The myth of the man-beast

Mealy-mouthed crusaders of Internet misogyny, better known as 'Men's Rights Activists' or MRAs, sometimes complain that thanks to feminism, men have gotten a questionable reputation of beastly savages unable to contain their primal instincts of murder and rape. 

As usual, MRAs blame feminism for something that men actually have another group to blame for: patriarchy, and by extension, themselves.

Earlier, I wrote about how the idea of what it means to be a man or how you can define yourself as a man, is a trap. It's always going to end up being restrictive.

That doesn't mean that we shouldn't combat clichés. All too frequently, men (and some women) invoke their so-called inherent primal nature to justify violence, stupidity and generally inappropriate sexual behaviour. But, let's not forget that no proof has ever been offered for arguments made by evolutionary psychology. Even if they were true, they are no excuse. We have managed to get ourselves potty trained, too. No one will defend shitting in the street because it's something animals would do or our ancestors might have done.

Let's become aware of some damaging internalised ideas and behaviour:

• Men are taught that displaying grief, pain, fear or in some cases affection is a sign of weakness. However, getting in touch with the full range of human emotions and how to express them leads to a richer experience in life and makes it easier to relate to others, ultimately improving overall life satisfaction.
• Men are taught that they should dominate others, especially women, either as benevolent protectors or as predators. Letting go of that social imperative produces more egalitarian relationships and less frustration for not meeting goals that might not even contribute to your happiness.
• Men are taught that subtlety, nuance, caution and a fine command of language is a sign of indecisiveness and weakness. However, by getting a grasp on the shades of grey that are simply a part of life, understanding of how the world works deepens, and leads to decisions that are better-argued, with better outcomes.
• Men are taught that verbal or physical violence is an acceptable answer in many situations. By restraint and resorting to violence only as a very last resort, situations are less likely grow out of control and breed lasting resentment.
• Men are taught not to say sorry or sincerely apologise. By learning to admit mistakes, you become more honest with yourself and more open in your dealings with others.
• Men are taught that they are or should be sexually insatiable and incapable of long-term monogamy, conflicting with the other essentialist view of women seeking the comfort of a long-term sexual relationship. An individual approach to sexuality that depends more on what a person wants for themselves instead of feeling pressured to do what they think they are supposed to do will lead to improved relationships and a better sex life.
• Men are taught that some, if not most women, are there to be ogled and in some cases harrassed and assaulted for crossing some arbitrary line of decency, while at the same time not desiring sex. Breaking this mental dichotomy and viewing women as individuals with individual desires, moulded by social pressure just like you are, leads to less generalising and essentialism.
• Men are taught that some occupations are manly and some are not. The more equal the gender ratio becomes in a line of work, the better the decisions are that get taken.
• Men are taught that minorities and women are often out to get them or have a secret desire to oppress them. Realising that minorities and women have legitimate grievances resulting from centuries of systematic oppression that still exist today, but are invisible to you, will make you realise that progress is not a zero-sum game. Others' rights do not infringe on yours.
• Men are taught that no sometimes means yes. By instead going for enthusiastic consent, you can be sure that partners are into it just as much as you are. The risk of ignoring boundaries is not worth it.

Now, as a last point, it is obviously true that the things men are taught can be and will be enforced by some women as well. This can be frustrating, but you should realise that women can be influenced and immersed in patriarchy just as much as men. Changing some women's binary gender thinking is not your job, but you can at least make a difference for other men.

Progress 101

Recently, I found myself grappling a little with all the new and changed functionalities of PowerPoint in Windows 7. I'd been very familiar with the presentation software in an XP environment, when the dinosaurs still roamed the Earth, but I had plenty of new stuff to learn. So, I decided to use my learning experience for a good cause, and made a presentation that attempts to explain (with examples!):

• What privilege is
• How power structures (patriarchy, plutocracy, imperialism and superstition) manifest themselves
• How people can be both oppressors and the oppressed simultaneously
• How power structures intersect with one another
• What typical defense and derail tactics of those power structures entail

I largely made this thing to help explain things to the uninitiated, especially fellow men who often seem to have difficulty grasping some elementary background concepts of social progress. It's a version 0.9, meaning it's still in a sort of bèta phase. I might do a version with voice-over later. Got feedback? Let me know.

White Whine #3: Multiculturalism has failed

Multiculturalism is a fact. Just like gravity can't suddenly 'fail' to exist on earth (barring quantum fluctuations), so have cultures been living side by side for as long as cities have existed. To paint multiculturalism as a left-wing, happy go-lucky hobby project is completely ridiculous. What the right actually means to attack is the tensions between immigrant communities and their descendants with the communities that were around before their arrival.

By the way, I am going to talk mainly about North African and Turkish immigrants. Whenever a European person says 'multiculturalism has failed', they're not talking about any immigrant group other than Muslims. There have been occasional fears about Polish plumbers, but I'm quite sure that discussion wasn't as deeply mired in mutual prejudice, racism and cultural presuppositions.

No doubt that tensions exist. While I am very wary of making general assumptions about one culture, ethnic group or religion, there's no denying that the cultural distance between, say, a family with roots on the Moroccan countryside and native West-Europeans will be greater than between someone who's moved from Athens to Brussels. It is also true that for far too long, the left has looked the other way when the theme turns to crime among immigrant youth, how girls report feeling unsafe or getting harrassed by them, or how some young Muslims attack openly gay or Jewish people. That is seriously not cool at all and frustrates a lot of people.

The right, again, is also right in pointing out that bad social integration lies at the root of the problem, but it is completely wrong in putting the onus only on the immigrant communities themselves. Research has indicated that Flemings and Walloons are among the most racist people of Europe. Time and again, employers get outed for having a secretive policy of not hiring people who look too brown or are of North African or Turkish descent. This is a big, big problem because it foments frustration.

Traditionally, Mediterranean cultures are patriarchal. Their very overt patriarchy bothers a lot of Europeans (and Americans too, I am sure). To pick a less controversial example, if you've ever been to Southern Europe, you might have seen how from an early age, boys are sometimes treated as princes, and the bad apples among them act like impossible little Mussolinis with a huge entitlement complex. Now put little Mussolini in a context that simultaneously tells him that he's a prince, but the wider society he lives in considers him a backwards savage and oh yeah he's pretty sure he won't be able to find a job and never get to have all the fancy stuff or any sign that says he's made it.

Then, people he sees as 'naturally' inferior to him ascend beyond his social position: rich gay men with nice designer clothes, confident women who go out alone at night, or Jewish people who have always been stereotypically associated with financial success. Top it off with his confrontation with racism on an everyday level that you and I (I am pretty sure 99% of my audience will be white) never have to face, and yeah, you can sort of understand why a young man like that would be an explosive cocktail of anger. So they run back to their safe space: their culture, their traditions, their religion, the place where they meant something. The fact that snooty whites come around and tell them that their culture is backwards only strengthens this belief.

The left has generally remained silent on this issue. That's too bad, because I think that these problems can be successfully tackled from a very real socio-economic angle. Here's a few thoughts:

• Workplaces where there's a healthy mix of sexes and ethnic backgrounds will decrease racism. You realise you're all in this together.
• It is absolutely crucial that employers who are found to be discriminating get named, shamed and hung out to dry.
• Concentration schools and ghettoes need to end.
• Emancipatory initiatives from within immigrant communities should be supported, but the state shouldn't make its own - you can't force people to emancipate.

Other issues that could help advance the position of ethnic minorities more or less fall in line with other initiatives to create a more egalitarian society. I'm specifically not addressing homophobia and sexism within the Muslim community because I have a keen sense that these feelings are not altogether dissimilar of those in native, white underclasses in the West. They're just not as exacerbated by a sense of 'Kulturkampf' or racism.

Getting back to the idea of multiculturalism as a surefire mechanism to doom a society, I would say that this is simply not supported by history. The Roman Empire's might and power grew expansively as it absorbed other cultures and those cultures impacted Rome's. It's funny to note that even then, there were backwards, staunch defenders of Rome's "rural values". Genghis Khan built one of the world's most impressive armies (a questionable feat in itself, obviously) with a meritocratic structure, regardless of ethnic background.

No, rose-tinted glasses are a bad thing and stuff like this doesn't solve itself. But there is no alternative, and any serious solution can't be explained in a political slogan. Except, maybe, this one: we all suffer from various forms of oppression. Instead of snarling and guarding jealously whatever we have think we've got left, we need to make a stand together and solve this mess.

White Whine #2: 'Feminazis'

The common image of the screaming, bra-burning, feminist with a square jaw and copious armpit hair is not only ridiculous and demeaning, it is also untrue. There are a lot of misconceptions about feminism. I'll try to be as brief as possible here, but what men feel selective outrage over (e.g. men being portrayed as stupid doofuses in commercials) is actually a much wider range of topics that hurts both men and women. A few statements:

- Not all women are feminist, and not all women understand feminism.
- If an individual woman happens to be a bad person, it's fundamentally wrong to attribute her bad traits to her being a woman.
- Physical, verbal and sexual violence against women is still an enormous problem.
- Feminism has no need for a 'male perspective' precisely because our entire society is informed by this very same male perspective.
- Feminism by not hostile to men, but it is hostile to patriarchy.

The common shorthand is that "Feminism is the radical notion that women are people". That they get treated fair and square, not written off, insulted, lavished in unwarranted praise, treated with kid gloves or fawned over simply because they happen to women.

If men who felt selective anger at being caricatured, what they need to blame is not feminism but patriarchy in general. In fact, if we would all take a few seconds to think that this sort of minor inconvenience is what women and other minorities face every day, we might begin to understand their plight.

One last thing: it's dumb to portray men as some sort of manchild-neanderthals, but as a man, I must say that no matter how coarse, this is a stereotype that we owe to ourselves. Some men still even pride themselves on it. And really, one joke in bad taste and men are hurt? I guess you've never tried to go in an online multiplayer game as a woman.

Are progressive movements antiquated?

The most high-profile progressive cause of today is probably the LGBTQ movement. They fight against discrimination based on sexual orientation and push for equal rights to heterosexual couples. While a lot of countries in the West still have miles to go to achieve true equality, the headway these movements are making is undeniable. It is a more quiet but by no means less vocal movement than the American Civil Rights movement of the '60s, the sufragettes of the '20s and beyond, and the first workers' unions of the early 20th century. Unfortunately, all this progress has lulled a lot of self-described progressive and conservative people alike into a false sense of comfort.

Certainly, if we have to believe the uninformed, the West has moved beyond racism and sexism, unions protect workers' rights and all is well. It's true, progress has been made on many fronts since the start of the 20th century, but to say that empowering movements have become obsolete is misguided at best:

- Violence against women is still a jarringly frequent occurrence
- The 1% continuously try to use their political henchmen to make people believe that unions and regulation are their enemy
- Racism, no matter whether it is dressed up as 'ironic' or not, still prevents people from getting hired and gets exploited by opportunist politicians
- Hostility against sexual minorities, verbal or otherwise, is still commonplace outside of large urban centres and sometimes even inside of it
- Women are still a minority in corporate Boards and high-profile political life

The list goes on and on. To make matters worse, there's a number of groups that insiduously claims that it is now, in fact, heterosexual white men who are getting the short end of the stick. The problem with this statement is twofold:

- Most hetereosexual white men are completely blind to their own privilege because they never experienced anything else
- They focus on petty anecdotes or elements of a patriarchal society that harms everyone, not just them

Progressive movements are certainly not antiquated. In fact, more than ever, in the face of environmental collapse, resurging hard right movements, corporate media manipulation and cynical exploitation of fear, a coherent progressive message is more important than ever. The bottom line is, and this will return in this blog a couple of times, that we are all in this together. Only if we attempt to erase mutual prejudice, we can truly make the playfield level and be societies that offer everyone equal opportunities to succeed in life and be happy - not just the 1%, who is happy to make us believe that 'uppity' minorities are our enemy and the cause of our problems. That is simply not true. The real problem is a deeply-entrenched system of privilege over privilege that finally ends with a tiny amount of white old men.

What is privilege?

The difficult thing about privilege is those born into it rarely notice it. Even worse, some do recognise it and fight very hard to maintain that position of social dominance over others and other groups.

Now, what is privilege?

I am a white, heterosexual, middle class, cisgendered man. My opinions will never be challenged because of my gender, I will meet far fewer obstacles in my professional life, sexual intimidation and sexual assault are but extremely dim fears on my radar, I do not have to deal with any sort of religion that tells me I am a second class person, I don't look particularly poor so I don't have to face stereotypes of laziness and stupidity, there are no powerful political parties in my country that openly hate or mistrust me because of my skin colour, and I am not really judged as a person for the amount of sex partners I have had.

Do you see the pattern developing here? These are all problems faced in various forms by groups in society that are less privileged than I am. Sure, it is entirely possible for me to get raped or to be the target of racial hatred, but not only is it much more unlikely to happen to me than to women or non-white people, but by definition, other groups have to face fears about these matters on almost daily basis.