Mansplaining

[82_28]

Great post, ahab!

I can feel the sentiment in that. But you know what, it was the exact opposite for me. I think it's always confused me. I get all my vitriol and actually the "mansplaining" from my mom and my pacifistic instincts from my dad. I frequently blame that for my inherent confusion on Earth being a male as I am.

[AhabsOtherLeg]

Cheers 82_28, I'm a bottle of Grants down already, so I can only hope that I managed a good post in the context of this thread. Obviously I am coming at it from an exclusively male perspective, like yourself, except I am staggering around drunk in here, mansplaining stuff to other men.

Willow'll understand it though, I bet.

Understanding is the main thing, which entails the sharing of knowledge, the pooling of knowledge - and mansplaining is always going to be a barrier to that, because mansplainers always know what they know and won't take no backchat.

[82_28]

Cheers 82_28, I'm a bottle of Grants down already, so I can only hope that I managed a good post in the context of this thread. Obviously I am coming at it from an exclusively male perspective, like yourself, except I am staggering around drunk in here, mansplaining stuff to other men.

Willow'll understand it though, I bet.

Understanding is the main thing, which entails the sharing of knowledge, the pooling of knowledge - and mansplaining is always going to be a barrier to that, because mansplainers always know what they know and won't take no backchat.

And OMG is that backchat thing prescient. My mom gave up disciplining me and "punishing" me at like the age of 6 because she was so STRICT -- truth is she came at me with a wooden spoon and I reeled back on my bed and kicked her -- happened to be her tits I kicked her in. She handed it all to my dad from then on. But my dad didn't punish me, he would just laugh when he had to "spank" me or whatever. And then he would just barely strike me. I don't believe in punishment of any kind to this day.

[Project Willow]

Willow'll understand it though, I bet.

Understanding is the main thing, which entails the sharing of knowledge, the pooling of knowledge - and mansplaining is always going to be a barrier to that, because mansplainers always know what they know and won't take no backchat.

Thanks for your posts Ahab.

[jlaw172364]

@Ahab

I don't like mansplaining because it dumbs down a complicated subject into "man bad, women good." I don't like it because it does PRECISELY what women have complained about for years with regard to words like "Man" and "History," it ascribes gender to something that could just as easily remain gender neutral in the greater interests of the pursuit of truth. We could easily describe the "huMAN" species as the "cerebriped" species, meaning large brain with two legs, and see, that term is broad enough to encompass all genders (don't forget the hermaphrodites). But no, we must persist in our man / woman fake dichotomy, akin to Democrat / Republican, conservative / liberal, Capitalist / Communist, Cubs / White Sox, divide and conquer so we can kill each other bullshit.

"For hundreds of years the genitals of both male and female scultures (and paintings) were vandalised and altered by people who had the full weight of the Church behind them. Yes, guys have destroyed sculptures of vaginas and naked women."

Now, you must realize that I was speaking about contemporary guys in the United States on a college campus, and not members of the Catholic Church at the height of it's persecutory power.

I read Starhawk's work on the subject, and I find her gender analysis more convincing, because its more thoughtful, even-handed, and less motivated by anger than what Dworkin writes. The actions of male-dominated religious groups seemed more about economics and centralizing political control over all institutions than a war on women per se. Before the medical monopoly, medicine was DISTRIBUTED through predominately folk healer women. I suspect this distribution of labor may have resulted from the need to keep the valuable (for reproductive purposes) female body away from more dangerous, heavy duty work with high risk of bodily injury, to prevent unwanted termination of pregancies, injuries, and deaths. I also suspect the women folk healers were probably far better at healing than the doctors because they were closer to their patients and had more incentives at keeping them alive. Also, in those days, there was more of an incentive to keep populations up, since unpredictable environmental threats could unexpectedly lower them. Now, in the modern age, things have become inverted, and the people at the top of society seem to view their challenge as how to strike the balance of keeping the population sick enough so profits can be extracted, but also healthy enough so they can work, so more profits can be extracted. So in other words, the War on Women perpretarated by the religious groups was more about a cynical profit and power grab, than about practicing an ideology. I feel the same way about the Nazi Holocaust (and all holocausts) and the various pogroms. Once you strip away the rhetoric and the propaganda, it's all about taking power and profits that don't belong to you.

How can you say that you agree with EVERYTHING Dworkin write? Are you her? I doubt even she would agree with everything she has written, as people evolve over time and their positions change. Don't you have ANY criticisms of her at all?

I think Dworkin advocated for a particular subset of the female population with very little voice, namely, women on the lower end of the socio-economic stratum who were sexually exploited by men close to them, which then later to them becoming sexual chattle in the sex industry. Dworkin herself underwent the EXACT SAME experiences, and like a police officer who mostly deals with criminals, placed the worse excesses of the male id onto the entire male population.

At what point would you stop agreeing with the most radical female gender theorist's most angry, disgruntled theories? Would she have to call for the killing of every first born male child as a necessary retribution for all the girl children who get killed in China? Would she have to call for re-engineering the human species so that men were incapable of expressing any aggression at all? Where does one draw the line?

Women don't kill men? If men are expected to be the bread-winners, and if bread-winning requires competition, and if that competition is a euphemism for war, and if war involves killing, then of course men will kill more men than women, but they are doing it for their familes, which consist of their wives, and their children. It's like saying generals don't kill anyone, only the privates do. Or, civilians don't kill, only the military kills. Nobody escapes responsibility for murder.

The underlying reason of who lives and who dies have more to do with economics than they do with gender.

In any case, I refer you to the wikipedia page on the Order of the White Feather. Those young women shamed those young men into getting themselves killed in the mostly obviously stupid war of all time: WWI.

Does this mean women are bad? That they, and not men, are the secret reptilian oppressors we must all loathe, despise, and unite against? NO! It just means that's what's going on is more complicated than patriarchy versus matriarchy.

I think a lot of feminists, but not all, would really like to have a matriarchy, because they're actually arrogant enough to think that they could do a better job running society than men, that they'd somehow be able to make it so that less people would have to suffer and die. It's like, when you're out of power, you naturally take issue with those in power, and you say that you can do better . . . but as soon as you get the reins, whoa boy, do you get a wake-up call. Anyone who's ever held even a limited office in a small organization knows what I'm talking about.

[yathrib]

Andrea Dworkin is definitely not one of my favorite feminists, or people for that matter. But there is a lot of misinformation that has been spread about her and her ideas. In the interest of truth and fairness, anyone who thinks they know all about them should look at the following site:

http://www.nostatusquo.com/ACLU/dworkin/

[FourthBase]

@Ahab

I don't like mansplaining because it dumbs down a complicated subject into "man bad, women good." I don't like it because it does PRECISELY what women have complained about for years with regard to words like "Man" and "History," it ascribes gender to something that could just as easily remain gender neutral in the greater interests of the pursuit of truth. We could easily describe the "huMAN" species as the "cerebriped" species, meaning large brain with two legs, and see, that term is broad enough to encompass all genders (don't forget the hermaphrodites). But no, we must persist in our man / woman fake dichotomy, akin to Democrat / Republican, conservative / liberal, Capitalist / Communist, Cubs / White Sox, divide and conquer so we can kill each other bullshit.

"For hundreds of years the genitals of both male and female scultures (and paintings) were vandalised and altered by people who had the full weight of the Church behind them. Yes, guys have destroyed sculptures of vaginas and naked women."

Now, you must realize that I was speaking about contemporary guys in the United States on a college campus, and not members of the Catholic Church at the height of it's persecutory power.

I read Starhawk's work on the subject, and I find her gender analysis more convincing, because its more thoughtful, even-handed, and less motivated by anger than what Dworkin writes. The actions of male-dominated religious groups seemed more about economics and centralizing political control over all institutions than a war on women per se. Before the medical monopoly, medicine was DISTRIBUTED through predominately folk healer women. I suspect this distribution of labor may have resulted from the need to keep the valuable (for reproductive purposes) female body away from more dangerous, heavy duty work with high risk of bodily injury, to prevent unwanted termination of pregancies, injuries, and deaths. I also suspect the women folk healers were probably far better at healing than the doctors because they were closer to their patients and had more incentives at keeping them alive. Also, in those days, there was more of an incentive to keep populations up, since unpredictable environmental threats could unexpectedly lower them. Now, in the modern age, things have become inverted, and the people at the top of society seem to view their challenge as how to strike the balance of keeping the population sick enough so profits can be extracted, but also healthy enough so they can work, so more profits can be extracted. So in other words, the War on Women perpretarated by the religious groups was more about a cynical profit and power grab, than about practicing an ideology. I feel the same way about the Nazi Holocaust (and all holocausts) and the various pogroms. Once you strip away the rhetoric and the propaganda, it's all about taking power and profits that don't belong to you.

How can you say that you agree with EVERYTHING Dworkin write? Are you her? I doubt even she would agree with everything she has written, as people evolve over time and their positions change. Don't you have ANY criticisms of her at all?

I think Dworkin advocated for a particular subset of the female population with very little voice, namely, women on the lower end of the socio-economic stratum who were sexually exploited by men close to them, which then later to them becoming sexual chattle in the sex industry. Dworkin herself underwent the EXACT SAME experiences, and like a police officer who mostly deals with criminals, placed the worse excesses of the male id onto the entire male population.

At what point would you stop agreeing with the most radical female gender theorist's most angry, disgruntled theories? Would she have to call for the killing of every first born male child as a necessary retribution for all the girl children who get killed in China? Would she have to call for re-engineering the human species so that men were incapable of expressing any aggression at all? Where does one draw the line?

Women don't kill men? If men are expected to be the bread-winners, and if bread-winning requires competition, and if that competition is a euphemism for war, and if war involves killing, then of course men will kill more men than women, but they are doing it for their familes, which consist of their wives, and their children. It's like saying generals don't kill anyone, only the privates do. Or, civilians don't kill, only the military kills. Nobody escapes responsibility for murder.

The underlying reason of who lives and who dies have more to do with economics than they do with gender.

In any case, I refer you to the wikipedia page on the Order of the White Feather. Those young women shamed those young men into getting themselves killed in the mostly obviously stupid war of all time: WWI.

Does this mean women are bad? That they, and not men, are the secret reptilian oppressors we must all loathe, despise, and unite against? NO! It just means that's what's going on is more complicated than patriarchy versus matriarchy.

I think a lot of feminists, but not all, would really like to have a matriarchy, because they're actually arrogant enough to think that they could do a better job running society than men, that they'd somehow be able to make it so that less people would have to suffer and die. It's like, when you're out of power, you naturally take issue with those in power, and you say that you can do better . . . but as soon as you get the reins, whoa boy, do you get a wake-up call. Anyone who's ever held even a limited office in a small organization knows what I'm talking about.

I can't believe this thread just ended here.
This was a post rich with things to agree on, be confused by, and dispute.
I find myself agreeing with about half, confused by a quarter, and disagreeing with another quarter.

b) Condescension, presumption, and lack of social skills are definitely large factors, but obviously women can have these traits too. I think where gender comes into play is that (especially in discussing music) men speak in a certain way to me that they would never towards another man: steamrolling over what I say, breaking things down to basic levels, or aggressively quizzing me on anything I do add to the conversation. In a broversation, men assume equal footing about each other both in terms of knowledge and in simple ability to participate

Don't have the time or energy to go through the 15 previous pages to see if this following point was made, but: A lot of those same mansplainers mansplain exactly as much and just as obnoxiously to other men, in broversations, where there is hardly ever such a thing as equal footing. But see, for a woman, it could be difficult or impossible to know that. I'd explain why, but, well...

p.s. This is another bump occasioned by my intra-search for "Boston", sorry for thread necromancy.

[AhabsOtherLeg]

I can't believe this thread just ended here.
This was a post rich with things to agree on, be confused by, and dispute.
I find myself agreeing with about half, confused by a quarter, and disagreeing with another quarter.

I did always mean to come back and answer jlaw's post, which I agree is a good one, but I was off for a couple of weeks after he posted it and felt that coming back with a "rebuttal" after such a passage of time would be like sneakily trying to claim the last word. I don't even know if jlaw's still around now, haven't noticed any posts from him in a while, but then I haven't been around much myself.

Will try to give a full answer tommorrow, got to do work now sadly.

For the record, I don't really agree with Andrea Dworkin on everything, hopefully no one ever thought I did. Do like Ice and Fire though.

[undead]

I need to greeksplain something about this his-story business. Not only is "history" a gender neutral word in the English language, but in the Greek language the word "Istoria", which is the origin of the word "history", it is a FEMININE WORD. EE EESTOREEA, the history, or alternatively just a regular old story. In English they like to add an H to words that start in a vowel because they just like it that way I guess. Like with the ERBS, which is spelled "herbs". And a lot of educated English types speaking propa English would question the istorical accuracy of this complex-feeding pseudo-etymological word nazification with people trying to make people say "herstory", because it's completely and doubly ridiculous from any informed linguistic perspective. If that were really the case then we would have to take antiherstamines for allergies and refer to the Herspanic inhabitants of south and central America. The only applicable implementation of this fetish I can think of would be a hersterectomy which admittedly makes sense, although I have a feeling that the feminists might not want to own that one.

Anyway, I am sympathetic to the idea of feminism, most especially in an ecological context. It seems as though taking it to absurd extremes kind of ruins a good thing. I think that fortunately most of this heated disagreement goes on in an academic discourse that has no relevance at all to 90% of the population. And when they are going around trying to convince people to use the word "herstory", what else is to be expected?

[JackRiddler]

I need to greeksplain something about this his-story business. Not only is "history" a gender neutral word in the English language, but in the Greek language the word "Istoria", which is the origin of the word "history", it is a FEMININE WORD. EE EESTOREEA, the history, or alternatively just a regular old story. In English they like to add an H to words that start in a vowel because they just like it that way I guess. Like with the ERBS, which is spelled "herbs". And a lot of educated English types speaking propa English would question the istorical accuracy of this complex-feeding pseudo-etymological word nazification with people trying to make people say "herstory", because it's completely and doubly ridiculous from any informed linguistic perspective. If that were really the case then we would have to take antiherstamines for allergies and refer to the Herspanic inhabitants of south and central America. The only applicable implementation of this fetish I can think of would be a hersterectomy which admittedly makes sense, although I have a feeling that the feminists might not want to own that one.

Anyway, I am sympathetic to the idea of feminism, most especially in an ecological context. It seems as though taking it to absurd extremes kind of ruins a good thing. I think that fortunately most of this heated disagreement goes on in an academic discourse that has no relevance at all to 90% of the population. And when they are going around trying to convince people to use the word "herstory", what else is to be expected?

I don't know, I always thought herstory was supposed to be an ironic bit of punning. As in, it's not that anyone thinks the word is derived from "his" "story" and therefore should be turned into hers. It's a joke about how the discipline has almost always functioned to tell only "his story," and how it's time to tell hers. I missed the part where it became a canonical requirement to always say herstory rather than history, and for various reasons I'm always going to blanche when the syllables "nazi" are ever brought into the proximity of feminism (since, though not in your case, it's usually nazis doing that).

On the other hand I'll be laughing about Herspanic all day. In a Beavis or Butthead sort of way.

[elfismiles]

I don't know, I always thought herstory was supposed to be an ironic bit of punning. As in, it's not that anyone thinks the word is derived from "his" "story" and therefore should be turned into hers. It's a joke about how the discipline has almost always functioned to tell only "his story,"

Case in point ... the first time / place I first heard the use of "HIS-STORY" ...

Public Enemy - Brothers Gonna Work It Out

"History shouldn't be a mystery
Our stories real history
Not his story"


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KHxkPNx23Og#t=02m13s

Uh your bad self
Help me break this down from off the shelf
Here's a music servin' you so use it
Papa's got a brand new funk
Get down (party for your right)
Huh let's get it on
Like we said before
They say the brothers causin' trouble
Hate to bust their bubble
'Cause we rumble
From our lower level
To condition your condition
(We're gonna do a song)
That you never heard before
Make you all jump along to the education
Brothers gonna work it out
And stop chasin'
Brothers, brothers gonna work it out

Chorus

You got it...what it takes
Go get it...where you want it?
Come get it...get involved
'Cause the brothers in the street are willing to work it out

So many of us in limbo
How to get it on, it's quite simple
3 stones from the sun
We need a piece of this rock
Our goal indestructible soul
Answers to this quizzin'
To the Brothers in the street, schools and the prisons
History shouldn't be a mystery
Our stories real history
Not his story
We gonna work it one day
Till we all get paid
The right way in full, no bull
Talkin', no walkin', drivin', arrivin' in style
Soon you'll see what I'm talkin' 'bout
'Cause one day
The brothers gonna work it out
Brothers, brothers gonna work it out

Chorus

You got it ... what it takes
Go get it... where you want it?
Come get it...get involved
'Cause the brothers in the street
Are willing to work it out
Let's get it on... we are willin'
Let's get it on, let's get it on ... we are willin'
Let's get it on, let's get it on, let's get it on ... we are willin'

Now we are ready if you are ready

In 1995, you'll twist to this
As you raise your fist to the music
United we stand, yes divided we fall
Together we can stand tall
Brothers that try to work it out
They get mad, revolt, revise, realize
They're super bad
Small chance a smart brother's
Gonna be a victim of his own circumstance
Sabotaged, Shellshocked, rocked and ruled
Day in the life of a fool
Like I said before to live it low
Life take you time, time yo go slow
Look here, not a thing to fear
Brother to brother not another as sincere
Teach a man how to be father
To never tell a woman he can't bother
You can't say you don't know
What I'm talkin' 'bout
But one day ... brothers gonna work it out

You got it ... what it takes
Go get it ... where you want it?
Come get it ... get involved
'Cause the brothers in the street
Are willing to work it out

Let's get it on... we are willin'
Let's get it on, let's get it on ... we are willin'
Let's get it on, let's get it on, let's get it on ... we are willin'
Now we are ready if you are ready

[Project Willow]

Fodder for the "poodle complaints of elite women" crowd. Critics and author spar in the comments section.

http://www.thenation.com/article/173743/my-so-called-post-feminist-life-arts-and-letters?page=0,0#

My So-Called 'Post-Feminist' Life in Arts and Letters
Deborah Copaken Kogan April 9, 2013 | This article appeared in the April 29, 2013 edition of The Nation.

The author's 2002 book about her career as a war photographer was titled "Shutterbabe"—against her wishes. Illustration by Milton Glaser Incorporated.
 
My latest novel was just long-listed 
for Britain's Women's Prize for Fiction, formerly known as the Orange Prize. I cried when I heard. Then I Googled it. Here are a few things I learned: it was founded in response to the 1991 Booker Prize, whose nominees were all men; it is frequently modified by the adjective "prestigious"; and it is controversial. Why do we need a separate prize for women, ask the columnists, year after year, in one form or another, following the announcement of the nominees.

"The Orange Prize is a sexist con-trick" posited a prize-winning male novelist in 2008. "The past is gone," he wrote. "Get over it."

The 2012 VIDA statistics have been out for some time now, so I won't linger over the current and quantifiable inequity—yes, even in this magazine—in the frequency with which male and female writers are reviewed today, five years after the past was deemed "gone." It's a proven fact, backed by simple math even my first grader can understand: the number of reviews of books by men is greater than the number of reviews of books by women; the number of male reviewers is greater than the number of female reviewers. Men, in other words, are still the arbiters of taste, the cultural gatekeepers, and the recipients of what little attention still gets paid to books.

What I will do, however, is open my kimono and make it personal, though I've been warned not to do this. It's career suicide, colleagues tell me, to speak out against the literary establishment; they'll smear you. But never mind. I'm too old and too invisible to said establishment to care. And I still believe, as Carol Hanisch wrote back in 1969—when I was having my then three-year-old feet forced into stiff Mary Janes—that the personal is political.

So. Let's rewind and take a look at my so-called post-feminist life in arts and letters.

Born in 1966, I came of age at the dawn of a revolution. The past was gone; we would move on and get over it! Except getting over it, as it turns out, takes more than an ashcan full of bras and access to the pill. It takes years—decades even. My whole life, in fact, and still counting. Nixon signed Title IX in 1972, when I was 6, but only the girls born many years after me got to reap its rewards. Who knows? Instead of a novelist, I might have become a really short, nebbishy soccer player.

Fast-forward to 1988: I am raped by an acquaintance the night before my graduation from college. The next morning, before donning cap and gown, I stumble into the University Health Services building to report the crime. I'm advised not to press charges. "They'll smear you," I'm told by the female psychologist assigned to my case. I don't want to be smeared. I've got a life to live. Twenty-five years later, while watching CNN lament the effects of the Steubenville rape on two promising lives—the rapists', not the victim's—I'll hold two competing thoughts: nothing has changed; I wish I'd been braver. I decide to Google my rapist's name, something I've never done in the quarter-century since the crime. His promise, I note, has been duly fulfilled. He's successful. He's married—to a woman who recently spoke on a "Lean In" panel with Sheryl Sandberg.

Because life's like that.

Let's head on over to 1989. I'm a 23-year-old war photographer, on the eve of my first professional exhibit at the inaugural Visa Pour l'Image Perpignan photo festival. I share this honor with photojournalism heavyweights Sebastião Salgado and Jim Nachtwey. They and all the other men—except the identical Turnley twins, who are paired for obvious reasons—are given solo exhibits. I share mine with another female on the slate that year, Alexandra Avakian. Ours is called "Les Deux Femmes Sur le Front," which translates as "The Two Women on the Front Lines." Of the twenty-six photographers featured in that first festival, we are the sole women.

It's now 1998. I am the mother of two young children. I am my family's primary breadwinner, working full time as a producer at NBC. I have an Emmy, but it's no big deal: work in TV news long enough, you eventually get one. Returning to work after my second maternity leave (which left my family broke, as it was unpaid), despite my specialty in international news I am assigned three stories in rapid succession: "Putting Your Kids to Bed"; "Fussy Babies"; "Picky Eaters." I am one of the few mother-of-small-children producers on the show, but there are plenty of father-of-small-children producers in our ranks. I punt the "Picky Eaters" story and take a leave of absence to try my hand at my first passion, writing, which my (male) freshman expository writing professor had once dissuaded me from attempting, though I'd previously been a young columnist for Seventeen.

It's 1999. I sell my first book to Random House, a memoir of my years as a war photographer, for twice my NBC salary. I'm thrilled when I hear this: a new job; self-reliance; the gift of time to do the work I've been dreaming of since childhood. The book is sold on the basis of a proposal and a first chapter under the title Newswhore, which is the insult often lobbed at us both externally and from within our own ranks—a way of noting, with a combination of shame and black humor, the vulture-like nature of our livelihood, and a means of reclaiming, as I see it, the word "whore," since I want to write about sexual and gender politics as well. Random House changes the book's title to Shutterbabe, which a friend came up with. I beg for Shuttergirl instead, to reclaim at least "girl," as Lena Dunham would so expertly do years later. Or what about Develop Stop Fix? Anything besides a title with the word "babe" in it.

I'm told I have no say in the matter. The cover that the publisher designs has a naked cartoon torso against a pink background with a camera covering the genitalia. I tell them it's usually my eye behind the camera, not my vagina. I fight—hard—to change the cover. Thankfully, I win this one, agreeing to shoot the cover photo myself, gratis. When my publicist tries to pitch the book to NPR's Terry Gross, a producer tells him that Terry likes the "Shutter" part of the title but not the "babe" part.

It's now 2001. After two years of painstaking work to produce the book—having never written one before or attended grad school, I had to learn on the job—nearly every review refers to me as a stay-at-home mom. One such article is entitled "Battlefield Barbie," which calls me a "soccer-mom-in-training." I look nothing like Barbie. My kids don't play soccer. The general consensus is that the book is good, but I suck. The character assassinations are intense. Talk asks if I'm worried I'll be labeled a slut. I object to both the word and the question; the journalist prints them anyway. Brill's Content and The Women's Review of Books insinuate that I brought on my own rape and various other crimes that I experienced at the hands of men—armed robbery, a knockout blow to the skull from a crack addict. Salon resorts to slut-shaming and libel. New York thinks I'm an insult to feminism for having left a promising career behind.

My book is a bestseller, gets taught in journalism schools. I haven't left anything behind, I think; I've started something new. (Years later, the Internet, reality TV and citizen journalists with smartphones will decimate both of my former professions anyway, forcing many of my ex-colleagues to scramble both for work and for new ways of working.) A proponent of "leaning in" before it ever became a topic for panels with my rapist's wife, I write to the publications who called me a slutty Barbie stay-at-home mom and/or an insult to feminism, not to ask for a public retraction, but to request privately—privately! I don't want to get smeared—that they carefully reconsider how they're reviewing women. "Would you call a male author a stay-at-home dad?" I ask, among other rhetorical questions.

Continues on page 2...

http://www.thenation.com/article/173743/my-so-called-post-feminist-life-arts-and-letters?page=0,1

[AhabsOtherLeg]

READER, BE ADVISED: In an immensely boring and pointless fashion I am going to reply to a post made several months ago by a member of the board who may no longer be present. I will say nothing of either general or niche interest that everybody here hasn't heard a million times before.

Did promise a reply, though, and the post I'm replying to was pretty good in itself. So here goes.

@AhabI don't like mansplaining because it dumbs down a complicated subject into "man bad, women good." I don't like it because it does PRECISELY what women have complained about for years with regard to words like "Man" and "History," it ascribes gender to something that could just as easily remain gender neutral in the greater interests of the pursuit of truth.

Mansplaining is so heavily weighted towards being a behavioural trait among men that one could almost say it is definable as a masculine trait. No?

In fact you could probably get away with calling it Mansplaining for that very reason. That's my excuse anyway.

For the record, in my opinion, a feminist complaining about the use of the word HIStory is not so much a feminst as an illiterate with too much time on her hands. The same is true of any guy who complains about the use of the word "womyn". If you want to spend any of your time complaining about other people's "poodle" complaints, there's no doubt that language and terminology is the most fruitful area of feminism you will find to concentrate on - but you must see that the problem of blatant hypocrisy arises there too.

Where the anti-feminism MRA narrative fails (where it drops to the floor and abjectly flounders, and just stays there) is, for me, where it accidentally intersects with that terrible thing we call HIStory. The problem with history (much more damaging to the MRA narrative than it is to the feminist one, and I don't believe this is down to a feminist conspiracy) is that history is at least partially real, at least partially true, and has existed for ages, and has loads of big massive books about it.

The fact that history has been (mostly, so far) a story of men and their actions is not down to a bias in the modern curricular teaching of HIStory - but it IS down to a historical bias against women which has, for millenia, excluded them from the educational establishments of our respective countries, from the legal establishments of our respective countries, and has seen them cast as inept, corrupt, and inferior by all the major religious authorities (at least among the Abrahamic faiths - it's frequently even worse outside them), and the historical fact is that this massive and painfully evident bias against women has extended since the beginning of what we now think of as civillized human history right up till now, into the realms of modern employment rights and payment, and has acted strongly against the involvement of women in all spheres of public life to this day, and has frequently prevented the airing of their voices altogether, even resulting in the non-publication of their literary works unless they had the good grace to adopt male pseudonyms instead of their own silly, girlish, unworthy designations.

That's how I see it.

I mean, c'mon. These are facts that you and everyone else here is already aware of. But the anti-feminism narrative chooses to begin (in historical terms, except when it suits them) yesterday. Why is that?

We could easily describe the "huMAN" species as the "cerebriped" species, meaning large brain with two legs, and see, that term is broad enough to encompass all genders (don't forget the hermaphrodites). But no, we must persist in our man / woman fake dichotomy, akin to Democrat / Republican, conservative / liberal, Capitalist / Communist, Cubs / White Sox, divide and conquer so we can kill each other bullshit.

Aye, but it's not quite like that, is it? And it never has been.

These ahistorical comparisons are what bother me the most. Republicans, for all their sins, never kept Democrats off the streets on pain of death in case they let a breast slip out into public view (the Janet Jackson Superbowl boob conspiracy may be an exceprion to thisrule, or a modern illustration of it). Liberals have never forced Conservatives to get dressed in special chambers off to the side of the house so as not to shame the Lord with their naked bodies (much as they might like to, especially nowadays, in the Time of the Rascal - and considering Cheney).

There has never been a distinct legal inequality between Cubs and White Sox fans to my knowledge. Has there? Am I wrong?

What it boils down to is that Cubs fans have never been deprived of education and social advancement, deliberately and of set purpose, over many generations, by the main institutions of society, so as to make them unfit for anything other than domestic work or wifehood.

Though I'm sure many White Sox fans would say Cubs fans now show all the signs of such deprivation.

But it's different with men and women, isn't it?. Because women have been treated in exactly that way for a very, very, very long time.

I'm neither a feminist nor a socialist, and not a historian either. The main reason I'm not any of those things is because, frankly, I don't think I've read enough of the literature, or done enough of the work, to count myself as qualified.

Take my support for gay marriage, for instance. It comes from a deeply traditional perspective. Marriage, in the old times, was always a contract between two men - the bridegroom and the bride's father. We must return to these eternal verities, mustn't we, where a marriage contract is always conducted between two men?

Cardinal O'Brien would've agreed, it turns out.

I don't believe in a Dworkin-esque (or more approriately, and insidiously, Steinem-esque) divide and rule between the genders, such as they are - and I don't believe for a second that that's what Dworkin was really after either.

I just have a basic belief that, y'know, women are human and all that. More or less. Most of them anyway. If they do my job they should get paid my wage. If they are smarter or better than me they should be able to rise higher. If they want to. Basic stuff. Nothing radical, or even interesting. If they can argue better than me, then they win the argument. I don't get to shout them down, or curse them back into their cage, much as i might like to, and rightly so. I think that's basically what the thread's about.

But it's amazing the opposition that such a humdrum position can come up against.

Life being what it is, and MRA activists being what they are, I find myself forever more drawn to play the part of Valerie Solanas rather than, say, Mary Wollstonecraft.

I haven't even got to the interesting bit of Jlaw's very interesting post yet, and Fourthbase is gonna be understandably annoyed with me for spending at least a page and a half in real terms on pointless commonplace homilies, but anyweys, I hope my main point is made - it is the mindboggling ahistorical liberties that the anti-feminism internet preachers like to take with reality that continuously piss me off.

Seriously, you want to hear these clowns bitching on and on about how things they never did to nobody long before they were born are not their fault and never were, and they shouldn't have to feel guilty about it.

Even though no one is saying they should feel guilty about it, or cares if they do.

They're like a bunch of fucken women.

[FourthBase]

Mansplaining is so heavily weighted towards being a behavioural trait among men that one could almost say it is definable as a masculine trait. No?

Yes. It could be. And the thing is: Men mansplain to other men, too.

[justdrew]

Fodder for the "poodle complaints of elite women" crowd. Critics and author spar in the comments section.

http://www.thenation.com/article/173743/my-so-called-post-feminist-life-arts-and-letters?page=0,0#

My So-Called 'Post-Feminist' Life in Arts and Letters
Deborah Copaken Kogan April 9, 2013 | This article appeared in the April 29, 2013 edition of The Nation.

The author's 2002 book about her career as a war photographer was titled "Shutterbabe"—against her wishes. Illustration by Milton Glaser Incorporated.
 
My latest novel was just long-listed 
for Britain's Women's Prize for Fiction, formerly known as the Orange Prize. I cried when I heard. Then I Googled it. Here are a few things I learned: it was founded in response to the 1991 Booker Prize, whose nominees were all men; it is frequently modified by the adjective "prestigious"; and it is controversial. Why do we need a separate prize for women, ask the columnists, year after year, in one form or another, following the announcement of the nominees.

"The Orange Prize is a sexist con-trick" posited a prize-winning male novelist in 2008. "The past is gone," he wrote. "Get over it."

The 2012 VIDA statistics have been out for some time now, so I won't linger over the current and quantifiable inequity—yes, even in this magazine—in the frequency with which male and female writers are reviewed today, five years after the past was deemed "gone." It's a proven fact, backed by simple math even my first grader can understand: the number of reviews of books by men is greater than the number of reviews of books by women; the number of male reviewers is greater than the number of female reviewers. Men, in other words, are still the arbiters of taste, the cultural gatekeepers, and the recipients of what little attention still gets paid to books.

What I will do, however, is open my kimono and make it personal, though I've been warned not to do this. It's career suicide, colleagues tell me, to speak out against the literary establishment; they'll smear you. But never mind. I'm too old and too invisible to said establishment to care. And I still believe, as Carol Hanisch wrote back in 1969—when I was having my then three-year-old feet forced into stiff Mary Janes—that the personal is political.

So. Let's rewind and take a look at my so-called post-feminist life in arts and letters.

Born in 1966, I came of age at the dawn of a revolution. The past was gone; we would move on and get over it! Except getting over it, as it turns out, takes more than an ashcan full of bras and access to the pill. It takes years—decades even. My whole life, in fact, and still counting. Nixon signed Title IX in 1972, when I was 6, but only the girls born many years after me got to reap its rewards. Who knows? Instead of a novelist, I might have become a really short, nebbishy soccer player.

Fast-forward to 1988: I am raped by an acquaintance the night before my graduation from college. The next morning, before donning cap and gown, I stumble into the University Health Services building to report the crime. I'm advised not to press charges. "They'll smear you," I'm told by the female psychologist assigned to my case. I don't want to be smeared. I've got a life to live. Twenty-five years later, while watching CNN lament the effects of the Steubenville rape on two promising lives—the rapists', not the victim's—I'll hold two competing thoughts: nothing has changed; I wish I'd been braver. I decide to Google my rapist's name, something I've never done in the quarter-century since the crime. His promise, I note, has been duly fulfilled. He's successful. He's married—to a woman who recently spoke on a "Lean In" panel with Sheryl Sandberg.

Because life's like that.

Let's head on over to 1989. I'm a 23-year-old war photographer, on the eve of my first professional exhibit at the inaugural Visa Pour l'Image Perpignan photo festival. I share this honor with photojournalism heavyweights Sebastião Salgado and Jim Nachtwey. They and all the other men—except the identical Turnley twins, who are paired for obvious reasons—are given solo exhibits. I share mine with another female on the slate that year, Alexandra Avakian. Ours is called "Les Deux Femmes Sur le Front," which translates as "The Two Women on the Front Lines." Of the twenty-six photographers featured in that first festival, we are the sole women.

It's now 1998. I am the mother of two young children. I am my family's primary breadwinner, working full time as a producer at NBC. I have an Emmy, but it's no big deal: work in TV news long enough, you eventually get one. Returning to work after my second maternity leave (which left my family broke, as it was unpaid), despite my specialty in international news I am assigned three stories in rapid succession: "Putting Your Kids to Bed"; "Fussy Babies"; "Picky Eaters." I am one of the few mother-of-small-children producers on the show, but there are plenty of father-of-small-children producers in our ranks. I punt the "Picky Eaters" story and take a leave of absence to try my hand at my first passion, writing, which my (male) freshman expository writing professor had once dissuaded me from attempting, though I'd previously been a young columnist for Seventeen.

It's 1999. I sell my first book to Random House, a memoir of my years as a war photographer, for twice my NBC salary. I'm thrilled when I hear this: a new job; self-reliance; the gift of time to do the work I've been dreaming of since childhood. The book is sold on the basis of a proposal and a first chapter under the title Newswhore, which is the insult often lobbed at us both externally and from within our own ranks—a way of noting, with a combination of shame and black humor, the vulture-like nature of our livelihood, and a means of reclaiming, as I see it, the word "whore," since I want to write about sexual and gender politics as well. Random House changes the book's title to Shutterbabe, which a friend came up with. I beg for Shuttergirl instead, to reclaim at least "girl," as Lena Dunham would so expertly do years later. Or what about Develop Stop Fix? Anything besides a title with the word "babe" in it.

I'm told I have no say in the matter. The cover that the publisher designs has a naked cartoon torso against a pink background with a camera covering the genitalia. I tell them it's usually my eye behind the camera, not my vagina. I fight—hard—to change the cover. Thankfully, I win this one, agreeing to shoot the cover photo myself, gratis. When my publicist tries to pitch the book to NPR's Terry Gross, a producer tells him that Terry likes the "Shutter" part of the title but not the "babe" part.

It's now 2001. After two years of painstaking work to produce the book—having never written one before or attended grad school, I had to learn on the job—nearly every review refers to me as a stay-at-home mom. One such article is entitled "Battlefield Barbie," which calls me a "soccer-mom-in-training." I look nothing like Barbie. My kids don't play soccer. The general consensus is that the book is good, but I suck. The character assassinations are intense. Talk asks if I'm worried I'll be labeled a slut. I object to both the word and the question; the journalist prints them anyway. Brill's Content and The Women's Review of Books insinuate that I brought on my own rape and various other crimes that I experienced at the hands of men—armed robbery, a knockout blow to the skull from a crack addict. Salon resorts to slut-shaming and libel. New York thinks I'm an insult to feminism for having left a promising career behind.

My book is a bestseller, gets taught in journalism schools. I haven't left anything behind, I think; I've started something new. (Years later, the Internet, reality TV and citizen journalists with smartphones will decimate both of my former professions anyway, forcing many of my ex-colleagues to scramble both for work and for new ways of working.) A proponent of "leaning in" before it ever became a topic for panels with my rapist's wife, I write to the publications who called me a slutty Barbie stay-at-home mom and/or an insult to feminism, not to ask for a public retraction, but to request privately—privately! I don't want to get smeared—that they carefully reconsider how they're reviewing women. "Would you call a male author a stay-at-home dad?" I ask, among other rhetorical questions.

Continues on page 2...

http://www.thenation.com/article/173743/my-so-called-post-feminist-life-arts-and-letters?page=0,1

wow, I don't know how Deborah Copaken Kogan puts up with such wild bullshit, I'd be furious all the time I suspect, can't really take going to look at the comments. but thanks for this insight