This post is a partial response to finishing the book, Love and Pornography, by Victoria and Garry Prater.
Activism & Politics
Let's begin with one basic observations about how things work in dominant Western societies:
Misogyny is not only corporately manufactured, but is also promulgated, promoted, heralded, and honored as "sacred" in a society that continually finds new ways to violate and degrade women as a gendered class.
A relatively young white man who appreciates many of the postings on this blog asked me to define what I mean by "a white man".
I'll attempt to do so here.
There was another post made here a couple of weeks or so ago that a good friend noted was potentially transphobic, or, at least, not very welcoming of trans visitors to my blog. I agreed with her and pulled the post. I revised it so much it became something else. What follows is that something else. (I sometimes use the word "they" or "them" as synonymous with "she/he/neither" and "her/him/neither", respectively.)
Although we had learned to approach most things political with tentative enthusiasm and trust, it really never occurred to us that men could use feminism and their claimed repentance for being a past misogynist as just another way to exercise power over women and our movement. Because once you’ve confessed you have nothing left to hide? Once you’ve come clean, you are just that, right? Innocent and trustworthy? After you’ve aired your dirty laundry, your drawers are clean and no one can come back at you and say there’s more dirt or new dirt on you.
Male privilege is a complex, vast, endemic matter, a bit like air--hard to notice unless it hits you in the face. If you're a woman living in a home with a man, that happens literally with atrocious regularity. I say this with knowledge that in the U.S. it is now "Domestic Violence Awareness" month. (I think it should be called "Let's Do Something About the Terrible Fact that Men Beat the Shit Out of Women at Home" month, but that's a topic for another post.
This report describes a programme for adolescent boys in Nigeria which seeks to increase boys' awareness of gender-based oppression, and to foster their critical thinking skills as a means to help prevent the spread of HIV/AIDS in their communities.
This report from the Catalyst series "Engaging Men in Gender Initiatives" examines men's support of gender initiatives in their workplace. This include ways to increase men's awareness of gender bias and the associated costs, factors that encourage men to lend their support to gender initiatives, and barriers that prevent them from supporting such initiatives.
In a world dominated by men, the world of men is, by definition, a world of power. That power is a structured part of our economies and systems of political and social organization; it forms part of the core of religion, family, forms of play, and intellectual life. On an individual level, much of what we associate with masculinity hinges on a man’s capacity to exercise power and control.
But men’s lives speak of a different reality. Though men hold power and reap the privileges that come with our sex, that power is tainted.