment the baby's sex is differentiated through the pink and blues of babyhood, the divisions of labour in the home, the gifts you receive, and so on and then through social institutions, school, church, workplace, that reinforce these gender divisions.
Having a mens movement that reinforces an idea that men are somehow put upon by the ideological discourse of patriarchy is utterly nonsensical. By all means group hug, pretend to be tigers, get in touch with one's gendered femininity but don't think for one moment that that confers some sort of equality or catharsis, it merely in turn reinforces hierarchical norms. If you want to change patriarchy go out into the streets and burn your books, refuse to dominate space, refuse to assume that woman can't wire a plug or men can't crochet, refuse violence, refuse to objectify women, refuse the media that objectifies women, oh you know...and perhaps saw your balls off.
Bitch about patriarchy, hug, talking about Carl Jung and the animus (not a band), gaze longingly at pictures of Jordan Peterson, hug and talk about how oppressed you are.
In an opinion piece in The Guardian Richard Godwin asks: Men after #MeToo: ‘There’s a narrative that masculinity is fundamentally toxic.' Can a new men’s movement bring a positive shift?"
This blog necessarily touches on sexual violence so a trigger warning.
Godwin joins a men's group to get to the bottom of his masculinity and learn "how to “get vulnerable” with Rebel Wisdom, a newly formed men’s collective. “In today’s world, for men to be vulnerable and speak their truth is an act of rebellion,” says its chic new age website. “We exist to fuel this rebellion.”"
Speak their truth? A slogan co-opted from civil rights via Oprah. For middle class white men. And what are they rebelling against? What'ya got?
No, not that...
But first we had to stand in a circle and say how we were feeling. And one by one, the men – mostly in their mid-30s, mostly straight, mostly white – said they were afraid."
I'm not surprised, a room full of men pretending to be tigers would scare the crap out of me too. Working out our Jungian archetypes would make me snigger.
Rebel Wisdom's website is like a teenager's bedroom wall...
One assumes these wise rebels spend all day scribbling "We heart you Jordan" on their notebooks.
It is full of the same rebel wisdom that their charismatic leader spouts online. Their "collective" mission statement:
"Rebel Wisdom is a growing collective of men sharing their skills to help other men to grow up and show up more in the world."
"We can only speak from our experience from doing this work for many years, which is that men and women have different challenges and experiences of the world. We are all impacted by society (what some call ‘patriarchal culture’) but we are wounded in different ways." my italics
I feel your pain, dudes. And so begins the long tiresome conflation of patriarchy with other ideologies, class, religion, race, etc. While patriarchy is one of the most dominant ideologies of our society, society is not patriarchy. These fellas seem to really struggle to grasp that being economically poor or disadvantaged by class isn't about patriarchy. Unless you're a woman.
Back to the revolting wisdom: "Many of the world’s oldest wisdom traditions, from Buddhism to Taoism to Hinduism, have concluded that the world manifests itself fundamentally as polarities, yin/yang, masculine/feminine.
Taking our lead from the great psychologist C. J. Jung, our experience is that everyone contains both a masculine and feminine side (what he called the anima and animus) – and that it is only by consciously and deliberately developing both of them that we become fully present and embodied.
But this is not the same as gender neutrality, quite the opposite – instead of seeing gender as a ‘spectrum’ – we can see it as two spectrums, an inner masculine and feminine in each of us."
The rainbow of feelings
The man rainbow of feelings and the woman rainbow. Gender is a social construct so how can you have two genders that are then socially constructed, that makes no sense. Masculine and feminine are constructs not biology. There's nothing biologically intrinsically feminine in a female. I'm all for celebrating femininity but as long as one remembers that's a gendered construction not biological. You're born male you're socialized into being a man man. Men and women are biologically different but there's absolutely nothing psychologically or sociologically different between them.
"Our experience is that true charisma comes from integrating both of these elements in ourselves, for men that means both to be able to stand in our relaxed confidence as men, and also to access our emotions and express them cleanly.
Our experience is that men need the support and challenge of other men to develop their masculine side. The kind of accountability, fierce loving energy that men can give to each other."
I'm a man, I don't need fierce loving energy from other men. We're back to the tigers again.
"Men who disrespect women are weak men who fear them, a sign that the man hasn’t yet done the work to develop his own independence (from mother) and sense of relaxed masculine confidence, so is still stuck in an unhealthy relationship to the feminine – fearful of its power."
Jordan will be proud of you. What does that mean? Violent men have mother issues? What of father issues? Violent men are fearful of their inner feminine? This really is silly. It's as if sociology never existed.
"Relaxed masculine confidence" sounds suspiciously like a kind of psychological manspreading.
Our right wing blogger friend, Guido Fawkes, helpfully explains manspreading is just a healthy natural normal manly biological phenomena not a continuation of men dominating space.
"Now if you look at the picture all the men sitting in the front are sitting in the same manly manner, all the women are sitting ladylike with their knees together. This is normal, it is not a problem, not a privilege of the patriarchy. It is a matter of anatomical comfort."
I promise you I'm sitting in a manly manner as I type these words. Manly words. I'm having none of those ladylike posed words here. I should just point out that I'm a man with a penis (a truly enormous one too) and fair sized testicles, think a couple of ripe limes. Yet I feel no physical need to spread my legs wishbone wide to accommodate my giant testicular appendages. I cross my legs like a girl. I mean, like a feminine man on the male gender spectrum.
"There is far too much of this immature masculine in the world – manifesting as some of the most powerful people (yes, we are talking about Donald Trump) – and the answer to this is the need for mature men who have done the work, which then means they can support others."
Yeah, we need old guys who have put in the hours.
Though Godwin himself has an ironic distance from the Jungian animus inner energy workshop gibberish he does find:
"I don’t know if you’ve noticed, but men are not exactly giving the best account of themselves at the moment. Every week brings another high-profile reminder of unhealthy masculinity, from Harvey Weinstein to Aziz Ansari to the former Oxfam boss Roland van Hauwermeiren. Clearly, something needs to shift. Like all the male friends I’ve spoken to recently, I’ve found the current reckoning disorienting at times, shaming at others, but mostly exciting, necessary and liberating. I’ve seen the overwhelmingly positive effect it’s had on many women in my life. But there are moments – say when I’m happily cooking with my son – when the dominant narrative of masculinity as toxic, entitled, corrupt, dysfunctional and so on seems a little limiting." my italics
What intrigues me is that Godwin should now notice this narrative is limiting. That men are complete dicks "at the moment." I mean, it's not like suddenly men overnight became this "toxic brand" is it? Harvey Weinstein isn't the first man to use his powerful position to violate women. Because of course men in powerful positions have always used their power to violate women. And less powerful men use their power as men to violate women. And this is where the complexity of society and ideology seems to completely outwit so many men, including the rebel wisdomers and Godwin himself. For having shown that the "man brand is toxic" Godwin both analyzes this and reinforces it at the same time:
"If you’ve always found men such as Weinstein despicable and pathetic, it’s disorienting to find yourself in the same category as him by virtue of also having a penis." my italics
The old, not all men are rapists. I'm not and I'll prove it but reiterating that Weinstein is a monster but I'm not and feel shocked that anyone could look at Weinstein (a man) and put me (a man) in the same bracket (men). Though Weinstein has a penis and I have a penis we're completely different.
But, of course, this is the point of the #metoo campaign that it's patriarchy and men that are problematic. I'm a man. I too own a penis (see above). I didn't buy it or choose it, and by penis we are talking metaphorically about male power (just assume) rather than the actual bit of flesh dangling there. But to deny you're part of the patriarchal discourse as a man is like an old Etonian denying they're part of the class discourse because, you know, they don't abuse their class privilege. Or someone who is white denying that there is a power dynamic in society between white people and people of colour because they've never been racist. So Godwin is falling into the very trap he seems to be distancing himself from. You don't need a penis to rape, you don't need a penis to hold power but if you are male you are socialized into the patriarchal ideology, invisible as it is, we don't recognize we, as men have this dominance until the penis is (still metaphorically) dangled in front of our face, in the shape of Weinstein or whoever. Yet we dominate women by our very presence. I'm small, camp and my girlfriend laughs at the idea that I could be a threat to anyone yet when I walk down a lonely road and a woman is walking the opposite way the very fact that I'm a man makes this simple act of two strangers passing on a street an ideological act. It doesn't mean I, or the woman can't walk down streets but there is a power dynamic at play in this scenario and to ignore that or suggest it doesn't exist or that it's just as bad for men too is utterly blind to patriarchal discourse. It's the accumulated experience of every woman within our patriarchal ideology that men are potentially dangerous precisely because we are men, even if that man is small and camp.
We'll come back to this as the men cited in Godwin's piece are clearly bemused by how ideology works.
George Lawlor was famously vilified on the web internet online. The Warwick University student didn't want to go to consent classes because he doesn't look like a rapist.
Of course, Lawlor already had form.
Exactly. Denial that being a man in itself is about power relations is an ideological blindspot. But Godwin, of course, has the usual caveat:
"And there are clearly dissonances in political, legal and psychological notions of gender that require careful unpicking: for example, the feminist notion that masculinity is in full control of itself and consciously uses sex to cement its power doesn’t quite tally with our understanding of the subconscious."
I don't think anyone seriously argues that all men consciously control women at all times. Or do they? Patriarchal discourse, like all ideology, is mostly invisible. In its simplest forms it can mean assuming the gender neutral term "doctor" automatically means a man and "nurse" a woman. But no one seriously argues that a rapist thinks I'm doing this for mankind (except Steven Pinker...see my blog on Pinker and rape). What feminism does argue is that our patriarchal society fosters the conditions that allows men to violate women sexually, physically and emotionally and let's them predominantly get away with it and then culturally reflect back to us thus that this is acceptable and blames women for it because they walk around looking like women.
Godwin argues: "Masculinity is very rarely under control and sexual abuse is often perpetrated by men who are threatened (often by other men), vulnerable, damaged, lashing out. Not that this insight can be expected to provide solace for their victims."
What? Men rape because they feel threatened? What utter rubbish. I wonder if Godwin has read Steven Pinker and thinks he's a world renowned expert on sexual violence.
"Perhaps all the moment requires is for men to shut up and listen, something many clearly find hard. But watching the hashtags accrue – #menaretrash, etc – it’s often hard to discern any positive role for men, beyond apologetic retweeters of feminist memes."
I'm a man and I don't recognize this crisis of masculinity that Godwin is suggesting is all around us. I don't sense men are under attack in any way. An equivalent would be to suggest that bankers feel threatened by a few online petitions and some negative media. Are we going to get a get #bankertoo movement. Just because I'm a banker it doesn't make me a heartless violator of public provisions. Let's form a banker group where bankers can get together, hug, talk about their animus and anima and how they're so misunderstood, we just want to make money with no social responsibility, is that so bad?
"And there’s a wider defensiveness around masculinity...But as we know, men are not fine. Boys get worse grades than girls. Suicide is the biggest killer of men under 35; men also report significantly lower life satisfaction than women. According to statistics compiled by the Men’s Health Forum, men make up 76% of all suicides, 95% of the prison population, 73% of adults who go missing and 87% of rough sleepers. A key part of this is men’s reluctance to seek help. Last year’s cross-party Jo Cox Commission described male loneliness as a “silent epidemic”: more than one in 10 say they are lonely but won’t usually admit it." my italics
Ah, the old conflate class with patriarchy myth yet again. Rough sleeping and prison populations are (almost completely) down to being working class and poor. Over and over again you get this confusion. How can all men be powerful under patriarchy if a good number are poor and homeless and in prison (for violent crime against women?)? Because these are two separate issues. If you're a working class male then social class ideology is heavily steeped against you. You're more likely to go to prison than middle and upper class men, you're more likely to do badly at school, skip school, have lower status jobs, have mental health problems. But none of this has anything to do with being male per se. It has everything to do with being poor.
It's important to remember that here in the UK in 1918 women got the vote, a major step towards equality. But what is hardly mentioned is that working class men attained the vote at the same time.
Working class men were not denied the vote because of patriarchy. Women were. Working class women were doubly denied by class and patriarchy. Christ, this is simple stuff.
And onto suicide. Male suicide rates are falling while female rates are climbing ONS and as data starts to trickle in from developing nations we see that there is a correlation between poverty and suicide.
Loneliness or suicide has nothing to do with patriarchy. It has everything to do with other social factors like class, like modern media forms or the way we're housed and the way we are schooled.
For reasons why boys do worse at school see Pierre Bourdieu:
"According to Bourdieu, working-class girls can more easily negotiate school life and its values since the feminine identity derived from their families also stresses docility and passivity."
The education system is based on "docility" according to Bourdieu, making children conform to set roles, rules and ideals and boys have more freedom to express themselves through things like physical play (there's heaps of evidence on how boys dominate space in the playground and how typically male sports dominate physical space, football say compared to girls skipping). Working class boys are also taught to prioritize the manual over the mental and girls are taught the opposite and these are reinforced in the media, in toys, at school, etc.
While these roles are gendered it doesn't actually benefit women if the roles offered in wider society are limited by their gender. Boys, on average, do worse at school but in the world outside of school males dominate the top jobs and careers.
“One of the problems is that in the last 10 years or so, the world hasn’t really been interested in the psychology of gender,” says the psychotherapist Nick Duffell. “What we’ve been interested in are transgender issues and free choice and pronouns and gender as a social construct and abuses of power. But one of the things I’ve been working with is how powerless men often feel in the private sphere. Men are very unskilled when it comes to relationships and dealing with their emotions. We need to train them to be better at vulnerability, better at relating – and when they begin to do that, the power they develop is more authentic.”
Men powerless in the private sphere? Again, this is conflating class with patriarchy, I assume. Does the average high powered hedge fund manager Randian superman suddenly step through his front door and feel emotionally castrated?
I dunno where Nick Duffell's been or who his clients are (young white males perhaps?) but I worked for about seven years as a psychotherapist and all issues for men were fundamentally about class. The males I saw were all white working class and did indeed feel powerless. But that had nothing to do with patriarchy (unless you count their abusive fathers, which proves the patriarchal point). They were powerless because they had just come out of prison, they had no jobs. However, their relationships were screwed because they'd been abusive, I had one stranger rapist and paedophile who had raped his daughter and another trying to get his children back because he'd being beating his partner. They were excluded socially by class but they expressed power over women and girls as men. Overwhelmingly my clients were women though and most had experienced sexual violence by men.
While the chattering classes might be discussing transgender issues (remembering that Trans people make up a truly tiny percentage of the population) the everyday conversation is about gender. Perhaps not overtly but most discussions between couples will be about gender (housework, childcare, work, pay, sex, etc.) and gender, alongside race, dominates media coverage of discrimination (disability and class are rarely discussed oddly).
Rather than Godwin attending man classes or the wise rebels group hugging and reasserting a good masculinity I would recommend reading a couple of books on sociology. The gender sections. And something by Adorno or Althusser on how ideology works.
David Fuller hugging with his hero Jordan Peterson...you can hear Fuller's interview with Peterson on the Rebel Wisdom site where Peterson spouts his usual gibberish (and namedrops Jung, Nietzsche, Piaget, Dostoyevsky) about archetypes and history and how we've lost faith in masculinity which is the same as the loss of the faith in god, we need to rediscover god and masculinity, yeah, we need to be more patriarchial, or something, no doubt the YT Peterson hero worshippers would argue I'm just not clever enough to understand and to be fair, I am an idiot but oddly I have read Piaget (whom I disagree with because his research is based on a small group of upper class children, primarily his own), Dostoyevsky (whom I love), who, of course set out to prove god exists in The Karamazov Brothers and proves exactly the opposite, Jung, gibberish new age nonsense, I tried Nietzsche but I have a suspicion that nobody has actually read Nietzsche but rely on readings of Nietzsche by others who, of course, haven't read Nietzsche. Mad old bugger.
Tantra and taking shit loads of mescalin does not sound like work in my world. The man work is still somewhat undefined. Men coming together hugging and a bit of primal scream group therapy by way of Fritz Perls 1960s Gestalt and Jung archetypes mimbo jimbo.
Beyond the Jungian new age drivel and the belief that men are such poor little darlings because they're so put upon, there is an elemental truth here that was, ironically, the cornerstone of second wave feminist belief. Whereas third wave feminism tends to harp on about wage equality or equality in the media and so on, seconds wave feminism saw equality not simply through women turning into men...
"“Around the election of Donald Trump, it felt really significant that a lot of issues around masculinity were being reflected in the culture,” he tells the 60 or so attendees. “How is it possible that a man who boasts of sexual assault can be elected to the most significant public role in the world? It spoke to a deep dysfunction around our ideas of healthy masculinity. But, at the same time, there’s a narrative that there’s something about masculinity that’s fundamentally toxic.” What we need to do as a society – but particularly as men – he says, is to redefine “healthy masculinity”. A masculinity that is no better or worse than femininity, but that stands as its opposite, equal pole."
This is problematic because what the hell is masculinity if not a social construct that comes paradoxically from gendered roles? What is this healthy masculinity? It's never exactly explained in the article or on Rebel Wisom's site or brother sites. Can you be in touch with your anima but still being all healthily masculine stare at women's arses on the subway?
On Rebel Wisdom this healthy masculinity is mostly a kind of Beatlemania: "Oh my god, Jordan we love you!":
"Over the last few months we have become convinced that his [Jordan Peterson's] work is nothing less than a heroic attempt to completely articulate the deep mythological substructure of western culture, and ground it in the latest understandings of neuroscience and psychology." my italics
Pretty typical Peterson philosophical musings, if you think Paulo Coehlo is deep, man then you'll love Peterson.
“You can’t have the conversation about rights without the conversation about responsibility because your rights are my responsibility … and then the question is what are you leaving out if you’re leaving out responsibility. And the answer might be well maybe you’re leaving out the meaning of life.”
I hope you're clearer about male rights.
"“This man could single-handedly save Western Civilization, if people would listen," claims Rebel Wisdom website.
Save it from what?
“That’s another hallmark of truth, is that it snaps things together. People write to me all the time and say it’s as if things were coming together in my mind. It’s like the Platonic idea that all learning was remembering. You have a nature and when you feel that nature articulated it’s it’s like the act of snapping the puzzle pieces together," says gorgeous Jordan Peterson.
"Responsibility binds the ideal with the truth and gives us an empirical base on which to understand the myths that have alternated like a current through civilization. But we can only come to a realization of some whole if we recognize what is missing. The visible is often the space between that which is lost and that which can be made whole once more. The Aristotelean hero may be a bird who flies alone, an outcast but huMANity is not above the law or above his own nature and masculinity can..." drivels Arkady Hughes...
You see I can vomit this shit out too...I could ramble on spouting meaningless phrases like that forever. I'm not as dishy as Jordan though.
Fuller writes on Rebel Wisdom (get that sick bucket by your side): "Listening to Peterson is to begin, or continue this journey of self discovery — to dare to learn just how much of yourself is made up from ideas you have inherited from others, and how many of the words you speak and thoughts you think are not your own. Are you ready for that journey?"
It seems that Rebel Wisdom's rationale, apart from sounding like a bad holiday brochure, is to be masculine; say wank over porn pictures, but also to be feminine, tape Jordan Peterson's face over the porn model.
There's a lot of this kind of confused defensive men stuff out there
"As a Jungian psychologist he explicitly links this journey to the concept of the encounter with our personal ‘shadow’ — the part of ourselves we repress or deny. He also links it to the great stories of mythology from prehistory onwards — how the hero goes into the underworld, encounters the dragon and comes back with the gold."
Oh ok. Maybe he is. Could you put this in more concrete terms maybe, how this hero journey encountering my shadow might look to me as a middle aged white man living in Manchester, northwest England?
“If you’re not using your own words, you’re the puppet of an ideology or another thinker or your own impulsive desires. You can tell when you’re speaking like that because it makes you feel weak — it makes you feel weak and ashamed, and you can localise that feeling physiologically if you listen to yourself talk. When you are speaking properly you will experience a feeling of integration and strength and when you’re speaking in a deceitful or manipulative manner you’ll feel that you’re starting to come apart at the seams. What you need to do is practice only saying things that make you feel stronger. At first you’ll notice that almost everything you say is a lie. It’s either a lie or someone else’s words. It’s very hard to find your own words — and you don’t actually exist until you have your own words.”
Wow. That sounds weirdly like Peterson's arch enemy, Jacques Derrida's claim that there is nothing outside of the text. So, there's a kind of ten commandment distortion of thou shalt not lie mixed with a Nietzchian supermanish Randian kind of self belief thang. That's about as focused as I can get it.
If you want to go on your own hero's journey you now can with your guides through the masculine ether, Will Gethin, "holistic explorer" and Alan Heeks, "natural happiness writer" or I'll tell you you're great and give you a hug for a fraction of the price on my Champion's Expedition with me, Arkady Hughes, magical mystery tourist guide (it's a real job). What does this journey involve?
Fuller adds: "Though he [Peterson} himself says it’s almost impossible to simplify his thought — a speech earlier this year came closest to doing it:
“There’s a principle at the heart of western civilisation and it’s older than Christianity and it’s older than Judaism, although Christianity developed it to a great degree. It’s the idea of the Logos — which means something like coherent interpersonal communication of the truth — and from an archetypal perspective it’s the action of the logos that extracts order from chaos.
We make order by articulating truth and then we inhabit the order. The order is the negotiated social agreements we come to to live among each other without tearing each other to shreds — which is basically what chimpanzees do to each other — so we need to negotiate the social order and we do that through articulated speech.
What Christianity did was take that proposition — derived partly from Mesopotamia, partly from Judaism and partly from Egypt and turn it into a symbolic doctrine — taking the figure of Christ, who from a psychological and archetypal perspective is the ideal man — an image of the ideal — which is the word made flesh, the instantiation of the logos in the body so that it’s acted out in the world. It’s the fundamental proposition of western culture — and we’ve lost it, and we will not survive without it.”
I think you can simplify that. Language and consciousness raises us above monkeys in the social hierarchy and we should aspire to be Jesus.
Words of deep (rebel) wisdom.
Godwin suggests "One of the themes that has come to the fore is that women shouldn’t have to perform the emotional labour of teaching men how not to harass and assault them – just as it shouldn’t be down to people of colour to call out and explain racism. Reflect. Be humble. Work this out. Admit fault. This seems compatible with the core precept of men’s work, which involves men sorting out their shit with other men. But the question is, when men get together to talk about men, do they say the sorts of things that women would like to hear?"
Of course, patriarchy runs a bit deeper than not harassing women. That's just its very visible tip.
A group of men getting together for group hugs and admitting they can be shitty to women changes bugger all.
"As the Men’s Movement 2.0 launch gets underway, I’m not so sure. There is lots of talk about anima and animus, about how men need to make peace with their inner feminine. The lack of male role models and masculine rites of passage is mourned."
What about Jesus? Or Jordan Peterson? Men have loads of role models. Surely it's harder in a male dominated media, arts and sports for women to find role models? And how does this role model thing fit if you're not white, not able bodied, not in love with Jordan Peterson? Are gay men welcome?
"Someone asks if gay men have a role in the movement. “Yes! All are welcome!”"
Yay! Well that's very inclusive. But I'm still unsure what the purpose of all this is?
"We spend a long time discussing whether Men’s Movement 2.0 is a good name."
It's like the Judean People's Front in Monty Python.
"Finally, someone remarks that it would be interesting to hear from one of the women in the room."
There are women at these men things?
“Come on, girls, speak up!”
Oh no, there are not women but very small children. No, it appears they are addressing women when they call out to "girls." And there my friends shows patriarchy in action. Come on you tiny little boys, you can do better.
"One woman says she’s been leading feminist groups for years and it’s interesting how similar the discussions are: “Obviously, there’s a different energy, and it’s complicated where the patriarchy starts coming in, and the fact you have penises and you are all monsters,” she says." Or something along that line. She was probably thinking it.
"Surprisingly, this is the first time anyone has mentioned the word “patriarchy”, and it produces a frisson."
Hopefully not a sexual frisson. Nathan Roberts of Band of Brothers (cringe) explains in full Jordan Peterson mode:
“For me, it’s about the idea that we’re equal, but different. I have a biochemical experience based on testosterone; a woman has a biochemical experience based on oestrogen. It’s a different sort of consciousness, in my belief. But there’s also a historical aspect. We as men have denied the effects of patriarchy for centuries. We can’t deny that. But if we lump all men and patriarchy in together, men end up nailed to the tree of history and feel a sense of shame that they will never escape from.”
The first bit is science, yep men have xy and women xx chromosomes. But after that, different consciousnesses? What? How? If we lump all men and patriarchy together? What? Patriarchy is male dominance how can you exclude some men from this? On what criteria? Oh they seemed so nice.
Nailed to the tree of history? Jesus. I mean, they really have a Jesus fixation.
This seems to be something to aspire to...which is a very mixed message
“But the reality is, at the top of our society, the vast majority of people are men,” Roberts continues. “The question is how to differentiate that from masculinity itself.”
That sounds bonkers but that is relevant. Differentiating gendered masculinity from male sex, biology and sociology, exactly, masculinity is gendered, dominating space, being violent, looking at women's arses etc. All actions that differentiate men from women are socialized beyond actual biological functions. But these guys just ramble on and on about getting in touch with their masculinity without ever defining how that is different from femininity.
"Soon after the launch, the tensions in the Men’s Movement 2.0 inevitably rise to the surface. Everyone seems to have found Robson too aggressive. There are further disagreements about whether to call it a men’s movement at all. When I describe all this to my wife, she seem unsurprised that we lacked direction. “When women get together, we don’t talk about femininity. We talk about rights.” Perhaps with no specific political cause to rally around, men have nothing else to contemplate other than our wounded feelings."
That's the point. If you're a white middle class western man what the fuck have you to complain about? Yes, you might be economically disadvantaged in a post-crash world of stagnating wages but THIS HAS NOTHING TO DO with patriarchy.
Rafia Morgan "veteran facilitator" (does no one have a recognizable career in this movement?) tells us:
"But at one of these sessions, he had an epiphany. “I remember listening to all these polite, middle-class men, full of guilt, full of anger, full of despair… And I had this image of them sawing their own balls off.”"
Which as mental images goes is a bit odd. But it seems reasonable. Perhaps they could do it for charity, like the ice bucket challenge?
My favourite masculine male man in the Godwin article is "Robson, the Swedish guy":
“But do we really need to differentiate it? It sounds to me that there’s some sort of negative association there. What you see in the most gender-equal societies like Sweden is that it’s still the males at the top, and there’s actually a lower percentage of females in leadership positions. For me this idea that we should smash the patriarchy, that men in power are evil, this is quite misguided, you know? Western society is actually kind of OK compared with any other society that’s ever existed. And it was built by a patriarchal system. These are guys working hard to make the world a better place. Yes, there’s corruption and so forth, but actually I think we’re doing better than anywhere else in the whole world.”
As mixed metaphors mixing up culture and ideology and patriarchy goes that's impressive. Where does he get this wisdom from?
“Well, I don’t want to be fact-checked on this, but the more equal a society becomes, the greater the specific psychological difference between the genders becomes. I got that off a Jordan Peterson video, but he’s kind of an expert on the issue, right?”
Aha. Allowing for Robson speaking in a second language (if he is...or indeed speaking any recognizable language) he still might as well be speaking Swedish to this non-native speaker:
“I see a lot of good things in the #MeToo campaign, but I also see a lot of angry women. All these women are angry at the masculine and they’re angry at men, and this is not helping the guys who are already feeling insecure in their masculinity.”
Baffling isn't it?
And our friend, the veteran facilitator, Rafia Morgan has a weird understanding of how sex, choice and life work:
"He was “completely lost” at the time. His father had just died and he become a father himself, unexpectedly: a woman had become pregnant with his child, deliberately and without his consent, he says, which left him confused and angry." my italics
He was raped? By a woman? How exactly is having sex with a woman and her falling pregnant "deliberate and without consent"? I assume it means she chose whether to have an invisible jockey grow inside her or not and he was pissed that he didn't have the final say on what happened inside her body. Isn't this the complete dickishness that proves the point that there are problems with men like "men's group facilitator" Morgan?
“What it’s so good at doing is breaking down the traditional ways men are supposed to relate,” he explains. “I find men incredibly generous with one another when they come together like that. There’s an implicit support for all men, the wounded men, the insecure men.”
It's 'Nam man, you don't understand what it was like there. The jungle, the heat, the day to day facing death and uncertainty and my girlfriend having her own reproductive choices.
"The message he finds himself giving, time and time again, is that men need to work on being present. Simply listening. “I find a present man is by his nature solid, loving, kind, protective. He’s not threatened by his own femininity, or the external feminine. He knows how to make women feel valued. And the problem is, women feel devalued by a patriarchal culture that’s run by castrated men and other devalued women.”
Wow, as mixed messages go that even outdoes hero journeyman Jordan Peterson.
So women need to feel valued by men? Herein lies the problem. I don't feel any need to value any woman. I like to believe I treat women the same as men (though I probably don't). I value individuals based on their actions, deeds, personality, etc. Patriarchal discourse makes men dominant over women, making an effort to value women is reinforcing that dominance. Just treat women like bloody equals.
I applaud getting in touch with your inner feminine however, again, one must not mistake these 'feminine' virtues as being intrinsically female but socialized and as he argues anyone can change their attitudes. This isn't biology. A man doesn't need to have his balls sawed off to be a decent human being. It might help though. And his penis. And his head.
And this is the crux of this utterly bizarre ideological mens movement nonsense. The problems with feminism become incomprehensible with men 2.0. Feminism, second wave, early 1960s feminism, Betty Friedan, The Feminine Mystique of 1963 was highly problematic because it talked about women as an homogenised whole and how they must free themselves from the tyranny of patriarchy, which, as Friedan was a white middle class American mostly involved housework. It was embarrassingly white middle class-centric. It said nothing about the experience of working class women, of black or Asian women, it said nothing about disabled women, gay women. It merely pushed the narrative from women, per se, to white middle class women. And the men's movement is the same with the added bonus of men already having power. If men feel powerless it has nothing to with patriarchy and everything to do with economics.
Godwin concludes: "Still, I take some comfort from the main thing I learned from men’s groups. Not one of us has a clue what he’s doing. I think it’s one reason many men are finding this moment so hard: we are perceived to have the power, yet most of us feel powerless in relation to our own lives, emotions, relations." my italics
To reiterate, what does that have to do with being a man? Are they powerless because they are men? Well, that would be bizarre. I would make an educated guess that (and these are white middle class men) the powerlessness come from social economic conditions like job in/security, wages, debt, family, etc. It has nothing intrinsically to do with being heterogametic, having xy chromosomes, having testicles or even socialized masculinity.
And finally the best of all. Dave Pickering.
And sadly is just as confused, deluded and myopic as the son of God...
"The patriarchy question is one that has been exercising Dave Pickering for some time. A London-based writer and performer, he interviewed 1,000 men about patriarchy for his live show, Mansplaining Masculinity, which he is now turning into a book via the crowdfunding publisher Unbound. About 85% of the men he interviewed thought patriarchy exists; some thought it was a good thing; some didn’t; some protested about the premise of the question; others cut-and-pasted the dictionary definition (“a system in which men have all or most of the power and importance in a society or group”). But it did provoke unexpected confessions. “A lot of men talked about being unfairly promoted, and not doing enough domestic chores,” Pickering says. “But a few were really surprising. One man said, ‘I raped my girlfriend because I didn’t know what rape was.’”"
As defences go that's up there. Your honour, I murdered her but I didn't know stabbing my girlfriend repeatedly in the head was murder.
Pickering sums up the confusion around patriarchy as an ideology...
"Pickering feels one of the reasons men become so defensive about patriarchy is the idea that they are supposed to be benefiting from it when, in fact, so many of us are suffering under it. “The main breadwinner is not a pleasant place to be. The person who is expected to use violence to defend people is not a healthy place to be. More men are in prison, more men are in the army, men are more likely to hurt other men, and it’s usually because they’re policing masculinity. My mum told me that men are wrong and men are sick. That’s something I internalised. And that’s part of patriarchy. Hating ourselves is social conditioning, this idea that there’s only one way to be, and if we don’t feel that way, we should be ashamed.”" my italics
That isn't part of patriarchy. Hating yourself is probably because you feel ashamed of being a man because men do so many of the awful things in the world. We internalize ideologies, like patriarchy, or capitalism, or Judaism, and so on. Men in prison or the army has nothing to do with patriarchy, the army target young working class males not because of patriarchal discourse but because they're economically disadvantaged and cheap cannon fodder.
Clearly pickering doesn't understand how ideology works. To reiterate, this argument about "patriarchy" is as illogical as saying, as a white man, there's all this racism about, you know, black people are inferior to us white people and whatnot. yet I don't get anything out of it at all, I still have to go to work and clean my own toilet. I feel like racism is against me too, as a privileged white man. Sigh.
Patriarchy is an ideology and is thus invisible. "The idea that they are supposed to be benefiting from it when, in fact, so many of us are suffering under it." It's not a welfare system you can sign up to to get benefits from. It's pretty simple stuff. The world has over the centuries been dominated by white people, it still is, thus, say, to be white is to have an inbuilt power. It doesn't mean that being white you feel supremely powerful. You don't swan around like George III, yeah underling black slave people, I'm white, I'm your king. Though one could argue that that's exactly how men act towards women. There are numerous ideological factors in how much power you have in our society. Being white is one factor. Being male is another. Being upper or middle class is generally the most important factor. You can be a white male but effectively be on the lowest rung in society. Patriarchy is an ideology where men dominate women, that doesn't in turn mean that all men are dominant. Class, race/ethnicity, dis/ability are all factors in how much social power one has. Men don't "benefit" from patriarchy. That implies some conscious decision on mankind to have power over women. But the gendered discourse is set in stone, it's historical and present in the obvious ways in which a child is socialized from the moment the baby's sex is differentiated through the pink and blues of babyhood, the divisions of labour in the home, the gifts you receive, and so on and then through social institutions, school, church, workplace, that reinforce these gender divisions.
Having a mens movement that reinforces an idea that men are somehow put upon by the ideological discourse of patriarchy is utterly nonsensical. By all means group hug, pretend to be tigers, get in touch with one's gendered femininity but don't think for one moment that that confers some sort of equality or catharsis, it merely in turn reinforces hierarchical norms. If you want to change patriarchy go out into the streets and burn your books, refuse to dominate space, refuse to assume that woman can't wire a plug or men can't crochet, refuse violence, refuse to objectify women, refuse the media that objectifies women, oh you know...and perhaps saw your balls off.
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