Did you see Miri's post over at BruteReason?  The upshot is misandry's thing, it's just not a feminist thing.

I've been saying for years that nobody hates men like anti-feminists do. (Seriously, the reason women have to be kept down is because men couldn't compete on a level playing field? Seriously? Wow, thanks, Phyllis, Newt, and Pat!)

Miri's found a preliminary study that backs up my intuition.  Go check it out.

Anyway, guys want to complain about misandry need to take it up with the actual misandrists.  Most of whom aren't even remotely feminist.

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 by Flickr user pikerslanefarm.

In just a few short lines from a song, and a few more from her heart GeekyVamp reveals the complete, bleak, and total lie that is "women have all the power."

kaigenlucinda:

I’m in the corner watching you kiss her, oh.
I’m right over here, why can’t you see me? Oh.
I’m giving it my all but I’m not the girl you’re taking home.
[I keep dancing on my own]

I hear this and I am suddenly a gawky girl again on the dance floor, dancing my little hormonal heart out, desperately trying to attract a boy’s attention, and trying to hold my head up high and swallow the boulder in my chest, as I see him leave with some gazelle-like creature.

Source: Interpretive Pants

I'm not sure who started the lie but it's mostly us men who completely, 100% don't realize the only "power" women have in standard hetero dating is the "power" to answer if asked! No ask, no power. None. Period. At all. In other words no matter how gawky a boy you were, or a man you are, 100% of the "power" you might complain women have over you is power you give in the first place.

This realization, which only sank in for me back in 2007 (I first started trying to date in 1973!) was the moment I realized all the attempted "men's rights" alternatives to women's rights movements I'd been trying to get my heart into (since 1974!) weren't ever going to work because they located power where it wasn't and then complained about it. Just a little later I decided to not only drop all the variations on men's rights, men's studies, men's advocacy, etc., and even drop all the variants on "feminist allies," supporters, sympathizers, etc., and it's later variants -- especially "good men" -- and just call myself a feminist. Because that was the point when I realized men and women are both indoctrinated to the same set of artificial constructs that nominally advantage men and certainly disproportionately disadvantage women, but really continue to persist in order to control all of us.

I happen to believe, as do many others, that feminism doesn't have all the answers. But there's a giant flipping difference between "not all the answers" and "wrong." Which is why I see the work for men like me -- and I'm obviously proposing for men like you too -- as extending feminism by analyzing and challenging the consequences and not just the nominal advantages of Patriarchy for men.

And it can start with something as simple as listening to little snippets of song lyrics.

I’m in the corner watching you kiss her, oh.
I’m right over here, why can’t you see me? Oh.
I’m giving it my all but I’m not the girl you’re taking home.
[I keep dancing on my own]

Oh!

Graph of Fisher English Corpus Part 1 results from Language Log

Language Log author, joint professor of linguistics and computer and informational sciences, and gender stereotype curmudgeon Mark Liberman crops up another example of the persistence of gender stereotypes...

Catherine Griffin, "Why Women Talk More Than Men: Language Protein Uncovered", Science World Report 2/20/2013.

You know all the times that men complain about women talking too much? Apparently there's a biological explanation for the reason why women are chattier than men. Scientists have discovered that women possess higher levels of a "language protein" in their brains, which could explain why females are so talkative.

Previous research has shown that women talk almost three times as much as men. In fact, an average woman notches up 20,000 words in a day, which is about 13,000 more than the average man. In addition, women generally speak more quickly and devote more brainpower to speaking. Yet before now, researchers haven't been able to biologically explain why this is the case.

Source: Language Log

In the face of quite a lot of computational linguistic research to the contrary

The stimulus for these little nuggets of nonsense was J. Michael Bowers, Miguel Perez-Pouchoulen, N. Shalon Edwards,3 and Margaret M. McCarthy, "Foxp2 Mediates Sex Differences in Ultrasonic Vocalization by Rat Pups and Directs Order of Maternal Retrieval",  The Journal of Neuroscience, February 20, 2013. More on Bowers et al. later — this morning, I'll just take up the "previous research has shown that women talk almost three times as much as men" business.

Summarizing:

1. There has never been any "study" showing that "women talk almost three times as much as men", although the "research" in question has been cited by dozens of science writers, relationship counselors, celebrity preachers, and other people in the habit of claiming non-existent authoritative support for their personal impressions;
2. Real-world studies of gender differences in language use indicate that men and women are about equally talkative. One large, relatively recent study (M.R. Mehlet al., "Are Women Really More Talkative Than Men?", Science, 317(5834) p. 82 July 5, 2007) found essentially equal counts of about 16,000 words per day in six samples of university students in the U.S. and Mexico.

Notice also the further evidence that Patriarchy is a co-ed enterprise: Catherine Griffin, Andrea Canning on the Today Show, Brittany Silverstein of Central Coast News, are pfaffing as rapturously about God using genes to make women talk "up to 13,000 more words a day than men" as the more reliable patriarchal toolbags such as Glenn Beck economist John (guns are better than penises) Lott.

Just a little editorial note here from a guy who studied the history and philosophy of science in college: The lead researcher who's lab has found increased levels of a protein encoded by a gene called FOXP2 in little girls is claiming, for television cameras, that this "explains" why women talk more than men. Except, of course, people like Mark Liberman who research and measure how much men and women actually speak say, have said, and (based on computational surveys of databases of thousands of recorded conversations. And except, of course, that the one single researcher who made the original claim based, evidently, on zero actual research, retracted her claim the day after it hit the newspapers. (Turns out she may have gotten it from... a flipping puff piece in Cosmopolitan, which in turn got it from idle speculation from a... televangelist!!!)  And except, of course, that the FOXP2 guy who's in the news today has been told and thus knows for a fact that women actually don'ttalk three times as much as men do.

Well so what? I mean except that it's a 100% falsehood that persists because for those who are completely invested in gender stereotyping the information is "fabricated but true." So again, so what?

Well. The guy really has detected elevated levels of that protein in little girls. And there really might be a reason for it. (Remember, I'll never say there are no differences between the sexes -- see, oh, say, penises and vulvas!) But if the guy's going to just go grab the first stereotype that crosses his mind, as he does here, and says "that explains it," and if the "explanation" is actually, um, a complete lie, then... whatever the real reason might be for those differing protein levels will go unexplored, unreported, and un-further-researched. Which is really a shame. Because the real reason, which we might never know because the fake one is so satisfying to gender bigots, might actually be interesting, useful, and even productive.

Point being here that gender stereotypes aren't just abstractly counterproductive. They get in the way of real science, real work, and real... um... reality!

Going even further, this kind of gleeful disregard for truth in favor of acknowledged bullshit raises the question what other human progress is our fondness for stereotypes interfering with? What other bullshit about, oh, say, men is propagated by assumptions that we already "know" so well we don't bother to find out? What other bullshit about women? Of children? Of trans people? And so on?

The only good news? Other people have been studying the FOXP2 gene for years. You'll just never hear about them on the Today Show or from Glenn Beck, though, because their findings don't luridly reinforce bullshit stereotypes about how men are "less fortunate" in their language skills or how women are "compulsive chatty cathys.") $%!@#!*&!!!!

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

Photo by figleaf

So here's a great idea from  Sarah Beaulieu of the Enliven Project that's bound to set off your "how to survive the patriarchy" alarms

Everyone is cut out to be cute. Men, women, gay, straight, young, old – doesn’t matter. For some, it might take a little practice, but it’s totally possible for all of us. And it’s much longer lasting, more versatile, and more universal than being hot. When I’m 80 years old, I’m definitely not going to be hot. I’ll have wrinkles and gray hair and skin that hangs in strange places. But I surely plan to be as cute as humanly possible.

Cute also gets things done. People don’t want to help mean, serious, grown-ups. Being hot and sexy doesn’t always get you the help you actually want. But pulling the cute card works universally. If you step on someone’s toes – literally or figuratively – be cute. If you are trying to convince the airline to get you on the next flight, be cute.

Source: The Enliven Project

Strategies she outlines include: play like a kid, be in your body, embrace your quirks, charm and disarm.

I think this is a brilliant insight and great advice.  Especially since by "cute" she's not saying "cutsie" or infantile.  Anyway, yes, by 80 we're not going to be credible trying to pull off hot, or buff, or butch, or macho, but cute as Sarah defines it doesn't depend on age, an able body, conventional looks, education opportunities, or anything else.  Except a willingness to connect. So why wait?

I'll just go one step further and say that if you cultivate the qualities she's collected under the cute umbrella then if you want to play "hot" or "no nonsense" you still can... but you'll be able to play it, for fun, because your perceived need for "survival" won't depend on it. And therefore you'll never live in fear of "losing at" the game you're playing.

Gathering statistics on human violence in America (as with violence around the world) is a perilous enterprise for a number of obvious and non-obvious reasons. Two being:

1. Aside from categories that tend to result in medical treatment or death, it's not always clear to either victims or perpetrators what constitutes "violence." (To the extent that some perpetrators will confess to behavior their victims will decline to recognize or acknowledge violent!)
2. Under-reporting of violence of all kinds, by perpetrators of all kinds, as recorded by law-enforcement and social scientists, is a giant, frustrating black hole of insufficient information. Oh, and a giant informational Rorschach Test on which people can project all their own personal agendas, biases, blind spots, and legitimate but difficult-to-support-because-the-data's-crap issues.

Today, with the House Republican engineered expiration of the not-entirely-well-named Violence Against Women Act, refining that evidence has just become a lot more difficult.

I say not entirely well-named because despite it having been written and passed (by mostly male legislators) with baked-in assumptions that only hetero women are victims of violence and that only hetero men are perpetrators in recent years it was becoming more inclusive.

But that was then. Until Jan 1, 2013, this was now: studies included information gathered about most intimate partner violence, about most intimate partner coercion, about most intimate partner sexual assault. About most intimate partner stalking. Not just women victims. Not just perpetrating men. Not just white people. Not enough, nearly, about trans people... but again until Jan. 1, it was starting to look like they were starting to get interested in that group as well.

Now! How do I know this? Well, I know it in part from a much-trumpeted but evidently poorly read executive summary of the CDC's The National Intimate Partner and Sexual Violence Survey: 2010 Summary Report (pdf). Which, among other things, provided hard evidence that based on available information, see statistics-gathering problem #1, above the reservoir of probable victims of intimate partner violence is at least half again as large as prior studies assuming only female victims would lead us to believe. That there's a reservoir of at least 10% more perpetrators of sexual assault as prior studies assuming only male perpetrators would lead us to believe.

And in absolute terms those reservoirs of present and future violence, coercion, stalking, and assault problematic in terms of perpetuating further perpetration and victimization.

And in absolute terms those reservoirs are also a source of a critical and often more, well, violent violence: reciprocal violence. (John Bobbet was only the most lurid example of reciprocal violence -- there are plenty of instances where men or women badly injure or even kill partners who previously had physically, sexually, or psychologically assaulted. These instances are so routine they're rarely picked up at all by news outlets.)

But worse, in relative terms the failure to recognize those reservoirs actually keeps them even larger by making it difficult for an unknown but probably far larger number of victims and perpetrators to even recognize themselves, let alone to report themselves to law enforcement, let alone researchers. And thus the real number of victims and perpetrators will remain unreported. And large. And therefore perpetuated. And therefore more people are going to be coerced, stalked, assaulted, and all-round hurt.

Anyway, thanks to a bunch of snit-picking, feather-bedding, incompetence, and pure gender-bound vindictiveness House Republicans have made sure it'll be a heck of a lot harder to gather, compile, or disseminate the information that had heretofore begun to be made public, and made part of policy.

Anyway, here's an excerpt from that stereotype-challenging, gender-determinist-subverting, more-inclusive NISVS 2010 Report. Read it and, literally, weep. There might not be updates for a while.

Key Findings Sexual Violence by Any Perpetrator

• Nearly 1 in 5 women (18.3%) and 1 in 71 men (1.4%) in the United States have been raped at some time in their lives, including completed forced penetration, attempted forced penetration, or alcohol/drug facilitated completed penetration.
• More than half (51.1%) of female victims of rape reported being raped by an intimate partner and 40.8% by an acquaintance; for male victims, more than half (52.4%) reported being raped by an acquaintance and 15.1% by a stranger.
• Approximately 1 in 21 men (4.8%) reported that they were made to penetrate someone else during their lifetime; most men who were made to penetrate someone else reported that the perpetrator was either an intimate partner (44.8%) or an acquaintance (44.7%).
• An estimated 13% of women and 6% of men have experienced sexual coercion in their lifetime (i.e., unwanted sexual penetration after being pressured in a nonphysical way); and 27.2% of women and 11.7% of men have experienced unwanted sexual contact.
• Most female victims of completed rape (79.6%) experienced their first rape before the age of 25; 42.2% experienced their first completed rape before the age of 18 years.
• More than one-quarter of male victims of completed rape (27.8%) experienced their first rape when they were

Stalking Victimization by Any Perpetrator

• One in 6 women (16.2%) and 1 in 19 men (5.2%) in the United States have experienced stalking victimization at some point during their lifetime in which they felt very fearful or believed that they or someone close to them would be harmed or killed.
• Two-thirds (66.2%) of female victims of stalking were stalked by a current or former intimate partner; men were primarily stalked by an intimate partner or an acquaintance, 41.4% and 40.0%, respectively.
• Repeatedly receiving unwanted telephone calls, voice, or text messages was the most commonly experienced stalking tactic for both female and male victims of stalking (78.8% for women and 75.9% for men).
• More than half of female victims and more than one-third of male victims of stalking indicated that they were stalked before the age of 25; about 1 in 5 female victims and 1 in 14 male victims experienced stalking between the ages of 11 and 17.

Violence by an Intimate Partner

• More than 1 in 3 women (35.6%) and more than 1 in 4 men (28.5%) in the United States have experienced rape, physical violence, and/or stalking by an intimate partner in their lifetime.
• Among victims of intimate partner violence, more than 1 in 3 women experienced multiple forms of rape, stalking, or physical violence; 92.1% of male victims experienced physical violence alone, and 6.3% experienced physical violence and stalking.
• Nearly 1 in 10 women in the United States (9.4%) has been raped by an intimate partner in her lifetime, and an estimated 16.9% of women and 8.0% of men have experienced sexual violence other than rape by an intimate partner at some point in their lifetime.
• About 1 in 4 women (24.3%) and 1 in 7 men (13.8%) have experienced severe physical violence by an intimate partner (e.g., hit with a fist or something hard, beaten, slammed against something) at some point in their lifetime.
• An estimated 10.7% of women and 2.1% of men have been stalked by an intimate partner during their lifetime.
• Nearly half of all women and men in the United States have experienced psychological aggression by an intimate partner in their lifetime (48.4% and 48.8%, respectively).
• Most female and male victims of rape, physical violence, and/or stalking by an intimate partner (69% of female victims; 53% of male victims) experienced some form of intimate partner violence for the first time before 25 years of age.

Impact of Violence by an Intimate Partner

Nearly 3 in 10 women and 1 in 10 men in the United States have experienced rape, physical violence, and/or stalking by an intimate partner and reported at least one impact related to experiencing these or other forms of violent behavior in the relationship (e.g., being fearful, concerned for safety, post traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) symptoms, need for health care, injury, contacting a crisis hotline, need for housing services, need for victim’s advocate services, need for legal services, missed at least one day of work or school).

Violence Experienced by Race/ Ethnicity

• Approximately 1 in 5 Black (22.0%) and White (18.8%) non-Hispanic women, and 1 in 7 Hispanic women (14.6%) in the United States have experienced rape at some point in their lives. More than one-quarter of women (26.9%) who identified as American Indian or as Alaska Native and 1 in 3 women (33.5%) who identified as multiracial non-Hispanic reported rape victimization in their lifetime.
• One out of 59 White non-Hispanic men (1.7%) has experienced rape at some point in his life. Nearly one-third of multiracial non-Hispanic men (31.6%) and over one-quarter of Hispanic men (26.2%) reported sexual violence other than rape in their lifetimes.
• Approximately 1 in 3 multiracial non-Hispanic women (30.6%) and 1 in 4 American Indian or Alaska Native women (22.7%) reported being stalked during their lifetimes. One in 5 Black non-Hispanic women (19.6%), 1 in 6 White non-Hispanic women (16.0%), and 1 in 7 Hispanic women (15.2%) experienced stalking in their lifetimes.
• Approximately 1 in 17 Black non-Hispanic men (6.0%), and 1 in 20 White non-Hispanic men (5.1%) and Hispanic men (5.1%) in the United States experienced stalking in their lifetime.
• Approximately 4 out of every 10 women of non-Hispanic Black or American Indian or Alaska Native race/ethnicity (43.7% and 46.0%, respectively), and 1 in 2 multiracial non-Hispanic women (53.8%) have experienced rape, physical violence, and/or stalking by an intimate partner in their lifetime.
• Nearly half (45.3%) of American Indian or Alaska Native men and almost 4 out of every 10 Black and multiracial men (38.6% and 39.3%, respectively) experienced rape, physical violence and/or stalking by an intimate partner during their lifetime.

Number and Sex of Perpetrators

• Across all types of violence, the majority of both female and male victims reported experiencing violence from one perpetrator.
• Across all types of violence, the majority of female victims reported that their perpetrators were male.
• Male rape victims and male victims of non-contact unwanted sexual experiences reported predominantly male perpetrators. Nearly half of stalking victimizations against males were also perpetrated by males. Perpetrators of other forms of violence against males were mostly female.

Bummer.