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May 16, 2006
From the Perspective of a Man
Last Thursday I met a friend for coffee at Barnes and Noble. (Yes, yes, it's so corporate of us, but I also make a point of frequenting the one independent coffee shop in town too, and my friend prefers B&N.) I was waiting for my grande decaf mocha in a mug (not a paper cup), when I noticed that Student C, a talented but uh, challenging student of mine, was sitting by the window, watching me. It was a shock to see him: this particular student absorbed so much of my energy during the year, but when I encountered him off campus, I realized that I hadn't had a single stray thought about him since I'd turned in my grades--god, it felt good to realize that.
"Hey, Dr. Holly," he said. "How you doing?"
"I'm OK," I said. "You?"
"Good," he said. "I'm writing!" And he gestured at the notebook before him on the table.
Then my beverage was ready so I chatted with my friend for an hour or two, and then I browsed books for a while, and then I went back to the café to get some water, and Student C was still there, writing, and he asked me a question about a course I'm teaching next semester, so I sat down to answer it. And we started talking about writing.
He asked if I'd written any poetry recently. "Nuh-uh," I said. "No inspiration." I paused. "You get any good assignments in your other classes? Any good ideas you want to pass on?"
"You should write from the perspective of a man," he said. He raised his eyebrows. He'd been in a couple of classes where we discussed gender; his ideas on the topic, although not the most misogynist I'd encountered, were still not what I'd call enlightened. And I'd been told that when I wasn't around, he often referred to women as "bitches," even women he liked.
"Nah, that doesn't really interest me," I said.
"I knew it!" he said. He shook his head. "I write from the perspective of women all the time, but you can't even imagine what things are like from the perspective of a man?"
"First of all, I've written from a male perspective before, but I don't think it's my best work. Secondly, I don't have to imagine a male perspective," I said. "I see it all the time. I experience it. The world happens from the perspective of a man. And while I may not want to write from that point of view, I'm certainly willing to read stuff written by men. Women are more willing to read works by and about men, while most guys don't want to read stuff by and about women." And I cited a newspaper article stating just that that I'd emailed everyone during the semester.
"My favorite books are by women," he said.
"In that area, you're an exception," I said. "I've known that since we read At the Bottom of the River by Jamaica Kincaid a year ago. You were the only guy in the class--almost the only person--who really liked that book. You liked it more than I did."
"I loved it," he said. "It's one of the best things I've read in my life." And the conversation went on from there.
At one point he mentioned someone he didn't like. I asked Student C if he had heard about a recent endeavor this disliked person has undertaken. Student C had not, and he became indignant and offended upon learning of it. "That cocksucker!" he exploded. "That pussy!"
"Hear what you just did?" I asked. "You just asserted your support for patriarchy."
"What're you talking about?" he asked.
"You called this guy a cocksucker, when you know he's not gay. You called him a pussy, when you know he's not female. Why use homosexuality and female genitalia to insult this guy?"
"It's just automatic," he said. "It's just what you say about someone you really don't like."
"This is what I meant," I said, "about how the world happens from the point of view of a man--a straight white man, I would add."
"No, no!" he said. "You're making too much of this. The words themselves don't even matter. It's the idea behind them."
"This from a poet?" I responded. "You're always telling me how much you love language. And now you tell me the words don't even matter?"
"But there's an idea..." he began.
"Exactly," I said. "And the idea is that invoking gayness and femaleness are the most effective ways to insult a man. I mean, why not call him a dick?"
He frowned and looked out the window. "Dick," he said thoughtfully. "Dick." He turned back to me. "It's just not the same."
"Exactly!" I said. "Merely being a penis is a mild insult. But being a cunt, that's really bad." I shook my head. "You're pretty race conscious, and you get annoyed when you encounter racial stereotypes in the texts we read or the discussions we have about them. You would never dream of insulting this guy by hurling a racial epithet that invokes brownness or blackness, but you say it's automatic and insignificant when you invoke these other kinds of difference. Why is that OK?"
"OK, OK," he said. "You're right. It's a bad thing. But it's just how the world works. It's just what people understand."
"It's just what straight men understand," I said. "I understand it because, as I said, the world happens from the point of view of a straight white man, not because it makes any real sense or to me, or because I think it's OK. What I don't understand is why you can defend this."
And it was clear to me that Student C really did get what was wrong with what he'd said. But it was also clear that he didn't want to change the way he talked about women he liked and men he didn't like--not because he felt he was morally justified in what he did, but because he didn't want the bother of monitoring his speech or thoughts, or altering his habits.
And that's pretty discouraging, when even guys who understand the problem are too lazy to do much to correct it.
What do we do about this? I think I did an OK job of explaining the problem to the guy. How do I convince him it's important enough that he should change his behavior?
One of my colleagues taught a couple of sections of introduction to creative writing this past semester; he said he was horrified by the number of stories by young men that expressed overt misogyny: he regularly encountered female characters who were called bitches and hos, or plots that revolved around humiliating female characters--and of course there was plenty of attention to describing women's bodies. "I couldn't believe how much rage against women these stories revealed," he told me. "And there was nothing at all like it in the stories by the women. These young women should be angry, should be enraged, but they're not. And even when they write about sex and relationships, they just don't objectify men in the way they themselves are objectified."
He said that he talk outside of class to the authors of particularly misogynist stories and ask if they realized how insultingly they talked about women, if they intended to portray women as objects of contempt who deserve to be hurt and humiliated. "They all claimed to be shocked and embarrassed," he said. "They all told me they really like women, that they have friends or sisters or lovers who are women and that the stories were just something they wrote without really thinking about it, not anything that reveals what they really think about women."
What do we do about matter-of-fact and ostensibly unconscious misogyny in our students' writing and speech?
Read follow-ups to this post here and here.
Posted by Holly at May 16, 2006 11:56 AM
Comments
How do I convince him it's important enough that he should change his behavior?
If you find a reliable answer to that question, you'll be famous for millennia.
It's the question of what we used to call radicalization. The words are necessary, and you got through to him as much as was possible, it sounds like. He'll remember what you said. And then, with luck, an event will take place — almost always an event, rather than words — that make him GET what you said, viscerally. Maybe he'll have a daughter and realize that all those things he dismisses now will hurt her. Maybe it'll be seeing someone vicitmized. Maybe he'll come out. Who knows? Something to crack his defenses and let the light in.
Sure, you didn't crack those defenses. But you did turn on the light.
Posted by: Chris Clarke at May 16, 2006 12:17 PM
The approach I've always taken, and which I've seen start to work in the very long-term, is to just keep talking about it. My boyfriend, after repeated conversations like the one you describe, has come around to the point where -he's- the one who reads a news article, or watches a movie, or has a converstion with The Guys, and then wants to discuss his outrage at the patriarchy and its workings.
Of course, he's had near-constant exposure to my steady feminist rhetoric for three years now, which just isn't an option in the re-education of every unwitting misogynist. But I have to believe that if I could have a solid impact on the way he chooses to critically examine the world around him and his own responses to same, I can do that for other people, too, given enough time, and enough confrontation, explanation, and repetition.
Posted by: Revena at May 16, 2006 2:17 PM
Hey Chris and Revena--thanks for your ideas. It's not like I think we're going to solve this problem here in the comments on my blog, but I need to think about it more creatively. And I need hope that conversations like the one I describe really do make a difference, even if the difference occurs over a period of years, as you suggest, Revena.
Posted by: Holly at May 16, 2006 8:42 PM
Holly: Perhaps the most important point you make is that we women also view things from the male perspective. I am prone to call women bitches sometimes, for instance. Or battleaxes. This is probably my way of saying, "I'm not a bitch or a battleaxe." I have decided to reform and stop doing this.
As the man says, it's kinda fun to nail people this way. Which doesn't make it right.
I've been called a bitch several times by men bravely posting at a safe distance from me. I'm afraid I think it's funny, because they are such obvious losers. No one has ever dared to call me a bitch to my face.
Posted by: Hattie at May 17, 2006 4:37 PM
I was linked to your post by a friend of mine on another blog, and while I'm not a very articulate person, I did want to mention how much I really appreciated reading this. I'm a young woman (if you would call someone a woman at 17, since some people wouldn't), and I'm only just starting to think about the sort of things I'll have to deal with simply being a female in the world today. I've become increasingly curious on what other people say or believe on the topic of feminism, especially in these terms, where it affects everyone on such an unconcious level.
I haven't really ever been victimized on a grand scale by anyone for being female, but I know for a fact that I'm going to have to deal with it sometime. I've rather been desensitized to the objectifying of women in media and society today, and it's only really just starting to click with me about how rampant it is. This article certainly helped to open my eyes.
Thank you so much for writing this! I've read a few more of your posts and I thoroughly enjoyed reading every one. I'll definitely be checking back!
Posted by: Rheall at May 17, 2006 8:20 PM
Hey Rheall--thanks for stopping by. I'm really glad you found the post interesting. And I also admire you for figuring a lot of this stuff out pretty early, and preparing yourself to deal with some of the stuff out there BEFORE it happens to you.
Hattie, you are absolutely right: we all need to be more careful about what we say--and if we want to insult someone, we should insult THAT PERSON, not some other group the world considers objectionable.
The word I need to stop using is "sucks," as in, "so-and-so or such-and-such sucks." After all, it's a homophobic statement. I was thinking today about how much one of my senators sucks, and then I said, "You have to stop saying that; you have to find a better way to convey your contempt for that man." And then I thought, "But sucks us such an effective word! It's succinct and sharp. And its homophobic content has been weakened by its widespread usage and...."
And then I said, "Holly, shut up! How dare you invoke the same kind of heteronormative justifications you argued against when your student brought them up! Just find another way of saying that!"
Here's what I came up with: "My senator is a flatulent, sclerotic dung-sack who oozes pus every time he opens his mouth." It's effective, I think, but not as concise as I would like.
So I am on the lookout for a succint way of saying that something is egregiously and intentionally vile.
If you've got any ideas, let me know.
Posted by: Holly at May 17, 2006 9:42 PM
How about "Rick Santorum stinks?" I know it's not as strong, concise, descriptive, or prejorative as "sucks" but as you have made salient points about the power of language, it's about the best I can offer. As for "sucks" being homophobic, I don't see that word that way, since there are plenty of heterosexuals who enjoy getting and giving (?) a blow job. Last I checked, there was sucking involved in that... (Gag. Plech, plech. Pa-tooey.)
Posted by: Janet Kincaid at May 17, 2006 10:26 PM
I like terms such as "asshat" and "godbag." Twisty uses them a lot.
Posted by: Hattie at May 17, 2006 11:55 PM
Yo Hol - I'm sure that student took to heart everything that you said and, you know what, he's going to start passing those ideas off as his own pretty soon, lol.
Posted by: Reese at May 18, 2006 2:11 AM
On harming with words, I really agree with Holly that it's important to insult the deserving target and not some class of innocent bystanders. I wonder, though, if some words can't be rescued from their status as insults. Some time back, Holly posted this defence of the "C" word. I've had to become sensitive to the way words have different weights here in England: to call someone a "cunt" here is pretty grave, but a "bitch" really is a female dog. Hattie, maybe "bitch" and "battleaxe" could be reclaimed and embraced. A friend once told me she wants to be reincarnated as a dog because among dogs, "the oldest bitch gets to be in charge." And battleaxe, well, fight on!
Holly, I think Dan Savage was the columnist who came up with the idea of making "santorum" into a descriptive noun. So rather than insulting a group who (in the case of sucking in particular) really have nothing to do with Santorum, it would be possible to invoke his name with a little venom instead. The solution his readers came up with may be considered by some to be, um, a bit gross, so if you're squeamish cover your eyes for a second: it's the mixture of semen and lube that leaks out after sex. Personally, while I get the way associating Santorum with anything sexy is loaded with irony, I just wouldn't want to invoke him under those circumstances. I would have voted for defining "santorum" as that bit of dog poo that remains on your shoe even after carefully scraping it off on the kerb.
Posted by: spike at May 18, 2006 3:43 AM
I wouldn't be too discouraged by this exchange. Even though he didn't immediately reform, you clearly made him think, and from the way describe him, I would wager he'll think about this conversation some more on his own.
For myself, it's easier and more natural for me to write from a female perspective. Yet I find writing from a male perspective and writing male characters to be fun and interesting. In a sense I have to think about it a little bit more than when I write a female character.
Obviously you're right that the male perspective is considered the default perspective for most cultural exchange. However, while doing some warm-up exercises for writing, I surprised myself with the degree to which I see the female as the generic, default person and male as the anomaly. Popular culture would have it that generic = male, generic + lipstick/eyelashes = female. Yet, going through my daily routine in an imaginary male persona, I caught myself thinking "well I would do this or that differently because it's not manly." LOL. Then I thought about how I don't expect women or girls to always choose the culturally female preference over an androgynous one. Naturally I was hugely proud of myself for going against the grain psychologically... ;^)
One of the reader feedback comments I was most proud of from my novel was from I guy who had read one of the segments of my novel where the narrator is male, and wrote that I had captured the male psyche well and that it was like listening to his own thoughts in a similar situation...
Posted by: C. L. Hanson at May 18, 2006 7:35 AM
Holly...there seems to be a double standard at play here in your post and the resulting comments. The central idea of this discussion seems to have landed on the notion that we shouldn't use language that universally criticizes a group when we are trying to criticize an individual.
And yet...
You seem to lump "men" and "straight white men" together into a cohesive, flawed group. By doing so, by turning the word "man" into a pejorative, aren't you doing the exact thing you criticize?
Your beef is with men who are misogynist and/or patriarchal; and yet, you don't seem to distinguish this. Should you? Or, do all straight white men deserve derision simply for being straight white men?
Posted by: Timothy at May 18, 2006 10:40 AM
Janet writes,
How about "Rick Santorum stinks?" I know it's not as strong, concise, descriptive, or prejorative as "sucks" but as you have made salient points about the power of language, it's about the best I can offer.
I thought about that one last night, as well as "Santorum reeks." It sounds too much like what second graders say.
As for "sucks" being homophobic, I don't see that word that way, since there are plenty of heterosexuals who enjoy getting and giving (?) a blow job. Last I checked, there was sucking involved in that... (Gag. Plech, plech. Pa-tooey.)
Precisely: it's about blow jobs. But it started out as a way to denigrate men--it was a shorter form of "he's a cocksucker."
Spike writes that Dan Savage helped come up with the definition santorum as a noun: it's the mixture of semen and lube that leaks out after sex. I could be wrong, but I thought it was the mixture of cum, lube and feces that leaks out after anal sex....
Posted by: Holly at May 18, 2006 11:15 AM
Hi CL--thanks for dropping by! I like your ideas about writing, but I've got to quibble a bit with this:
Popular culture would have it that generic = male, generic + lipstick/eyelashes = female.
My best friend used to be a professional drag queen, though he hasn't done that scene for ten years. But we've discussed the fact that every so often, we'll put on a little lip gloss and curl our eyelashes before we go to bed, just so we look that much better when we wake up.
So to "generic + lipstick/eyelashes = former drag queen" to me, because not even all gay men bother with that kind of thing.
Posted by: Holly at May 18, 2006 11:21 AM
Timothy writes, You seem to lump "men" and "straight white men" together into a cohesive, flawed group. By doing so, by turning the word "man" into a pejorative, aren't you doing the exact thing you criticize?
How am I turning the word "man" into a pejorative? Is it used an an insult? If I say, "My student is a young man" or "In one of my classes, only two out of 14 were men, and in another, 11 out of 18 were men" have I belittled the males I am referring to?
You summarize my point this way: we shouldn't use language that universally criticizes a group when we are trying to criticize an individual.
But you've got it wrong. First of all, I can think of groups I would like to criticize universally, and I reserve the right to do that. Secondly, I would summarize my point like this: If you want to insult someone (I do acknowledge the desire to insult someone), do it by referring to traits and attributes that person actually has, rather than by referring to traits that person lacks but finds abhorrent: in other words, don't insult a homophobe by calling him a cocksucker, because it insults gays as much as it insults the homophobe. And don't call a man a pussy, because he doesn't have one but it insults everyone who does.
Or as Spike puts it, it's important to insult the deserving target and not some class of innocent bystanders.
I wouldn't especially object to calling a male jerk a dick--after all, a guy at least has a dick, and there's a kind of logic in reducing him to a single part of himself. I only note that it's not a very strong insult, because our culture doesn't find maleness as offensive as femaleness.
As for "lumping 'men' and 'straight white men'" into a group and failing to distinguish between men who are patriarchal and men who aren't, I refer you to this comic strip. We live in a patriarchal system, even feminists.
Posted by: Holly at May 18, 2006 11:36 AM
Holly...
I can understand your point, I think. Can you not understand mine?
When you say "the world happens from the point of view of a straight white man" it seems to overreach a bit. I certainly understand why you say that. But, I am a straight white man, and the world certainly doesn't operate per my viewpoint.
Posted by: Timothy at May 18, 2006 1:09 PM
Tim: Saying "the world happens from the point of view of a straight white man" is not the same as saying "the world happens from a single point of view shared universally by all straight white men, whatever the nuances of their experiences and attitudes towards women, homosexuals and people of color." I am perfectly willing to acknowledge that not all straight white men are misogynist, racist or homophobic--that, in fact, a good number are decent, just and compassionate people.
Nonetheless, the normative default in our culture is straight, white and male. Is it really overreaching to acknowledge that?
The student I had the discussion with cannot change the fact he is straight or white, and I doubt he considers himself transgendered. He is a straight white man for life, but he doesn't need to spend his entire life falling thoughtlessly into patterns of speech and behavior that reinforce the dominant power scheme. If I thought it were impossible for him to escape the point of view he acquired via his biology, I wouldn't bother talking to him about how to do precisely that.
Posted by: Holly at May 18, 2006 1:34 PM
;-)
And there I was thinking I was such a bad feminist for imagining it's interesting for a woman to want to experiment witha male persona, when there are so many men out there who like to play with a female persona as well. :D
Cool blog by the way!!! I'll be adding you to my sidebar in my sidebar cleanup this weekend!!!
Posted by: C. L. Hanson at May 19, 2006 3:20 PM
When you say "the world happens from the point of view of a straight white man" it seems to overreach a bit. I certainly understand why you say that. But, I am a straight white man, and the world certainly doesn't operate per my viewpoint.
A bit of a false syllogism there.
Posted by: Chris Clarke at May 21, 2006 2:54 AM
What a great post, Holly! I'm so glad you captured this conversation for us.
It is amazing what comes out of the mouths of babes. And even more amazing how they don’t see their participation in making these (unacceptable) phrases even more acceptable and widespread by continuing the pattern.
I'll have to come back to read all the comments this has sparked!
Posted by: frankengirl at May 22, 2006 2:38 PM
maybe suggest to this kid that he read the essay 'politics and the english language'. It emphasises stating vvhat you mean clearly and not using played out figueres of speach that you aren't really thinking about.
Posted by: Carpenter at May 23, 2006 11:39 PM
maybe suggest to this kid that he read the essay 'politics and the english language'.
That is indeed a terrific essay, and that's a good suggestion--except that Student C has already read it--we discussed it in the class he just finished with me. But I'm teaching that essay and other stuff by Orwell this fall, so maybe I'll use this discussion to underscore the points Orwell is making and why they're immediately relevant to the way we talk right now.
Posted by: Holly at May 23, 2006 11:45 PM