Re: Gender issues Great article that we can all agree on.
As a possible antidote to some of the hard words exchanged on DU these days surrounding "misogyny" and "white male privilege," here's an article that I hope will show us that we're really all (well, almost all, heh) on the same side here.
http://lettersfromthevineyard.wordpress.com/2014/05/29/yes-all-men/
All of which is to say that for men shocked and appalled by the deluge of women’s stories of their abuse by men, there is an opportunity here to take a hard look at ourselves and the ways we might contribute to this structure that we have been thrown into. No matter how well we were raised to be good boys and men (and many of us were simply not), and no matter that we are not one of those men luring a young girl over to a shadowy corner to expose ourselves, or threatening a woman’s life because she didn’t sexually capitulate, or any one of the other horror stories women have lived, the fact is that none of us escaped this structure of man-making, even if we did not become a monster because of it. We unconsciously do or say things to make women and girls uncomfortable. And more often than we’d like to admit we very likely consciously do or think things that are misogynistic in some way–from unequal participation in domestic life, to supporting sons over daughters, to unequal or inappropriate relations with female co-workers or friends, to pornographic preferences for womens’ appearance and sexual behavior, and much more.
The stories and structures that have often informed us how to be men with women are, of course, all-encompassing and powerful, and have been with us for a long, long time. But we are lying to ourselves if we believe that we have wholly escaped them and live a narrative outside of other men. Feminism at its core is not a gradual, civilized response of dialogue and discourse, inviting men and women to take women seriously as fully human, so much as it is an organized, last ditch all-out revolution to stop the crushing tide of a genuine human catastrophe where nearly every woman ever born is a casualty in some fashion. As men, it’s simply not possible to not be complicit in some way in this tragedy, if merely for the reason that these damning structures have given us our identities and told us how to live, move, and have our being.
And while we cannot choose how we were thrown into this world, a determined stance of self-awareness of this throwness and personal repentance can begin to turn the tide. We cannot be condemned for enacting roles that were given to us and that we played before we knew otherwise; and we certainly should not feel shame for being something (men) we cannot be otherwise. But we are condemned for any refusal to respond to the call of thousands upon thousands of these voices–that men did this, not aliens or genetic human mutations, but men, and thus to look inwardly and examine ourselves in the light of this suffering, not simply point fingers at others as a minority of exceptional warped sociopaths. They were spun out of the same system we were and are therefore extreme symptoms of a disease that touches all of us.
(More at link)
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seabeyond
(110,159 posts)and read the whole thing. and i stepped away and am playing. this is very good. i look forward to reading all of it.
thank you
Damansarajaya
(625 posts)And that's a very unifying concept.
(That's not an implicit attack that other people are using a guilt-shame approach, but certainly some men could perceive it -- a feminist message of the need for change -- that way, and I think this writer pre-empts that pretty well.)
seabeyond
(110,159 posts)not only all men but all women too. ALL of us. we are in this together. for sure.
Damansarajaya
(625 posts)AverageJoe90
(10,745 posts)
