MeyerBros

I was just reminded at Ilyka’s that today is not only International Women’s Day, but also blog against sexism day. So I thought it would be a good time to take a break from our other recent conversations and, um, blog against sexism.

The gender-split commentary over on this post at Hugo Schwyzer’s got me thinking about how patriarchy hurts men (or, in gennimcmahon’s ever-so-much-more-eloquent version, “how the cultural view of men as irresponsible children whose backs hurt from the weight of following their dicks around, hovering in the air like a divining rod that’s found a ocean beneath their feet, is damaging and limiting”), and conversely how men so often love to divert conversation about patriarchy into “but women do bad things to men too!”, which is a technique for denial and minimization of male privilege.

I do think it’s important for privileged people to reflect on how privilege warps and damages our spirits, because until we do this internal work, any anti-privilege work we do is all about “helping out those poor oppressed women/people of color/queers” and not about a mutual struggle for liberation (cf the tagline quote over at AllyWork). It’s equally important for us to recognize that our privilege benefits us in lots of very concrete ways - recognizing our own hurts doesn’t make things “even”. And we’d better not think it gives us the right to take over a marginalized group’s conversation space with our tales of woe-is-me. That’s why I’m posting this here. And lastly, this can really verge on navel-gazing, so I’ll try to skim the edge of that cliff and (hopefully) keep this interesting or relevant to someone besides me.

Anyway, two personal stories come to mind. Not surprisingly, they both have to do with parents - hi Mom and Dad!

The first story I don’t remember myself, but Mom has told me several times. I guess at age three or so I had a pair of Raggedy Ann/Raggedy Andy dolls that I loved to pieces, including “nursing” them (Mom must have been breastfeeding Eric at that point). I told Mom that when I grew up I was going to be a Mommy, and she (very compassionately, I’m sure) informed me that I would never be a Mommy, but that she was sure I’d be a very good Daddy. Apparently this was crushing news to me, and I put those dolls away and never played with them again. (Mom makes it clear when she tells the story that she still regrets that, and given a do-over would just tell me “I’m sure you’ll be a great Mommy” and leave it at that).

What does that say about my images of mommy-ness and daddy-ness at that age? How much of this difference is due to the biological reality of mother-child attachment (maybe some, but I’d guess not the bulk of it), and how much is due to what I had already experienced from my parents (or observing other parents)? And what will I do to help my child, due next month, see both Mommy and Daddy as tender, attentive caregivers? (Given that I’m totally speaking out my rear end here, having never been a parent, I’d love some reflective - and patriarchy-aware - commentary on this from actual parents - including my own!). Also, if I so clearly understood Mommy to be the one responsible for tenderness towards children, and I was told early on that I couldn’t be one, how might that have impacted my later perception of myself as able to relate tenderly towards children?

The second story that comes to mind (I was reminded of it by gennimcmahon’s quote above), is the whole saga of parental reactions to my wife and I sharing a room in one context or another before we were married. Both her parents and mine reacted strongly to this at different points. In both cases, I initially thought it was just a generational issue of worry over “what others might think” - and to some degree it was. But the more we got into conversation about it, the more stunned I was how much of the resistance seemed (at some level) rooted in the idea that, essentially, men are unable to control sexual urges or make good choices about them.

Now, clearly men make awful (even evil) choices all the time, up to and including rape and sexual assault. I’ve made some pretty poor choices myself (though thankfully not to that point). But assuming that men are inherently unable to control themselves justifies rape and sexual assault. Instead of putting the onus firmly on men to take responsibility to stop being violent and dominating, the responsibility gets put back on women to “not put themselves in the wrong situation” — because the man can’t be responsible for something he apparently can’t control. Others have written more clearly about this whole issue - this post at Feministe is a good recent place to start.

The idea that men are incapable of self-control is also insulting and damaging to the spirit of men. It limits my vision of who I can become as a man, and even perhaps becomes self-fulfilling.

Anyone else have stories or thoughts to share? How has patriarchy/sexism impacted you?

Interesting (and, not surprisingly, somewhat fiery) conversations in the blogosphere recently about diversity, gender, exclusion, and affirmative action in the web-geek world. Our favorite Meyerbro homonym web-geek Eric Meyer started things off by posting his personal manifesto about why he doesn’t care about diversity, and why when he plans conferences he chooses speakers based purely on “merit” and without considering gender or race. (To borrow liberally from the pithy genius of the other Eric Meyer: “Race and gender are irrelevant. That’s what I (white male) always (white) say (male).”)

(update: I shouldn’t have given Eric Meyer credit for “kicking things off” - he was responding to this Jason Kottke post where he simply lists the percentage of female presenters at various recent “webby” conferences.)

Tantek quickly weighed in with his thoughts, in which he a) blames women for not taking enough initiative to promote themselves in the industry, and b) wonders why nobody is concerned about including enough green-eyed people. (”It’s women’s fault for not working hard enough. And anyway, gender doesn’t make any more difference than eye color. That’s what I (male) always (male) say (male).”)

Then Anil Dash jumped into the fray and chastised Eric Meyer and John Gruber for “defending the boys-only nature of [their] treehouse,” and followed it up by offering a list of “the essentials of Web 2.0 your event doesn’t cover”, following which he notes “Where are the men? Don’t worry - the door is open to them. As soon as one of you has done something with the impact of Flickr…”

Today things took an interesting twist. Apparently Eric Meyer (the non-Meyerbro one) is doing some serious soul-searching about all of this, which is great. (Though apparently there hasn’t been sufficient soul-searching yet for him to stop trying to defend the innocent goodness of what he was “really trying to say”).

In all seriousness, wrestling with privilege — with the stupidity and blindness it sometimes causes us to display, even with the best of intentions — is really gut-wrenching stuff, and I wish Eric all the best. I hope he can come to a place where he might even recognize that “what he was really trying to say” itself might have been coming from a place of privilege and ignorance, and that “who he really is” is a good person whose identity, like all of us with privilege, has been deeply warped and shaped by the blindness of privilege.