Comments Elsewhere

Citizen 382-22-0666:

In fact, though feminism was one of the most important influences on my intellectual development, I no longer identify myself as a feminist. I was told in graduate school—repeatedly and vehemently, by women active in feminist causes and scholarship—that males could not be feminists.

Since I wasn’t there when you had the conversation with these people, I can hardly be positive, but usually when feminists say things like this they aren’t claiming that you as a man can’t support the feminist political programme. They are telling you that they don’t want you to cash out that support by calling yourself a “feminist,” and would prefer a term more like “pro-feminist man.” Roughly, because feminism isn’t just some set of abstract policy positions that anyone can sign on to; it involves some policy positions but it’s mainly something that you live, and as a man you (and I) necessarily stand in a very different position to the movement and to the living of feminism than women do. One reason they worry about this is because of how, historically, feminism has been co-opted and marginalized by liberal and Leftist in the name of an allegedly “broader” program (as if women’s liberation weren’t good enough on its own)?

I think it’s a pretty compelling argument. But whether it’s compelling or it’s complete nonsense, it’s not, as you have portrayed it, any kind of argument against boys helping out in the movement. What it is is an argument about how boys who do support feminism should act, how they should identify themselves, and how they should think of themselves in relation to feminist activism. It’s a call for humility, something which I’ve found, frankly, to be in sadly short supply amongst white Leftist boys. In any case, the fact that the argument is compelling doesn’t mean that there might not be other compelling reasons to reconsider the conclusion (I’ve tried to take up some of these issues and explain why I usually identify myself as a feminist anyway in That Feminist Boy Thing); but I can’t for the life of me find “It hurts my fee-fees when they yell at me for calling myself a feminist” among them. The fact that you as a man may not enjoy a practice, or that it might “alienate” men who are otherwise sympathetic to the movement, is no argument at all for feminists to forswear it. If feminists never did anything that didn’t hack some of the boys who claimed to be their allies off, there never would have been a feminist movement at all.