I have read a few thought provoking articles recently, and I thought, for today, that I would share some of my thoughts and reactions to them.
First of we have this interesting piece that Ursula K. LeGuin wrote for Book View Cafe called A Band Of Brothers, A Stream Of Sisters.
First of all, disclosure time : while I have only read one of her books (The Dispossessed), I love that book enough that I consider myself a fan of hers. Anyone who can put that much fascinating political, sociological, economic, philosophical, and psychological content into one book is clearly no dummy, and jakes in my books.
Now on to the article. One of the more interesting ideas she presents is that because women do not have the same drive to challenge and dominate that men do, they paradoxically do not have the same pressures to form extremely close knit and loyal groups as men.
This jibes with my observation, although I had never thought of it that way before. Male subgroups might seem cold and standoffish and taciturn to women, but they are nevertheless extremely close knit, especially under pressure. Hence the “band of brothers” phenomenon alluded to in the title. I think we men are programmed by evolution to react to danger and stress by pulling together and facing it down, whether it is a dangerous predator on the Serengeti, or a sudden crisis at work. These bonds are very strong despite (or because of?) being mostly unspoken.
I am reminded of an incident I witnessed, when word of an attempted rape spread through a bar I was at, and with amazing speed, every man there, myself included, was a posse, ready to find and punish the offender. A line had been crossed and it did not matter that we had never met one another and had nothing in common with one another. A Threat had emerged, and until it was dealt with, we were no longer individuals. We were a posse, a mob, for good or ill, until the Threat no longer threatened.
So far so good. But then she says this :
So, when the interdependence of women is perceived as a threat to the dependence of women on men and the child-bearing, child-rearing, family-serving, man-serving role assigned to women, it’s easy to declare that it simply doesn’t exist. Women have no loyalty, do not understand what friendship is, etc.
I have never heard anyone say anything like that. Women have no sense of friendship? Who on Earth has ever said that? If anything, it is assumed in our society that women form close knit groups of friends and men just have other men they do stuff with and occasionally grunt at primitively.
I think here LeGuin is falling victim to the trap of oppositional thinking in identity politics, specifically the simplistic “man oppresses women to keep them down” mindset that forces people to filter things through a notion of Group A does things to Group B to keep them down, therefore any problem of Group B must be caused by the overt or subconscious actions or intentions of Group A.
I do not see that as the case in this instance. Men do not systematically attack female interdependence in order dependent on their men, at least, not in the modern world. She speaks the truth when she says it is invisible to men. The gender walls that enforce homosocial bonding remain fairly intact despite a century of feminism. The two sides rarely notice one another, let along attack one another.
But it was this question of LeGuin’s that really grabbed me :
Can women operate as women in a male institution without becoming imitation men?
That is the sort of question that haunts me. Like George Carlin said, “Mindless careerism? Is that the best women can do? “. It bothers me to think that all of 20th century feminism might boil down to essentially, “It’s not fair that only men get to be men. Women should get to be men too!”
That is why I am highly encouraged by the recent generation of feminism’s strong interest in the reclaiming of femininity. Somewhere along the line, feminism internalized a great deal of misogyny, to the point where you had women who were obviously doing everything they could to look exactly like men and stomp out any trace of femininity in themselves and other women claiming to know what is good for all women everywhere.
I mean, imagine the absurdity of a man in full drag screaming about the evils of women.
Luckily, that madness ended, and now women can finally face the question of just exactly how one is female in a world where a lot of the old male-driven definitions are still in place.
I can not claim to have any particularly useful insight to offer the ladies. I know that I value the unique difference of femaleness and I sincerely believe that the genders desperately need one another in order to maintain psychological and spiritual balance. Both genders go crazy without the other, and I say this as a gay man who does not “have to” deal with women in the traditional sexual at all.
Nevertheless, I think we go mad without one another around.
And for what it is worth, my idealistic milk and honey humanism tells me that the most important thing is to be yourself, whatever that happens to be, and eschew false and restrictive binaries that cannot possibly plot your true being on their simplistic and poorly labeled line graphs.
But as someone who feels he falls between genders himself, perhaps I have no choice but to think so. I certainly lack a great many (but by no means all!) of the attributes ascribed to the “typical male” in our modern world.
And yet, I am not a woman either, despite traditionally womanish traits like sensitivity, volubility, desire to nurture, and so on.
Perhaps the best thing we all can do is throw our hands in the air, admit that the whole thing is in flux and elusive, and just try to leave the labels (and the desire for them) at the door.
Confessing your own ignorance is the first step towards wisdom, after all.
