Mr. Shakes has an excellent post over at the new digs, Shakesville, discussing why feminism benefits everyone — and why the continuing insistence of a lot of men (even progressive ones) on denigrating, attacking or maligning feminism (even as they accept individual feminists) is against their own interest. In particular, Mr. Shakes wonders why it’s so hard to accept that empowering women is not done at the expense of men, and that we’re all in this together. Indeed, when we say that patriarchy hurts men, too, we mean something like this:
One of the greatest bulwarks against men accepting the feminist movement is that they seem to think that women gaining power must necessarily dilute their own exclusive powers and status. But in so holding onto this erroneous notion, they forget that they themselves are powerless in the face of the corporate plutocracy that now weighs down so heavily upon all of us. If they could get their heads around the fact that they too are powerless and insignificant and ignored, they would stop trying to beat up on the kids they perceive to be weaker and instead acknowledge their own weakness, ally themselves with them, and move forward with them in a new movement that would grant greater freedoms for all of us. It shouldn’t be about trying to maintain some illusory advantage over others. It should be about trying to create concrete advantages for all of us.
If men were smart, they wouldn’t fight against feminism. They would embrace it for what it really is: Humanism. (And stop fretting over whether the term “feminism” is exclusory; its principles aren’t.) They would incorporate the principles of all civil rights movements and collaborate with their proponents on the genesis of a vast humanist movement. Instead of feeling threatened by or put upon by these movements, instead of feeling they somehow denigrate straight, white men’s lives or their ability to be who they are, men would apply these ideas in an effort to improve their own lives, along with everyone else’s. What we need to do is confer all the rights and privileges that these men have traditionally enjoyed upon everyone else, and then, once we’ve done that, we can start thinking about what new rights, obligations, responsibilities we can confer on everyone, in order to make our society a more egalitarian and fair place to live.
Men need to get it through their heads that they, too, are under the heel of power structures that have no interest in promoting their welfare. They must understand that the rights and privileges that they have hitherto been enjoying fall far short of the privileges they could enjoy were they to try and achieve them. The internecine warfare that occurs between women and men, people of color and white people, straights and gays, as they all squabble like schoolchildren in an attempt to gain or deny rights, is exactly what those in power want. They promote it, they foment it, they do everything they can to aggravate it, because they know that if we were all ever to get our fucking shit together, and demand that the society we all live in and contribute to should be fair and decent to everyone, then the egregious wealth and power that they enjoy would finally meet its end.
What men need to understand is that their wives, the black guy across the street, the gay guy next door, are not the only ones toiling under the weight of a patriarchal system that doesn’t benefit all men, but instead a select few who hold all the power and all the wealth in their hands, the weight of a society that rewards capital and a slavish work mentality over human dignity and the freedom of individuals to express their own interests and realize their full potential as human beings.
One of the ways that the power structure keeps us divided is to create and reinforce hierarchies within the powerless, so they spend their time fighting each other instead of those in power. One of the ways that’s done is to give some of those at the bottom the illusion that they share the wealth based on some shared characteristic. So, the patriarchy encourages white guys to vote Republican by playing on their fears of the Other — and by holding out the possibility that they, too, can join the club. I remember reading during the last election that a lot of people who had no hope of ever leaving an estate big enough to be taxed nonetheless supported the repeal of the estate tax. Why? Because they might be rich someday.
Another example of this is class anxiety, and the idea that if you get an education, you should be making more money than people who don’t have a degree. This was illustrated nicely by the reactions many people in New York had to the transit strike in late 2005 — there was an awful lot of resentment that transit workers would be making in the high five figures for driving a train. A lot of people on New York One, a local cable news channel, demonstrated in man-on-the-street interviews that their resentment about how much the members of the TWU got in comparison with themselves was directed at the blue-collar transit workers, and not at, say, their own white-collar employers. This is the kind of thing that keeps people from collective action, and keeps the people in power pulling the strings.