Sunday, July 16, 2006
Manblog Part III: Commodity Feminism
(Get it? Get it? Oh, all right.)
Last Manblog, I said masculinity turns men into isolated individuals with poor social skills. Yet I'm relying on the notion of individual feelings: if men could feel more, they could cope better. Some argue that's also individualism: that capitalism itself created the concept of individuals and their feelings.
"Marge, why are you crying? You're not in any physical pain, the only kind of pain a man can understand."
I really dislike the self-help industry, which makes everything an individual problem, rather than a social one. It's incredibly bourgeois - only the rich have the means to create individual solutions to their mental problems. They can spend hours unlocking their feelings; they can afford high-priced therapists; they don't have to work at demeaning jobs. It shows how recent our concept of individuals is: many pre-capitalist societies have no concept of authorship.
This, however, only confirms the Marxist analysis: our personalities are not self-contained. They're shaped by the material mode of life we exist in. Capitalism is contradictory: it creates the basis for Marx's concept of the free-thinking, self-actualized individual. It helps us imagine a higher stage of individualism: one that achieves its identity through a collective act of social creation i.e. communism.
Whether capitalism created the individual is besides the point; right now, the only individualism allowed is bourgeois freedom, rife with contradictions. One of those contradictions is masculinity. I'm not arguing for a return to a feudal collectivity. There's no putting the genie back in the bottle. The capitalist division of labour, and private property, has created an individualized worker, and with it a concept of people with their own, particular needs and feelings. Denying those needs denies social reality itself. The point is to connect them - and this is where feminism is a key tool for men.
Chris Ware - a key tool for understanding masculinity
We are all feminists
Feminism is often taken as 'man-bashing', which is ironic given its potential to help men. As with Marxism, sometimes it's easier to define feminism by stating which kind I mean. Feminism allows men to understand themselves and build new relationships. But for this, liberal feminism - equal rights, 'women in the boardroom', etc. - is useless. It starts by separating men and women, and then promotes equality between those separations. Empowering women within capitalism is a first step, but it's also fundamentally flawed: it still leaves women oppressed.
Feminism, in its radical and socialist forms, however, is a way to understand the specific effects that social oppression has on individual consciousness.
It's interesting that, during the rise of feminism, men were encouraged to think critically about masculinity. 'Free love' bohemia was extremely popular in the early 20th century socialist and communist movements. Women were no longer property, but humans; and this led to a redefinition of men as humans too, not as flesh-property owners.
In the 1970s, feminist consciousness-raising sparked a men's movement which tried to understand masculinity as a product of capitalism and patriarchy. That movement led to interesting scholarship on the nature of the family and male bread-winners; it was also an attempt to redress some of the sexism rampant in the New Left. When the New Right backlash against feminism arose, the 'sensitive man' was ridiculed as, well, unmanly.
The men's movement has disappeared, to be replaced by a through-the-looking-glass variant that celebrates masculinity. And then there's the sexist, reactionary Christian doublespeak of the Promise-Keepers. Today, any movement helping men to be more masculine - even in a thoughtful way - simply reinforces their patriarchal power.
It's no coincidence that the men's movement declined with the feminist movement. Feminism is the healthiest of any radical movement around today - certainly far more grounded and effective than Marxism. But it's also been coopted by liberals - and, frighteningly, conservatives - with its radical voices marginalized to campuses and non-profits.
With that decline, men who wish to engage critically with masculinity have few choices. There are still a few who pursue the 'guilty white liberal' track, suppressing their own thoughts and opinions because women have been historically oppressed. For GWLs, feminism is still something 'for women', to be respected and possibly feared, but not a tool for their own liberation. Well-meaning initiatives like the White Ribbon Campaign come from this: I have nothing against men wearing white ribbons, but it's limited to seeing individual men as the problem, with a moral choice to treat women as equals as the solution.
Unfortunately, however pleasant an idea that is, capitalism is a violently totalizing system that works beyond the level of any one individual consciousness. There's a desperate need to understand how the material processes of capital accumulation - and the brutal dispossession that accompanies it - affect men's consciousness. Men's liberation, like women's, is not possible without a revolution against capitalism itself.
"Bolshevism! Sheer bolshevism! Ripe for the quashing!"
Next Manblog: "Prone!"
Last Manblog, I said masculinity turns men into isolated individuals with poor social skills. Yet I'm relying on the notion of individual feelings: if men could feel more, they could cope better. Some argue that's also individualism: that capitalism itself created the concept of individuals and their feelings.
"Marge, why are you crying? You're not in any physical pain, the only kind of pain a man can understand."
I really dislike the self-help industry, which makes everything an individual problem, rather than a social one. It's incredibly bourgeois - only the rich have the means to create individual solutions to their mental problems. They can spend hours unlocking their feelings; they can afford high-priced therapists; they don't have to work at demeaning jobs. It shows how recent our concept of individuals is: many pre-capitalist societies have no concept of authorship.
This, however, only confirms the Marxist analysis: our personalities are not self-contained. They're shaped by the material mode of life we exist in. Capitalism is contradictory: it creates the basis for Marx's concept of the free-thinking, self-actualized individual. It helps us imagine a higher stage of individualism: one that achieves its identity through a collective act of social creation i.e. communism.
Whether capitalism created the individual is besides the point; right now, the only individualism allowed is bourgeois freedom, rife with contradictions. One of those contradictions is masculinity. I'm not arguing for a return to a feudal collectivity. There's no putting the genie back in the bottle. The capitalist division of labour, and private property, has created an individualized worker, and with it a concept of people with their own, particular needs and feelings. Denying those needs denies social reality itself. The point is to connect them - and this is where feminism is a key tool for men.
Chris Ware - a key tool for understanding masculinity
We are all feminists
Feminism is often taken as 'man-bashing', which is ironic given its potential to help men. As with Marxism, sometimes it's easier to define feminism by stating which kind I mean. Feminism allows men to understand themselves and build new relationships. But for this, liberal feminism - equal rights, 'women in the boardroom', etc. - is useless. It starts by separating men and women, and then promotes equality between those separations. Empowering women within capitalism is a first step, but it's also fundamentally flawed: it still leaves women oppressed.
Feminism, in its radical and socialist forms, however, is a way to understand the specific effects that social oppression has on individual consciousness.
It's interesting that, during the rise of feminism, men were encouraged to think critically about masculinity. 'Free love' bohemia was extremely popular in the early 20th century socialist and communist movements. Women were no longer property, but humans; and this led to a redefinition of men as humans too, not as flesh-property owners.
In the 1970s, feminist consciousness-raising sparked a men's movement which tried to understand masculinity as a product of capitalism and patriarchy. That movement led to interesting scholarship on the nature of the family and male bread-winners; it was also an attempt to redress some of the sexism rampant in the New Left. When the New Right backlash against feminism arose, the 'sensitive man' was ridiculed as, well, unmanly.
The men's movement has disappeared, to be replaced by a through-the-looking-glass variant that celebrates masculinity. And then there's the sexist, reactionary Christian doublespeak of the Promise-Keepers. Today, any movement helping men to be more masculine - even in a thoughtful way - simply reinforces their patriarchal power.
It's no coincidence that the men's movement declined with the feminist movement. Feminism is the healthiest of any radical movement around today - certainly far more grounded and effective than Marxism. But it's also been coopted by liberals - and, frighteningly, conservatives - with its radical voices marginalized to campuses and non-profits.
With that decline, men who wish to engage critically with masculinity have few choices. There are still a few who pursue the 'guilty white liberal' track, suppressing their own thoughts and opinions because women have been historically oppressed. For GWLs, feminism is still something 'for women', to be respected and possibly feared, but not a tool for their own liberation. Well-meaning initiatives like the White Ribbon Campaign come from this: I have nothing against men wearing white ribbons, but it's limited to seeing individual men as the problem, with a moral choice to treat women as equals as the solution.
Unfortunately, however pleasant an idea that is, capitalism is a violently totalizing system that works beyond the level of any one individual consciousness. There's a desperate need to understand how the material processes of capital accumulation - and the brutal dispossession that accompanies it - affect men's consciousness. Men's liberation, like women's, is not possible without a revolution against capitalism itself.
"Bolshevism! Sheer bolshevism! Ripe for the quashing!"
Next Manblog: "Prone!"
