To speak, or not to speak?
The young woman was determined to be heard. She had the sort of volume that can only be achieved through a combination of theater training, ample quantities of alcohol in the recent past, and an unquestionable confidence in the righteousness of her every word.
“Straight white men should not be allowed to speak” she stated, at eardrum cracking amplitude. “And putting on Shakespeare is just listening to another straight white man.”
We were backstage at Cal Shakes, the beautiful outdoor theater in Orinda where friend and savant Mike Daisey had just given another of his brilliant monologues, this time combining personal revelations, cultural insights, and a powerfully lucid vision of Hamlet.
I’ve been to two of his shows, was blown away both times, and hanging out afterwards, have witnessed the consequence of his provocative monologues, namely that everyone comes up to him after the show and inflicts their own monologues on him. The exhausted man sits and endures speech after speech with grace and good humor. It’s a second impressive performance.
But last Friday the diatribe being shout-talked into the ear drums of every human in the room (and possum, raccoon, and sleeping raven in the woods outside) came from this young lady, swaying moderately, Racer 5 beer tipping up in hand, and opinions crashing around the room like a demolition derby.
We’d communally decided that theater is a medium for a cultural discussion about the rights, roles, and purpose of people (or something like that) when she informed us that straight white men should be allowed no voice in the conversation.
Don’t get me wrong, I know what she means. Here in the West we dwell in the aftereffects of centuries of straight white men screwing things up royally, in a cavalcade of crap, storms of stupidity, avalanches of assholery. It is well past, centuries past, the time when a broader spectrum of voices needs to gain power in our dialogues…all of them.
But NO role? NO voice? Is that the way forward? Should I be bound and gagged because of the skin, anatomy, and sexual preference I was accidentally born into, to pay the penance earned by my pigment predecessors? Is retribution of discrimination the best way forward?
Or is there some way we can take the former criminal class, and let them help drive the progress? Let’s ask Iceland and Suriname.
Those two antipodal countries recently announced an upcoming U.N. panel on gender equality…to which only men and boys will be invited. More oppression? More uninclusive dialogue? Or do, perhaps, straight white men have a role to play?
Do you agree with my opinionated friend and straight white men should bow out (or be forced out), or do straight white men have a responsibility to be involved in advancing equality?
I’m not sure no voice is a good thing, however I understand her rage.
Gender equality is something that won’t be achieved without men giving up some of their power. Do they need a men’s only panel to discuss it? I don’t think so because they are missing the point of gender equality. Women don’t need a panel of men sitting together to decide their fate. As a woman I find that insulting.
It’s like saying, oh you feminists, you fight and argue your cause but it’s not unless us men sit together without you and decide your fate that that’s what counts. It plays into the oppressed feeling that without a man leading the feminist movement we won’t achieve anything.
I read an article from a friend and feminist writer the other day that perfectly articulated my stance. Let me find it for you.
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I absolutely see what you mean about the condescending feel of a panel of men telling women how it’s going to be….which is why I think a men’s panel on it would have be very explicitly about telling OTHER MEN how it’s going to be.
Things this massive don’t change very well unless we all participate, which means helping men come to an overt acknowledgment of the problem, together with an outspoken refutation of the old behavior. I think/hope that’s what the Iceland/Suriname panel would do: have only men because they’re speaking only to men (women as a group are already well aware of the problem!)
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Here’s her public post on her fb page.
Clementine Ford
9 October at 13:12
A friend of mine emailed me earlier and told me she’d noticed my feminism had become more radical and angry in the past year. She was interested (in a totally non-judgmental way) to know what had inspired it. Was it confronting more and more stories about men’s violence against women? Was it the constant backlash and trolling? I had a think about it and wrote a response. I anticipate it annoying or upsetting the #notallmencrew who just can’t let a post go by without commenting about how the REAL feminists understand that ‘engaging men’ is vital and that has to be done by being sweet and nice, but tbh I doonay give a fuck. I hope what it does is harness some more of the potent rage that I’ve been seeing from women and real-ally men lately, and encourage them further to understand that it’s okay to embrace that publicly.
Our anger is not the PROBLEM of understanding how gender inequality and oppression leads to violence against women across a multitude of spectrums – it’s the fucking CONSEQUENCE of it.
Anyway, this is what I said to her:
“I definitely consider that I’ve become more radicalised over the last year and way less tolerant of the softly softly engage the menny approach. I’m just sick of it. It doesn’t achieve anything, it doesn’t help and I really feel lately like it’s just reinforcing patriarchy by treating men with reverence and giving them authority and respect that they haven’t earned and don’t deserve. I’m angry about the amount of violence women experience and the constant downplaying. I’m angry that men make it about them and have to be reassured that they’re not being included or targeted by discussions of violence against women. It seems that a lot of men want to theoretically support the idea of change without actually have to make any changes in themselves. They don’t seem to understand that a surrendering of power will have to occur. The ones who get it are great and they get on board and they just accept that a level of anger is fair given the historical oppression of women.
Supposedly feminist men are also not the ones who bear the brunt of feminist backlash. No one abuses them or undermines them or tries to eradicate their experiences or expertise. No one targets them for ridicule. They can literally have no stakes in the game, and they still make it about them.
You know who makes me uncomfortable a lot of the time? Mikki Kendall. I feel targeted by her anger. I feel discomfort at what she says. I feel like if she met me, she’d hate me. And I read her because I know those feelings are the necessary part of me daily checking my white privilege and my class privilege. I learn from her and I accept that her anger is justified and real and that she is entitled to own it. I don’t need to be liked by her to care about what she’s saying, and I understand that she is angry BECAUSE she has to deal with a raft of issues that I get a free pass on. I don’t know why it’s so difficult for men to understand the same things.
This idea that we need to be enticing and kind in order to get men on board is bullshit. It doesn’t work, and it doesn’t lead to change. And plenty of men have expressed solidarity even though there is anger, and they tell me that they have come to an understanding that this rage is valid and means something even though when they first started reading me I made them uncomfortable and defensive. They can and do get it, so I don’t know why people keep compromising and pretending that men need to be deferred to. It doesn’t help. It’s just reproduced patriarchy.
I just feel like I have come to the end of my tether and tolerance for men who want to make it about them. I don’t have the time or energy to bother trying to convince them in a nice way, or to kindly and politely explain things to them. I have better things to do. Women undervalue our time constantly, and we’re expected to do all this free work in educating people who’ll still turn around and say that we’re wrong and convince themselves that they’ve bested us somehow. Fuck ’em. I just won’t listen to them. I just think it’s beneath me to ‘engage’ them as if they’re spoilt children and I’m their nanny from the underclass.
And man, the rage feels powerful! And I see other women expressing it and feeling more and more entitled to do that without fear of being painted as an angry man hater, and that feels good. I wish instead of Emma Watson ‘reassuring’ people that feminism didn’t mean man-hating, someone had stood up there and said, ‘History has given women lots of reasons to hate men and to be angry. And that anger is real and men should feel ashamed for having caused it. It’s okay to be angry. It’s okay to hate the patriarchy and how it benefits men. It’s okay to talk about male privilege. The men who understand these things and who truly care about women’s rights and liberation will join your war cry and the world will be a better place for it. Get behind us or get out of the fucking way.”
But instead, it’s just business as usual. And this really surface veneer of feminism runs the risk of becoming meaningless because it refuses to interrogate male entitlement. So men aren’t challenged to change, and women fall back into the false consciousness of thinking that everything is okay. Backlash revisited.
I want women to be angry, not complacent. We have earned the right to be angry.”
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Is retribution of discrimination the best way forward?
Is retribution for anything ever the best way forward?
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So true, so true! Revenge is an appallingly seductive and utterly counterproductive mistake in human relations. (See: Israel.) I’d hoped that it was a failing attached to males, and that if we created a world order run by women, perhaps it would diminish, but alas, it seems we humans are not as different as I’d feared/hoped.
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In a truly just world, all of our mouths are too full of burritos and bourbons and chocolates to speak.
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Burritos and bourbons and bonbons! Equally distributed among the incidental demographics, of course.
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I guess the thing is, I can imagine the best-qualified or best-able people to speak about gender inequality happening to be all, or largely, men. But I don’t think it likely, and I have the sense that deferring to women is probably wiser. I suppose some of that is because what is pernicious about gender inequality is the social default of men as the important participants, women as the auxiliaries, and that default needs to be consciously averted.
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I absolutely agree, it’s crucial to get rid of the antiquated idea that men should automatically be dominant.
I’m not sure about the next step though: should women be automatically put in the dominant role for awhile to try and balance the scales, or should we try to move straight to a more meretricious system where one’s gender conveys no advantage/disadvantage? How ambitious do we want to be?
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That’s crazy talk.
Like the UN Secretary-General said, violence against women — and gender equality, generally — cannot happen unless we are all in it together.
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Absolutely! I would sit quietly, perhaps with popcorn, and listen to you discuss that with my inebriated friend. (Unless I had something useful to say, in which case I could say it, regardless of what happens to be in my pants. ;))
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What? No of course straight, white men should be allowed to speak, we all have a responsibility to advance equality and I don’t think totally silencing anyone is helpful.
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