Image from "I Guess It’s a Jungle in Here Too, Huh?" at Feministe

One might be inclined to read the following and despair.

In modern America we believe racism to be the property of the uniquely villainous and morally deformed, the ideology of trolls, gorgons and orcs. We believe this even when we are actually being racist.

Source: Ta-Nehisi Coates in the New York Times

But even though what Coates says is just as true about sexism, homophobia, xenophobia, classism, age-ism, and just the whole shebang, dispair would be a mistake.

The trick is getting over the idea that you can ever completely overcome ground-in stuff.

To use a completely neutral example, a past-middle-age friend who's spoken fluent, unaccented, and vernacular English since coming to the U.S. as an elementary school kid said he occasionally still has dreams in his natal German.  This doens't mean he wants to "go back" to Germany.  It doens't mean he's "secretly" German.  It really doens't mean he's fluent in German -- he came over in 1st or 2nd grade and hasn't really spoken it since!  All it means is that even though he has little nostalgia and less practical interest in it there are still vestiges of something he was exposed to literally from birth, even though he learned to be -- and prefers to be -- an English speaker from a pretty early age.

So it's the same with racism, sexism, and pretty much everything else we were raised with growing up with the voices, expectations, and attitudes of everyone older than us.  It's not even anything good or bad in itself.  We can't exactly go back in time and say "Grandma, that story about the little boy and the tigers stereotypes East Asians out the wazoo."

Case in point: ever wonder whether the word "wazoo" has ethnic overtones?  Possibly negative ones?  Me neither.  It was just in there in my natal catalog of euphemisms and it came out.  (Answer, since I just looked it up: no, wazoo probably isn't derogatory, or not directly so. While there could be cognates in mideveal and/or Louisiana French and maybe in the Pama-Nyungan family pre-colonial Australian languages, it apparently just sounds funny.)

And while that one seems to be ok, and while I've consciously filtered out plenty of other distinctly ethnic, religious, sexist, abilist, and neuro-atypicalist euphemisms, other choices I still might have made, from the same stockpile of childhood "substitute for cuss words" are almost certainly of less savoury origins.  But they're just there in the language and I haven't learned about them.  Yet.t

So still not feeling better?  I'm tellin' ya it's really not that bad to know how much you don't know.  Because consider the alternative!  Ignorance with confidence is just about the best place to stand while maximizing misery and chaos for others.  As well as bringing heaps of  generally well-deserved contempt upon one's self when one earnestly attempts to downplay, pooh-pooh, or otherwise reassure others that no, in fact, really, you're not one of those homophobic buggers.

(Oops!)

This is why I think it's not just dumb or arrogant but rash to proclaim yourself a "good man," or a "nice guy."

It's not just that you're setting yourself up for ridicule.  Or a fall.  It's that if you really are well-intentioned, and if you really do want to do good work then you want to just pull up your big-boy pants

In Landmark Education (the erstwhile EST) they have, or maybe had, this declaration "Who I am is the possibility of [ABC,] and the act that I'm giving up is [XYZ.]"  Say what you like about Landmark (and plenty of people do) there's something to be said about acknowledging that you can't ever be completely rid of old habits.

The other point, I think this one's more from the 12-Step philosophy, is that rather than rashly claiming you've purged yourself of all sexism, homophobia, misandry and misogyny, or even hey-you-mean-it's-not-obsolete anti-Irish prejudice,* the trick is to get out of denial, clean up what you can, and get back on the wagon.  Sooner or later everybody falls off.  The trick is having the fortitude to get back on.

More importantly integrity doesn't depend on never transgressing!  I.e. being a "good person."  Instead integrity depends on learning from your mistakes, apologizing, cleaning up the damage if you can, and living with it if you can't.

In fact, the time you spend defending the "good person" you are is identical to the time you spend out of integrity.  And, perhaps worse for you and more embarrassing to your friends, its identical to the time you spend without dignity.

There's a saying among exterminators: there are two kinds of people in the world, those who know they have rats, and those who think they don't.  Guess who invariably has the bigger collection of rats?

Well, there are two kinds of people in the world when it comes to being "good" too.  Choose which one you'd rather be.

* Considering it's been nearly 100 years since the last big outbreak of anti-Irish political sentiment it's amazing how many anti-Irish sentiments remain in modern American culture -- see "paddy wagon" or Notre Dame's overtly belligerant, dimunitive caricature of a football mascot.  Thus it's kind of pompous to imagine we can as quickly shed stereotypes reinforced both subtly and overtly as recently as last week.

Image of Gilligan's Island's "Wrong Way Feldman" via Neatorama.com

Thanks to commenter Sam for linking to a Washington City Paper interview of Jaclyn Friedman by Amanda Hess from 2010. I thought Friedman summed up one side of the problem of "nice guys," and really summarized my issue with the whole "good men" thing.

AH: So do you meet guys who pass the feminist test but then turn out to be disappointments for other reasons?

JF: Oh God. There is a type of feminist guy who is so eager to fall over himself to be deferential to women and to prove his feminist bona fides and flagellate himself in front of you, to the point that it really turns me off. And it makes me sad, because politically, these are the guys that I should be sleeping with! You know what I'm talking about?

AH: YES.

JF: Everyone knows what I'm talking about. And some of them are even really cute! I want to say to them, "If you could be a person, like a whole, complicated person, who I feel like I could crack jokes around, then I would really like you." But they're so serious about their feminism at every moment that I don’t feel like a person to them. I feel like I'm on a pedestal, almost. I know that they're not going to disagree with anything I say under any circumstances. And I don't feel like I can make a raunchy joke about sex, because they'll be horrified. . . . I hate to be critical of our allies in any way, because we need them, but there's something about that certain kind of hyperfeminist guy that makes them unappealing to date, to me. I suspect it has something to do with our internal conceptions of masculinity, which is terrible on my part.

The turnoff pretty clearly isn't that the men are feminist, it's that they're trying to demonstrate their gender-masculine "worthiness" by performing feminism. Which boils down to them performing worthiness! And since inside standard gender construction men perform worthiness in order to "earn" or "deserve" sex, that's as essentially anti-gender-egalitarian and therefore as anti-feminist as anything else a man can do! No wonder it falls flat!

And here's the thing, which comes out even in Friedman's remarks: men massively over-interpret and over-construct what women mean when they say they want "nice" partners. They tend to think "are interested in other stuff as well as sex." We tend to think it means something like "interested in other stuff besides or instead of sex." With maybe sex sometimes as earned affirmation for "nice," a.k.a. worthy behavior. In other words our interpretation tends to be almost diametric to the intention.

That, incidentally, is why I have almost zero patience for talk about "women say they want..." and (sweet mother of pearl!) "friendzones." We tend to have such (self-indoctrinated) male certainty about what women "mean" it hardly matters what they actually do say.  Which means to the extent there's a problem we're responsible for it.

I need to say a lot more about the whole male worthiness trap. All the ways out that I can see come straight out of feminist tools for analyzing gender. (Just to be clear I don't mean analysis of men by women, instead I mean feminist analysis of men by non-"nice-guy" and non-"good men" feminist men.)

tfl

Image by theimpulsivebuy on Flickr

While he blows it at the end with bland exhortation to become a "good man," Lore Sjöberg at Wired has a very good takedown of the desirability of being described or of describing one's self as a "nice" guy.

If someone — we’ll say a woman, but actually it’s pretty much anyone who doesn’t have a tin ear for language — has a great date with someone new, this is how she describes the person:

“Wow, he’s amazing. He’s really funny, and there’s also this chemistry, you know? Like, he was really LOOKING at me. Plus he works as a caterer so he has a lot of interesting stories. And he was so thoughtful! When he asked the waiter for more ranch dressing, he didn’t let him go until he checked to see if I wanted anything as well. I’m really looking forward to seeing him again.”

If a woman has a boring date with a new guy, this is what she says:

“He seemed nice.”

...

Now, I hear some of you complaining “women always say they want a nice guy.” I know lots of women — I’m even related to a few — and I can’t say I’ve ever heard any of them say that. I can’t prove it, but this sounds like one of those things stand-up comedians say about women and everyone else just repeats. ...

At any rate, if a woman does say “I just wish I could find a nice guy,” I would suggest this is the equivalent of “I’m so hungry I could eat a horse.” Which is to say, she’s not hoping you’ll say, “You’re in luck, I have a dead horse in my backyard!”

Source: Wired.com

I think that sounds about right. In terms of dating criteria, or even friendship criteria, being "nice" is roughly the equivalent of "being able to dress and feed yourself." A good thing overall but sort of a low threshold.

Going a step further, calling yourself a "nice guy," or even a "good man" is a bit of a red flag. For at least two reasons. One possibility is you're underselling yourself horribly. The other more ominous possibility is that really ist's the, well, nicest thing you or anyone else can say about yourself.  (Keep in mind that "nice" is, along with "quiet" and "kept to himself," are three things almost everyone says when they hear a neighbor turns out to be an axe murderer," being "nice" just isn't the selling point we maybe grew up believing it to be.)

As always that doesn't mean we shouldn't be nice, and it definitely doesn't mean that as men we shouldn't be good. The predominantly-male decision that women only go for "bad boys" is almost as pernicious as the decision that they're never interested in ordinary men. Instead it means we need to re-think what exactly we mean when we think about male desirability in the first place.

Photo by Flickr user intvgene. Used under a Creative Commons license.

Proto-ruminations on the "Good Men" problem.  From 10/25/2007 on my old (occasionally nsfw) blog.

This seems like as good a time as any to point out that men should not be into feminism because it's "the right thing to do." Men should not go into feminism "even though there's nothing in it for them." And men really, really shouldn't get into feminism in hopes they might get laid (or finally get laid.)

First of all because each of those reasons is based on totally false premises in the first place. But more importantly because stories about "should" and "ought" are just the 21st Century equivalent of men opening doors for women: more of what we're trying to get away from!

Instead from better health to longer lives to more financial independence to better sex there are plenty of staggeringly obvious reasons why men should be jumping into feminism with both feet. In fact, the supporting evidence is so obvious that one of the biggest reasons all over that just might be...

just might be...

just might be that we think we should, or that we ought to, or that it has to inconvenience us, that it's a zero-sum game, that us guys just have to fondly step aside because it's "Teh Ladies'" turn.

F'shea right. The blinders go on the horse, Galahad, not the rider.

---

Quick note: When I talk about issues related to feminism I really try to talk in terms of the way men relate to it. With regards to this topic, though, the idea that men should support feminism simply because "it's the right thing to do" spans both genders. I'm not going to say that women asking men to do something "because it's the right thing to do" is playing into generations of oppressive conditioning... but I will say that when that argument is made it seems to trigger all the wrong reflexes in men.

In retrospect part of the main post was even more tangled than I usually get.  What I meant to say is that it's a problem if a guy's only involvement in feminism is to "do the right thing."  There are enough other good reasons that a failure to recognize them is itself a symptom suggesting he's up to his neck in his own gender indoctrination.

Image from flickr user Andrea Kirkby.  Used under creative commons license.

John Lennon of The Beatles wrote the song "Girl" no later than Nov. 11, 1965 -- the day it was released on their chart-topping album Rubber Soul.

In 1965 feminism in America, often considered to have been sparked by the publication of Betty Friedan's The Feminine Mystique was at best about two and a half years old.

And yet Lennon felt compelled to write these accusatory lyrics about what he felt was the role of men in that pre-feminist world. (Emphasis mine.)

Was she told when she was young that fame would lead to pleasure.
Did she understand it when they said
That a man must break his back to earn his day of leisure?
Will she still believe it when he's dead?
Ah, girl!

Crucial question: Who's the "they" in "when they said..." whatever it was they said when she was young?

Remember, if she was more than two and a half years old "they" weren't feminists. But whoever it was instead their construction of men couldn't have been more clear.

Now as it happens, John Lennon claimed the in the song song was really a metaphor for the church (emphasis mine)

I was just talking about Christianity in that - a thing like you have to be tortured to attain heaven. [...] - be tortured and then it'll be alright, which seems to be a bit true but not in their concept of it. But I didn't believe in that, that you have to be tortured to attain anything, it just so happens that you were."

That last sentence is pure gold. Somebody wants men to interpret their (but only their) suffering as a sign of worthiness. And indeed it's been pretty convenient to those somebodys to prod men into further sacrifice, further pain, further injury, further self-neglect, and all in hopes of "earning" something that in all likelihood will either be freely given (like acknowledgement, love, sex, etc.) or not worth the cost (a fancier car for working so late you never see your kids awake? Twenty five cents more on the hourly dollar for ten fewer years of life?

What really gets me is how hard it is to see this.  How hard to see the ways we enforce it not just in others but in ourselves.  It's an indoctrination that runs deep.  And we're so deep in it we don't even think it's there.  So deep that we go looking for someone else to blame.

So should you meet, or imagine you're involved with, a "girl" like the metaphorical one in Lennon's song it's a good idea to ask yourself: who told her?  

Whoever it was probably told us first.

It starts with a "P..."

I expected some people to be nettled by my riffing on the Good Men Project in my title for this blog so that wouldn't surprise me.  Nobody's complained to me about that.  (Which is good because I really don't mean any disrespect.)

Instead I've gotten a couple of good critiques, including this one by a commenter named Dimitria over at my other blog: it brings in cultural overtones of men being basically incorrigable (with further overtones going at least as far back as Augustine that women are needed to "temper" us.)

Wow. The name "bad men project" just makes me think of the old idea that men are incapable of goodness, which is hardly new or subversive. Men thinking of themselves as bad people may prevent some misbehavior on their part, but it also leaves them open to all sorts of manipulation and boundary violations. Based on your previous posts I'm pretty sure you're not advocating that men accept those violations and "take one for the team."

I understand that the name is mostly a joke about / jab at the good men project. It's very possible that, because of my own history, I'm overly sensitive to joking suggestions that men are no good or not fully human.

That's actually a great point and I thanked him for being the first to raise it.  But there's a method to my madness.

As I mentioned above it is a reply to the Good Men Project but not a rebuke. It IS a rebuke of the patriarchal notion that men are good or bad depending on earned external worthiness. That reflex flinch you might be feeling when you read the title? That's a clue there's some heavy gender indoctrination we need to figure out how to unwrap. 

Another clue might come  from asking ourselves "good or bad compared to what?"

That's what I hope to dig into in this blog.

(My intuition tells me one step on the way out of the subjective "good" vs. "bad" approval-based construction is to ask instead the more concrete question "am I making a difference that matters?"  But don't quote me: at the moment that's just a first hypothesis.)