lagusta.com - men 2007

Why are lefty women so amazingly awesome and lefty men so weird, slightly creepy, and generally just fucked up?

This question has been kicking around in my head for quite a while now.

I really love the left – the good parts of it, of course, not the mainstream Clintonesque Democrats whose beige politics makes me feel slightly woozy, but the real left: that deep down grassroots of the radicals and revolutionaries. The people who own that one Salvation Army suit that they wear when they table (the people who use “table” as a verb, actually) because they think it makes them look so respectable, when a Wal-Mart shopper 5 miles away would never be fooled by it because they bleed progressive politics from the core and sweat it out their pores.

I really love the left, really I do. I’ve been to all the meetings, marches, and rallies, signed and got signatures for all the petitions, put up the lawn signs, had the endless arguments with people whose politics I fundamentally agree with, just as all liberals love to do. My parents met at Woodstock. I didn’t learn how to drive until I was 26. I’m a vegan chef – you don’t get more leftist than that.

But I’ve really got to figure out what’s up with liberal men. I don’t want to hate on my people or anything, but in the spirit of some constructive criticism, I’d like to ask: why are 85% of all liberal men dicks?

I just made up that figure, but admit it: something is up with progressive dudes.

Here is my thesis, in run-on sentence form, on what the problem is with political men on the left: Whereas men on the right[1]will just come right out and say that they are superior and women inferior, lefty men walk around with this horrible sublimated macho-ness that they subconsciously feel guilty for because of vague notions about feminism that they think they agree with but don't really understand, but also deep down don’t really care to understand. They have a veneer of softness, but it’s just the thinnest veneer, which falls to the floor in great irritating flakes when push comes to shove.

Is it because there hasn't been a "men-inism" to teach men how to be good humans who are comfortable in their skin, like there has been for women? I don’t think liberal men want to be assholes - as a matter of fact I think their desire not to be assholes and the deep-down feeling that are is one of the keys to their psyche -- but the fact remains that they sort of are, and what us

liberal, got-our-shit-together/are-dealing-with-our-issues women are left with, in meetings, at rallies, and of course in bed, are these maddening, fucked-up menchildren.

I’m kind of losing my tolerance for them, to be honest.

Bust magazine once did a great article about “wimpsters” – those limp-wristed Brooklyn-esque hipster cuties who you think just must be perfect boyfriends because of their seeming lack of frat-boy-dude-style and copious amounts of 1” band pins but who turn out, upon closer inspection, to be just another boring non-feministy man that you need to live without:

“Wimpsters are men who use cultural artifacts and politically correct platitudes in place of the empty spaces where real thought and emotion should be. Wimpsters are men who unwittingly enjoy Bukowski's misogyny. Wimpsters walk a tenuous tightrope between their secreted, terribly warped masculinity and the mainstream manliness that they claim to abhor.”

Yes yes yes! This is the paradigm of man I constantly see on the left.

I am extremely lucky in that I do not, in fact, share my bed or my life with a wimpster. Ten years ago I fell in love with a beautiful boy who had been raised by wild woman (a mother and two strong-willed sisters) in the wilds of upstate New York, and who was and remains blessedly free of the latent fear/hatred of women that I see in so many guys who are active in leftist politics. I feel lucky to have snagged one of the last remaining “real men” on the left.

A “second wave” friend of mine in her 70s says that things are better for men these days, because in the 1970s when she started becoming aware of feminism, there were not many options for men who rejected the prevailing meat-and-potatoes vision of masculinity. Today, she says, there is space for men to be “soft” and (not to brag or anything, but:) she often uses my partner as an example of a man who escaped patriarchal conditioning.

I do see other men like my man around. Usually they are perfectly lovely people with stellar politics, but they are not terribly politically active. Progressive politics would seem to be a space that welcomes these “soft” men, but it seems that instead it attracts/breeds men who have most definitely not found ways to be comfortable with being a man on the left.

Why is that?

Good liberal women tend to join political groups mostly because we are riding the very last whitewater waves from the second wave of feminism that encouraged us to become politically active. Because our entry into the political realm was so hard fought, we aren’t as cavalier about it as some men- women mostly join political groups to actually accomplish things, rather than as a power scramble. Most good strong women I know have no desire to be the head of the group – they just want to get shit done.

Many women took one look at the sort of Ms. Magazine feminism that says that women should be CEOs and presidents and just exactly like men and decided it didn’t sound interesting – we see through it. Since day one women have been the power behind the power, and when society finally made a little space for us to be the power, we got some Hillary Clinton types, but we also got lots of women who dared to imagine what the world would be like if seen through women’s eyes, and who work to realize this vision, not to fit themselves into power suits and blood red lipstick. In large part, these are the women who go to progressive groups and really work for change.

Men are also often motivated by a desire to improve our little corner of the world. But once seated at a conference table, the types of men who are drawn to progressive groups reveal themselves to also be the types who want to fritter away time with lots of discussions about parliamentary procedure, elections, and protocol. It could be explained as easily as the fact that women still often need to eye the clock to keep track of when the babysitter has to leave, but (not wanting to discount the facts of men and women’s continued inequality when it comes to basic issues) I think it’s that and something more.

Here is my thesis on why sketchy progressive men seem to be overrepresented in progressive groups: Many progressive groups draw men who thrive on hierarchies, and women who spend much of their lives trying to break down hierarchies, simply because that’s what progressive women have to do. Progressive women almost always identify themselves as feminists and have at least a vague notion of gender politics, whereas progressive men often have tunnel vision when it comes to gender politics – they care about marijuana reform, or veganism, or Green Party politics, but they skipped the feminism chapter of A People’s History of the United States – they would never treat women badly, so there you go. If only all men were like them, they figure, there would be no problem. But because women are treated as women are treated (that is: because we live in a patriarchy), women need to care about more than their pet progressive cause just so we can find a space to work for our pet progressive causes.

Before we go any further I should perhaps discuss a rather nasty little monster: that of the Really Irritating, Fucked-Up Progressive Woman. Yes, they exist, but not in the same way their male counterpart does. RIFUPW tend to fit into one or more of these categories:

1) New Agey Weirdos. Not a major problem, but a creature you might come across at the odd rally or march. NAW don’t tend to be active in groups because in no way do they live in the real world, so they tend to be a little blurry about real world problems. Problems like a woman’s access to a safe abortion pale in comparison to the huge problem of, say, mainstream society’s inability to “recognize the divine spirit present on all womanfolk.”

2) College Women’s Studies majors who have gone slightly insane with religious-like fervor for the far left. Usually they come from nasty Republican backgrounds. Don’t worry about them, they will be gone in a few months. Once in a while you get a college Women’s Studies major who has gone slightly insane from reading too much postmodernist, deconstructionist, “third-wave” feminist theory. If they start quoting Foucault and/or speak in a way that seems to suggest that they are using parenthesis in inappropriate ways to make strange puns, slowly back away while maintaining gentle eye contact. Because postmodernism makes fun of actual activism, though, these types are few and far between, and are usually found in East Coast Ivy League college towns.

3) General Nuts. Often these are women who make mean-spirited jokes about men being losers because they only got half of feminism – the half that says that men are a lot of the problem with this thing called patriarchy we live in. They never realized that putting down and hating men isn’t really going to solve much. They are the women you see in the supermarket screaming at their significant others for not remembering what kind of tampon they use. Curiously (or not), most of these women are not lesbians. Lesbians tend to be just…lesbians. Lesbians, in my experience anyway, don’t tend to “hate men,” they just like women. The most virulent man haters I’ve ever met were just mean straight women.

As you can see, there are lefty women to be avoided in progressive groups. Because their numbers are so much smaller and we now know who to keep an eye on, we can move on.

My thesis on what we should do about the problem of wimpster-esque lefty men driving all us sane women crazy: In a word, feminism. In three words: Feminism for men. Feminism, though corrupted and rather stultifying versions of it are currently being taught on college campuses all across the country, has done and continues to do so much for women.

So much that maybe men have been left out in the cold, and now feminism needs to teach men how to be human. Well, feminism has been about teaching men how to be human all along, it just seems that men haven’t been listening, assuming that feminism was primarily concerned with women. On the contrary, a great benefit of feminism is that it opened up a safe space for “softer” (and saner) men (you’re welcome). Feminism says that it is OK for a man to be a human being. Now men need to move into that space, and give up on their tired ideas about hierarchies and power and everything that distracts them from the actual work of progressive change.

Women can’t, however, hold lefty men’s hands and teach them how to not be so annoying – they need to recognize that they are being oppressed by outdated, simplistic ideologies (which translate to irritating behaviors) and to liberate themselves. The tension between the knowledge that being a “manly man” is not p.c. on the left and a lack of (or a lack of support for) alternatives is what causes this weird disconnect in the average progressive activist dude’s heart.

An awareness of feminism need not (and should not) involve going into the woods and beating on drums in order to recapture some lost masculinity or some such ridiculousness. The problem, actually, is an excess of masculinity – masculinity as defined by patriarchy, that is. In short, men need to expand their definition of masculinity to include traditional “feminine” qualities, which will lead to them becoming whole people. Feminism allowed women to become fully human by allowing themselves access to all of society – and now it needs to do the same for men.

The personal is political, dudes!

footnote:

1] Perhaps here I should state that, to my knowledge, I have never actually met a Republican man except for the night of the 2004 election, when I went to Pennsylvania with Moveon.org to do those things that liberal people do before elections in swing states. There were some scary flag-waving suit-wearing totally stereotyped-out Republicans doing just what I was doing, but, you know, for The Enemy, and one guy, with rat-like beady eyes and a leer/sneer, said something to me. I can’t remember how it all went down, but it ended up that he was Jewish and didn’t like my atheist sort of Judaism and I asked him if he could quote me just one passage from the Torah, and he couldn’t but whipped out his Blackberry to show me how it had all these Torah passages on it, and I started screaming at him about how Judaism specifically says that thou shall not vote for Bushes, and…that was my one experience with Republicans.

So, based on this one incident, I can tell you with absolute certainty that Republican men really do think

they are better than everyone else, they really do go around using religion to try to prove how superior they are, and they really do have scary beady eyes that glow red when they look at you. Obviously there is no hope for them. Our little damaged men of the left, on the other hand: we’ve got to figure out their problem so they stop driving us crazy, because, unlike Republicans, it’s just not an option to pretend they are all dead until they really are all dead (not because I’m going to go on a killing spree, because everyone knows all Republican men die of heart attacks in their 40s).