I'LL TELL YOU WHY...


...we're guilty by association.

[Yeah, I know. I said I wasn't going to do this a lot. And I'm not. But this is another one near and dear to my heart (and other organs), on a subject about which I have previously blogged and babbled and blathered at length. So it seemed to me another prime candidate for a cross-post. Live with it. And enjoy it...]

Over at The Pittsburgh Men's Blogging Society, my esteemed colleague, Judge Peckham, wonders why many people who favor total equality don't want to be called "feminist." Well, Judge, let me tell you...

I was a feminist long before I knew what one was. My mom, who would never have called herself one but who, through her words and her actions and her proud, fierce independence, showed me what it was to be one, made sure of that. As I grew up, the idea that women might not be equal to men was as foreign to me as the idea that men might not be equal to women. Or that the Eagles might one day win the Super Bowl. But I digress.

Throughout high school and college, this was not a problem. I was what the great Christina Hoff Somers defines as an “equity feminist," someone who wants and expects for women what he (or she) wants and expects for everyone: fair treatment, without discrimination. I was loud and proud. And, yes, I had a penis. Which also did not seem to me to be a problem.

At least until I got to grad school, where I was told, over and over (and over) again, in no uncertain terms, by at least a couple of professors and by the same, bitter, angry gaggle of gender feminists -- people who, in Hoff Sommers' definition, believe women are always under seige by institutions that, without exception, perpetuate male dominance -- that I could not possibly be a feminist because of that penis. That’s right, folks. Female colleagues who were my classmates but surely were not my peers, women who were supposed to be fighting against the notion of biology as discriminatory destiny told me that I couldn't possibly be a feminist — I could only be an ally — because of the destiny of my biology. Because I had a dick and they did not and, well, that was the end of the story.

When I told them they were doing to me the very same thing they did not want done to them, when I had the audacity to suggest they were perpetrating a sexism as silly and senseless as ever occurs when a man looks between a person’s legs, sees nothing swinging there but a skirt, and immediately assumes himself superior to her, those women looked at me as uncomprehendingly as cows at a passing train. My words were nothing more than a vague and distant tooting, just one more example of a guy who, no matter how sympathetic he may be, just doesn’t get it and never, ever will. Which in some ways, I suppose, was true; what they got, I surely did not want.

(For the record, the reactions of my male colleagues were often split between a vague concern that I was willing to identify myself as a feminist and a real concern that I’d come up with some clever plan to score with the chicks that they had yet to figure out.)

So, Judge... when you are not even conditionally accepted by the very people who want you unconditionally to accept them, when you have come to speak and stand against sexism but are told, over and over (and over) again to sit down and shut up and feel guilty for certain pieces of your anatomy, when you come to lament the excesses of people who call themselves feminists in the same way that all thoughtful, rational liberals view the existence of Al Sharpton, well, it is no wonder, whether or not you have a penis, that you no longer aspire to be one of the cocks, nor even one of the hens, of that particular walk.

Posted: Thu - January 24, 2008 at 11:58 AM          

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