in my solace

PLEASE VOTE FOR GAVIS BETTEL

THANK YOU

but doing this all forces us to unearth all of our mountains of neuroses and trauma surrounding gender and maleness. it forces us to confront the ways in which men are deeply hurt, and it forces us to confront the ways in which this pain has not and will not immediately lead to men being perfect feminists.

integrating men into feminism, as a class of people in need of feminism and taking that seriously? its a lot of work on a ton of levels from all sides. it is absolutely vital for feminism & anti-patriarchal liberation broadly. but asks a great deal of us, and that is why pop feminism struggles severely with this topic (and nearly everything else good feminism needs to do).

there was an effort made at male consciousness-raising, the original men's liberation movement (which was explicitly intended to be feminist). just gonna copy + paste the Wikipedia section on the history of the movement:

The men's liberation movement, as recognized by feminists and gender scholars, developed mostly among heterosexual, middle-class men in Britain and North America as a response to the cultural changes of the 1960s and 1970s, including the growth of the feminist movement, counterculture, women's and gay liberation movements, and the sexual revolution. Jack Sawyer published an article titled "On Male Liberation" in Liberation journal in the autumn of 1970, in which he discussed the negative effects of stereotypes of male sex roles. The year 1971 saw the birth of men's discussion groups across the United States, as well as the formation by Warren Farrell of the National Task Force on the Masculine Mystique within the National Organization for Women. Robert Lewis and Joseph Pleck sourced the birth of the movement to the publication of five books on the subject in late 1974 and early 1975, which was followed by a surge of publications targeted to both lay and more academic audiences. The movement led to the formation of conferences, consciousness raising groups, men's centers, and other resources across the United States. The male liberation movement as a single self-conscious liberal feminist movement dissolved during the late 1970s. By the early 1980s, members of the male liberation movement had fully split into two entities. The members who had placed greater emphasis on the 'cost of male gender roles to men' than the 'cost of male gender roles to women' had formed the men's rights movement focusing on issues faced by men. The members who saw sexism exclusively as a system of men oppressing women rejected the language of sex roles and created pro-feminist men's organizations focused primarily on addressing sexual violence against women.

again, this idea of "men are victims of the patriarchy too" is far from new and it has been at the heart of many people's feminist organizing.

but i am wary of acting like this was ever a non-issue. in the same way i am wary of acting like pre-radical feminism & the emergence of "lesbian feminism" and female separatism and active hostility towards trans (masc + fem) lesbians and bi lesbians and sex workers, that feminists never had an issue with trans people or bi women or sex workers, even though these groups also have always been participating in feminism & feminism can never truly succeed without them.

there is already ground laid we can build on! but it must be an act of building. & that's my point with this post; this is not just an attitude issue, its an action issue. and when we put the attitude into action, it creates friction and tension and conflict, and we need to acknowledge this in order to work through it. we need not just ideas but theory that integrates men with feminism, and not just theory but action that makes all men have a sense that they are personally invested in feminism and being anti-misogynistic and anti-patriarchal. and in order to get there, we need to wrestle with why we aren't already.

we are not currently dealing with so much conflict around trans men, and men more broadly, because we just fucked up and forgot some key piece of information. we are dealing with this conflict because we haven't ever fully dealt with it to the extent we really need to. and so much other stuff has kneecapped feminism's actual revolutionary, liberatory goals and abilities in recent decades; this is just one part.

OP: My mundane life hacks (cr 永放光芒)