Dear Men Who Hate Ladies: How do I make my boner go away?

There’s always joining a monastery.

Seriously, though, it’s probably better for everyone everywhere that these fella’s removed themselves from the dating pool.

A lot of people think hate is a passive thing, but I am constantly stunned whenever I read this kind of thing to see just how much maintenance it takes. You really have to go out of your way to train yourself to constantly dehumanize half of the population. And the MGOTWs call us feminists “miserable” and that we are the ones that hate and fear male sexuality– I can’t imagine trying to do this to yourself. It’s very much like “reparative therapy” but for straight men. I hope these dudes wake up and realize what they’re trying to do to themselves is ridiculous.

They often claim the MRM is a male counterpart to feminism, why don’t the MGTOW figure it out and decide they’re the male counterpart to lesbian separatism? 😉 Pretty sure you don’t have to be actually gay, guys. You can just think of wanking off your comrade or sucking their cock as a political statement. 😛

(Hmm… need to write short story.)

Blackbloc – When the fringes of the mgtow homosexual seperatism movement start arguing about how it’s wrong to masturbate with yonic objects, as this just perpetuates evil feminist piv, then we know they’ve arrived!

…Actually I think meller jsut said soemthing about his doll that was getting there..

Fleshlights: symbol of Matriarchy.

Cupcake carousel… hungry now

*reads post*

**blinks**

***reads comments***

Wow. Um, I admit my first thought was, masturbate dude!

And go your own way.

I don’t actually think that the analogy to lesbian separatism works entirely (depends entirely on how lesbian separatism is defined), but my understanding of it (which may be totally out of date) was that lesbians would pool resources to create communes and work on developing ways of supporting their group that did not depend on THE MAN (economically or sexually), and, well, there you go. Lots of variation and debate, I suppose, and even when I was reading more about it back in the day, I never thought it viable (i.e. as long as THE MAN has THE BOMB, it’s hard to ignore the crap the dudes get up to), but I can see the appeal.

Reminds me of this really great article I assigned in my graduate seminar this past summer: “Out of the Closets, Into the Woods; RFD, COuntry Women, and the Post-STonewall Emergence of Queer Anti-Urbanism,” by Scott Herring, published in the American Quarterly V. 59, No. 2, June 2007, pp. 341-372.

As a rural queer, I’m always interested in work on queerness outside the urban setting, and this was a brilliant exploration of that.

Here’s my ‘lecture’ notes I prepared for my students — and if you want a copy of the article, drop me an email (ithiliana AT hotmail.com) and I’ll send you one.

HERRING: This article takes for granted a good deal of gay history which I suspect is not likely to be familiar to the class (have you been following the debates over California’s mandate to schools to teach gay history?). In fact, given the suppression of all forms of alternative sexuality in Texas, I’d be surprised (but happy!) if any of you have covered any of this in any educational or professional workshop setting.

Some online resources that give good background for this article: first, information on the 1969 Stonewall Riots that are a major turning/tipping point for GLBTQ rights movements, and also glossaries for terms used within those movements.

Stonewall Riots:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stonewall_riots
http://socialistalternative.org/literature/stonewall.html
http://topics.nytimes.com/topics/reference/timestopics/subjects/s/stonewall_rebellion/index.html
http://www.columbia.edu/cu/lweb/eresources/exhibitions/sw25/index.html

LGBQT glossaries

http://www.pomona.edu/administration/qrc/lgbtq-education/lgbtq-glossary.aspx
http://www.oneonta.edu/development/gsrc/terms.html

NOTE: one important thing to keep in mind when talking about names, labels, and identifiers in oppressed and marginalized groups–terms that are used by members of the group to other members as friendly identifiers and signifiers of in-group bonding will be seen as insults if used by outsiders who are not members of the group. There is no “single” right name/label that can be used in all contexts and be considered appropriate/correct by everybody.

The tendency in such situations is to blame the marginalized group who are just so picky about what they want to be called; the antidote to that tendency is to keep in mind that the mainstream/dominant group has historically and currently set the rules for naming/labeling in ways that often disadvantage the marginalized groups, and are themselves (dominant group) not used to being “named” by others. I’ve seen major debates online when a transgender person or a transgender ally uses the newly coined term “cisgender” or “cis” to refer to somebody who was born in a body that feels natural to them. This coinage came from the marginalized group, and many cis people who consider themselves “normal” are shocked and offended when the term is applied to them without their permission even though they will use derogative terminology (“tranny” is very insulting) to people in the marginalized group. The issue is not so much which term is used, but the relative power structures.

Another thing to keep in mind is that different people will choose different terms to identify with, perhaps at different times in their life, so that if you are an outsider, it’s always best to ask individuals what they choose to be called and to not assume that the more slang or vernacular terms are appropriate for you to use.

The essay analyzes two mimeographed counter-cultural magazines focusing on rural lifestyles for gays and lesbians in the mid 1970s. One of the magazines (Country Women) directly inspired the other (RFD, which stood for Rural Fairy Digest), one by and for back to nature lesbian separatists often living in communes, the other by and for gay men who identified with a rural lifestyle rather than with the urban “meterosexual” gay men who were the public face of homosexuality then (and to some extent, now). There is also some time spent on the glossy for profit gay urban lifestyle magazine as a contrast to both the counter-cultural ones.

Herring gives some historical context, situating the journals within the period of the hippies, involving communes, various countercultural movements, which originated in the late 1960s, grew in the 1970s, began to diminish in the 1980s. Most of these movements were dominated by middle-class with some working-class white people, and the assumption of straightness is usually applied as well (i.e. the “Summer of Love” is always illustrated by images of heterosexual couples). The Civil Rights movement which was occurring in parallel, with some connections, during the time. The various feminist movements of the 1970s had connections with the Leftist movement, the hippie movement, and the Civil Rights movement–as did the moves toward gay and lesbian civil rights (which did not originally include transgender people, or, in the earlier decades, bisexuals).

Some terminology used in the article: “meternormativity” credited to Judith Halberstam is clearly coined off “Heternormativity.” Halberstam defines it as a “dominant” story of migration from “country” to “town,” ‘a spatial narrative within which the subject moves to a place of tolerance after enduring life in a place of suspicions, persecution, and secrecy’ and embraces a flight to the city that images the metropolis as the only sustainable space for queers.'” (344). In recent years, the issue of rural queerness is being studied and talked about in ways that would not have been possible a few decades ago.

In this context, the term “homonomativity” came to refer to people who are gay and lesbian but also white, middle class, sophisticated, cosmopolitan, and living in urban areas. The term is “post-Stonewall urbanism.” This movement is tied to stripping the gay liberation movement of its impulse to resistance and political activism. Herring notes that there were always pockets of resistance within the urban areas (Gay Liberation Front), as well as the outside movements, the queer anti-urbanism: note that he “redeploys” the term anti-urbanism which is usually used to refer to “white flight” (in the wake of school desegregation). He argues for using it to reference another meaning “a mode of queer critique that counters the normative ideals…of homonormative and meteronormative post-Stonewall urban gay lifestyles” (345). .

The urban gay culture is publicly portrayed primarily as consisting of well off, fairly young, white male professions as well. Herring analyzes the different types of identities and subject construction within the “gay” community, with some commentary on the lesbian community — with a special focus on class as marked by the emergence of glossy lifestyle magazines which are better known than the counter-culture journals created by working-class queers, queer women, and queers of color for themselves.

The full paragraph on page 346 is important to mark: it gives important terms as (i.e. an overview of the : “aesthetic archeology,” “oppositional stylistics,” the historical context of the 1970s), but I also consider it the full fledged thesis paragraph as well as a blueprint paragraph. A blueprint is an overview of the structure of the full essay (it’s a metaphor–think of the relation of actual blueprints to the buildings, and apply it to an overview paragraph).

NOTE: A number of my students have noted the ‘repetition’ in academic writing–as if it is a bug rather than a feature. In long, complex articles (or chapters in long, complex books), a certain amount of repetition is helpful in working through the article. The good or useful repetition is the use of key terms and concepts from the thesis paragraph and or blueprint paragraph (sometimes they are the same) in the topic sentences of the paragraphs and sections in the article. Another good use is the summary at the end (keep in mind that these are 5000-6000 sometimes 10,000 word articles). Plus, these ‘repetitions’ allow us to skim the main parts of an essay quickly in our early research phase to decide if we want to use it in our work–a research process for a new topic often involves the sort of wide spread bibliography search I’m having you all do (but with saving ALL the hits, or at least all the peer-reviewed hits), followed by skimming of titles, abstracts, introductions, and then by more full-scale in-depth active reading of the articles chosen from the earlier stages.

So when I point to key paragraphs for you all, I’m encouraging you to mark and perhaps re-read them.

Here is a list paraphrase of the elements from that paragraph for you all:

1. He focuses on a “pivotal moment in U.S. sexual history” (focus is on that moment, not historical change over time, but the moment is considered important in the field).

2. The importance is related in part to the convergence of different types of magazines produced by GLBTQ people for GLBTQ: these types are the national glossies, regional “radical-lesbian mimeographs” and “anti-urban counterparts [of radical-lesbian mimeographs].

3. He starts with the lifestyle glossies from Los Angeles that “crystallized aesthetic standards of gay urbanity in the post-Stonewall United States.” (Think of how many people today refer to homosexuality as a LIFESTYLE — that’s in part thanks to the effect of the glossies’ discourses.)

4. He identifies rural critiques (also in California) created by lesbian separatists

5. He then focuses on the creation of RFD which is opposed to the Advocate and influenced by Country Women’s “in order to advance what I theorize as critical rusticity” which he then proceeds to define as: “an intersectional opportunity to geographically, corporeally, and aesthetically inhabit non-normative sexuality that offers new possibilities for the sexually marginalized outside the metropolis as well as inside it.”

Here is my gloss of that quote which is a complex and dense one: Herring is doing a close textual and visual rhetorical analysis of RFD, a journal which is in rhetorical opposition to the Advocate even though both are created by white gay men and which is influenced by a journal created by radical lesbians (living in a rural separatist commune). He argues that RFD is in praxis an example of what he is calling “critical rusticity” (critical in this sense means critic cal of, and rusticity is a new term he coined, based on “rustic”). Critical rusticity is an opposition stance to urbanism. (Many of you live in the small towns or rural areas of NE Texas–think of the ways in which “country” and “city” are defined in opposition to each other in all sorts of ways; what Herring is writing about here is a parallel opposition in GLBT culture, in which the geographical country/city dichotomy is part of an intersectional discussion of identity which also includes gender and sexuality but does not pay much attention to race). So in the creation of this (theorized) critical rusticity, RFD locates itself as a text that advices people in regard to a matrix of rural (geography), physical (bodies, corporeally), aesthetic (the images, what is considered beautiful or pleasing) way to “inhabit” (live in) “non-normative sexuality” (queerness) that “offers new possibilities for the sexually marginalized outside the metropolis as well as inside it” (the outside/inside reflects the basic fact that many urban poor could not afford to move to “the country”).

The length of my unpacking of the original text is why the specialized language exists: just as anybody who works with horses or cars needs to know all the specialized language (AKA: jargon) regarding horses or cars, so too people working with theory need a compact way of presenting arguments.

8. He acknowledges flaws/limits to the two counter-cultural journals (relating to gender and racial politics of the lifestyle glossy), but notes how “a working-class ‘country journal for gay men everywhere’ tried to present alternative aesthetic opportunities to dominant U.S. gay lifestyles via rural U.S. Women’s alternative lifestyles” (346).

If you are not part of a culture, it you are outside looking in, then everybody in the group often seems the same to you (homogeneous). It’s only when you start to know more about the culture that the variants and differences and intersections start to become apparent. You may not have thought or known or even considered that there might be a variety of political, ideological, aesthetic, and regional variations among sub-cultures in the larger GLBT community even though you possibly know that not everybody who is heterosexual attends the same church, lives in the same place, votes the same way, etc.

Rest of essay:

Herring presents his evidence, through a full-fledged textual analysis, covered in page 348-368, analyzing covers, advertisements, table of contents, and other elements of the journals.

A few other things to note in Herring’s article (348-9):

The list of earlier gay and lesbian journals that existed during this time (some may still exist; probably most went under, but there are similar web sites these days produced by the GLBT community for their community).

The impact of class (which intersects with gender and race) on different constructions of GLBT identities.

The connections with other social justice movements (feminism, civil rights, Chicano liberation, anti-imperialism).

The textual and rhetorical analysis is worth looking at for examples of how to present an analytical close reading: the details from the text, and the explication/explanation of the interpretation that Herring is presenting. Compare to Borgstrom’s work with Uncle Tom’s Cabin.

The last paragraph sums up what he has done (notice it’s not a carbon copy of the thesis/blueprint paragraph). This article, as many do, incorporates the Works Cited in “notes” rather than a separate section titled “Works Cited.” These are called bibliographic notes, although there are some discursive notes as well.

Random irrelevant rant – please ignore.

So I’m having lunch at the chicken shop with my dad. A woman with a pre-school-aged grandchild is leaving and a young man thumps her hard on the shoulder as she opens the door, then walks away. She’s rattled, the kid is really scared, so I walk her to her car. My dad refused to help, because he “thought it was a domestic”. In other words, my dad is fine with domestic violence.

WTF Japan? Seriously?

This is a serious question – do men like this actually exist?

I’m not so sure. They are totally internet based; they never meet, they have no organization, no hierarchy, nothing. What they have are message boards and forums – and that’s it. Nothing that they say can be verified.

Do they practise what they preach? Or is it a masturbatory fantasy of how they’d like themselves and other men to be?

Thoughts?

MRA movement discovers the previously unknown fact that 15 years olds tend to be idiots. More news at all, when they discover that toddlers are often a little unreasonable.

These guys make it waaayyyy more complicated than it should be. I mean, the choice should be obvious — castration. Sure, it’s probably a bit more expensive than reading crazy rants in order to control one’s lust, but it would sure save time and is much more effective! Plus, there is a variety of options — the surgical route, the chemical route. The minimum of trouble, really. I don’t want to get bogged down in those forums, but I sure hope someone gives them the suggestion.