Robbing the Hearts of Men
Friday, March 7, 2008

It's long been my view that sexism and misogyny do every bit as much damage to men as to women.

Before you go all Outraged-Feminist on my ass -- read on, please.

I believe that the very things that men complain about -- needing to be "the strong one", "the provider", the "bread-winner" -- are a direct result of sexism and misogyny which attempts to cast human beings in rigid gender-based roles from which they believe they cannot escape.

I believe that the very things that men complain about -- feeling under- or un-appreciated, misunderstood, or unseen -- are compounded by the fact that the gender-based role of the guy is to be "strong and silent" -- to "suck it up and be a man" -- because, if he's doing that, how the fuck are we supposed to know what's going on inside him?

Yes, I believe that men have "privilege" over women -- no matter what their stratum on the great pyramid of oppression -- poor men generally still possess privilege more than poor women, black men generally still possess privilege more than black women, etc. (and yes, I know there are exceptions, but I am consciously choosing to speak in cultural generalities -- So sue me!).

However, I think that, at the level of basic existence as a human being, any privilege obtained by being male in this culture is probably cold comfort when you consider the real toll that sexism and misogyny take on those who identify as, or are considered Man/Male/Men/Males.

Here's one of the ways that I believe this toll is taken:

In our society (at least), the following traits are considered primarily "female/womanly":
Tender, Emotional, Vulnerable, Receptive, Passive, Compassionate.

(OK -- you can argue with me about this if you want, but I challenge you to ask 10 people who you know to listen to these words read aloud -- without prepping them beforehand about the context of your query -- and ask them to assign the words as either Male or Female. I'm not saying that this is "what is so" about men and women, I'm saying that this is the overwhelmingly common cultural perception/expectation.)

This is where the toll is paid:

If you are living in a misogynist, sexist society where privilege is awarded automatically by virtue of manliness/maleness or perceived manliness/maleness, and therefore, being womanly/female is an undesirable (if not despicable) position, then you are going to work hard to avoid the culturally-acceptable traits of womanliness.

This, I believe, is one of the tragedies of sexism for men in our culture -- the abrogation of their right to "have a heart" -- a full-range emotional body.

Men feel -- because they're human. They experience moments of tenderness, and vulnerability, and emotion (yes, emotions other than rage) -- as well as moments of compassion, and receptivity, and passivity.

The problem is: They can't express that without looking like a woman. Which, in a sexist, misogynist society, would be a bad thing. A thing that loses you jobs, and gets you called "pussy", and "mangina", and subjects you to suggestions that you "sit to pee" -- which would all be BAD, because being anything like a woman/female human is BAD.

Bad and wrong.

Eve-In-The-Garden-Bad-Apple Wrong.

Condemning-The-Entire-Human-Race-To-An-Awful-Existence Wrong.

This is one of the tolls of sexism and misogyny for men -- they are robbed of their hearts.

Which to me, is tragic.

My father is 81 now, and 17 years ago, just after his retirement, I went with him and my mom to see the movie "The Doctor". The theater was crowded, so I sat in a seat in the row directly in front of my mom and dad, and during the film, I heard this distinct sniffling behind me, and assumed it was my mom. As we left the theater, I noticed my dad's eyes were all swollen and puffy.

I said: "Were you the one who was crying?"

He replied: "Yeah. I don't know what it is. Ever since I retired, I just cry at almost anything . . . . . . . . It's kind of a relief."

I was curious about this. I understood that there was probably a very basic shift from needing to wear the "mask" (required of both men and women) in the work environment (being "businesslike" or "professional"=not showing emotion) -- but I suspected that there was something more.

Since one of the prime stereotypes of what it is to "be a man" in this society is that you are valued for the profession that you have, and the work you produce, it seems to me that my father's retirement from his profession was also, in some way, a resignation from some need to adhere to an entire range of stringent cultural expectations of maleness.

His softening has continued through the last 17 years, and he and I had a particularly sweet moment where we were both blubbing away together at a Little House on the Prairie re-run during a visit. Friends have reported similar "softening" in their elderly fathers.

Think about this the next time you hear someone say the words: "Be a man!"

Actually look at the situation in which this comes up, and think about what is being demanded. In my experience, it usually means: Shut up about your feelings. Grit your teeth and bear your pain and don't let anyone know you're feeling it. Don't show it on your face, don't talk about it, square your shoulders and your jaw and carry on like everything's OK -- hide it however you can.

That, to me, is unbearably sad.

Little boys who cry are "sissies" (aka -- "girl-like").

This wouldn't, and couldn't, be a problem if being a woman, or being like a woman, wasn't a very bad thing -- and training a human being to devalue someone else on a basis that truly, logically makes no sense at all (women by virtue of their physical anatomy, people of color by virtue of their skin color, queer people by virtue of their choice of who to have sex with) requires deep and continuous programming.

Boys cry. They cry from the moment they are born. If they didn't cry as infants, you'd worry about this.

The indoctrination required to train a human being out of one of the deepest human responses (emotionality) is a staggering task when you really think about it -- yet it is done, systematically and thoroughly -- male children are taught to control and suppress any emotion which falls outside the acceptable stereotypical range for "real men" from very early on -- and I believe that it is these stifled emotions in men which so often erupt in the only emotion that is consider "gender-appropriate" -- anger.

After all -- if you'd been denied the right to express the rest of the human emotional range (sad, bad, scared, etc.), don't you think you'd be a bit pissed off, too?

My male friends have reported, in moments of vulnerability, how intense the pressure to "be a man" can be -- how difficult it is for them to cry in front of other men (or in front of anyone) -- how much they fear being perceived as "weak" or passive. A straight, male friend went out last Halloween in drag, and reported that he felt unsafe the entire time he was in public -- because he was a virtual woman for the night.

Personally, I think that in a misogynist culture, one of the only things you can do that is worse than actually being a woman is to be/become a woman, or be/become like a woman. I believe that this is the reason that "sissies" are so often brutally targeted on the playground, and effeminate gay men and drag queens and jail-house punks are traditionally beaten severely and killed in hideous ways -- they have betrayed the privilege of maleness by daring to exhibit behaviors that make them like women.

(Similar punishment is doled out for women who dare to aspire to "manliness" -- think "Boys Don't Cry" -- but that's a different post entirely.)

Of all the ways that sexism and misogyny harm men, I honestly believe that this is the worst -- that men are expected by society to give up these crucial parts of their humanity -- their ability to connect with other human beings emotionally, to express their vulnerability and tenderness without being mocked, and to associate fully with their authentic selves.

This post was inspired by an email exchange that I had with a friend, in which we discussed recent flare-ups of what we both see as sexism and misogyny among men who we consider to be allies, and whether it was really possible for a man in our culture to fully embrace feminism. I found myself typing this:

"I believe that it is possible, but that it's difficult in the way that really deeply ingrained shit is difficult -- like healing from trauma.

In fact, I do think that men in our society are traumatized by sexism and misogyny -- they just haven't felt the wound yet, like someone who is dissociated -- and they're terrified of feeling it."

Posted byPortlyDyke at 10:31 PM 19 comments  

Labels: Connection, Consciousness, Feminism, Freedom, Gender

Portly and The Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Bank Job
Friday, January 4, 2008

This was the next Portly Parable on the popularity list.

This is a story about quitting.

This is a story that I thought about when Tart quit her job.

This is a story from my distant past. 1978, to be exact.

I want to make it clear that it's not as if nothing interesting has happened to me in recent years -- it's just that it would be very difficult to relate some of my more recent interesting experiences without a whole lot of explanation, and without divulging the identities of people who might not want to be identified. Elapsed time is nice that way.

But on with the story: Portly and the Terrible, Horrible (blah, blah, blah) Bank Job.
********************************************************
I won't go into all the details of how I got to the bank. I'm just going to start at the bank. The big bank. The traditional bank. The bad-ass bank. The edifice-on-the-corner bank. The bank that had a huge clean-room with a computer that took up the whole fucking floor bank.

When I went to work there, I thought I had entered the future, because this was the first place that I ever had a magnetic ID card which allowed me to access certain rooms, but not other rooms, which allowed me to ride certain elevators, but not other elevators. It was teh cool. It was, like, Tron (before Tron existed).

I was originally hired as a check-sorter. All day, I sat in front of what was, essentially, an enormous rolodex (I realize that some of you may be too young to understand what a rolodex is) -- but this was an ultra-cool, hi-tech rolodex, with these numbered pedals like a church-organ which allowed you to rotate the files within it until you came to the file for the account that you had checks for, and my job was to look, look, look at each check to make sure that the signature matched the signature on the card at the top of the file into which I was about to file it. We had those little sticky thumb-cotes, and little jars of sticky-stuff sitting at our sides, so that we could quickly and efficiently make sure that everyone's checks got into the correct file.

Bar-codes did exist in some places, but people were more vigilant about their money in those days, I think. They wanted human hands to process their checks, and human eyes to check the signatures. So in this huge bank with its clean room and magnetic-strip IDs, I was sorting checks by hand. Every day.

Apparently, I did such a good job doing this that I came to the attention of the supervisor, who promoted me to a new position within two months. Now, I was an "over-draft manager".

My job, from 8 am to 5 pm, every day, was to look at line after line of tiny computer print-out (18" x 24" ring-clipped books -- green/white alternating lines of dot-matrix print), figure out how many checks a particular customer had written that were "non-sufficient funds", and calculate how to manipulate the pay-off order of these checks so that the bank could stiff the customer for the maximum number of overdraft charges.

By policy, if a customer was overdrawn on some of the checks (but not all), I was supposed to authorize the largest check for payment that I could, and make sure that a whole bunch of smaller checks would bounce, thus enabling the bank to make many $10 per-check charges for overdrafts. Nice, huh?

I became subversive almost immediately. I would have the stack of checks here and the print-out there, and I would see that this one was their light bill, that one was their phone bill, or their heating bill, and regardless of the "policy", I'd pay those first.

I did have the technical authority to make such decisions, and my boss didn't want to be bothered and never checked -- so I did it. This was back in the day that Ma Bell would yank your phone service the day your payment was late -- and they could -- because they were the only game in town. As Ernestine used to say: "We don't care, we don't have to -- we're the phone company". (And that, dear friends, is why you don't want another global media conglomerate -- but that's another post.)

Of all the places I've ever worked, I think that this was the soul-sucking-est. I was a young lesbian, trying my best to do the straight-acting/appearing routine, and I had been a weirdo from birth, orientation not-withstanding.

I took my lunch in the cafeteria alone for the first couple of months, scribbling feverishly in my journal after I had scarfed down whatever horrible food was available under glaring fluorescents, surrounded by institutional-green walls. A woman who worked in my department asked me one Friday: "Writing another letter? Do you write every day?" I looked up from my journal, and said: "Yes. Yes. I write every day."

I had just written: "Friday: It is the day of freedom. It is hard for me to fathom the fact that today, some 90% of the country is rejoicing that the week of toil is over. Surely the bums must laugh at us in their leisure. Sane people fear the mad because they are afraid they might become dangerous. Mad people fear the sane because they know them to be dangerous."

I did find two compatriots at the bank, eventually -- two black women who, like me, tended to sit apart in the cafeteria, but who, unlike me, had not received rapid promotion in their departments, even though they were both wicked smart, and had each been there for more than five years. Huh. Fancy that.

When I took this job, I took it for the money. Period. End of story.

I knew when I took it that it would be temporary. I knew that I needed to get the fuck out of Kansas. I knew that I needed a bit of cash to make that a reality. So, three months after my promotion, I was ready to quit. I confided this to my new friends, and was wondering how much notice to give. The older of the two said simply: "None. Don't give them any notice. I've seen what happens. You give notice and they will load you up with every one of the crappiest jobs they have for the rest of the time you're here. Listen -- do you need another job with them?"

"No."

"Then don't do it. Just go when you're ready to go. Trust me on this."

So I didn't give notice. I quietly did my job. I plotted. I planned. I waited.

On my last day -- a Friday -- at lunch --I went to the teller window in the main lobby and withdrew my entire account balance -- $1500.00 -- more money than I had ever seen in one place -- in cash -- and stashed it in my purse.

I sweated out the afternoon, certain that my outrageous withdrawal must have flagged an alarm somewhere. But no -- apparently their super-computer was not that smart yet.

At 5 pm, I went into my supervisor's office and handed her my magnetic badge. I told her that I wouldn't be back on Monday. I quit.

She got this face full of concern and said: "Portly, what's the problem?"

"No problem. I'm quitting."

"Let's go talk to Personnel," she said, in a motherly tone.

"Okay."

The personnel manager heard my boss retell my quitting moment, and turned to me with a perky tip of her head. She was all chipper and upbeat and "can-do".

"OK now Portly -- we can talk about this. What's bothering you? Let's get this fixed up."

"Nothing's bothering me," I said, "I'm quitting."

"Oh, come on, you can tell us. I promise we'll listen."

"There's nothing to tell. I'm quitting. I won't be back."

The personnel manager and supervisor exchanged looks. The PM asked my supervisor to step out a moment, and dropped her voice slightly.

"Now Portly, if there's something you don't think you can say in front of [supervisor's first name, which I had not known until that moment -- in Kansas, in those days, you didn't call your boss by their first name -- you called them "Mr." or "Mrs." So-and-So], it's fine. You can tell me."

"No. There's nothing. I'm quitting. That's all."

She then stepped briskly into the hall, talked in hushed tones with the supervisor, then they both came back in. Gone, now, the saccharin sweet faces and conciliatory tones. They both stared at me as if I were insane.

"So, you're telling us that you are quitting."

"Yes. That's what I'm telling you."

*Slightly Outraged Tone*: "You realize that you can never expect a reference from this organization. You realize that, don't you?!"

"Yes. I realize that."

*Sympathetic, Comforting Tone*: "Really, Portly, what's the problem?"

"There is no problem. I'm quitting. I won't be back. Not on Monday. Not ever."

They just stood there, dumbfounded.

It was a moment of supreme satisfaction for me. I watched it sink into their collective consciousness: I didn't need them. I wasn't afraid of what would happen to me if they didn't approve of me. I didn't care that they thought I was nuts.

It was profoundly liberating. So much so that I sat there for an extra moment or two, just to watch them marinate in their own confusion.

Then, I got up and walked out of the building for the last time. A half-block away, my only two friends from the bank hollered from the bus-stop: "Did you do it?" I gave them the thumbs-up and they jumped up and down.

I never saw them again. The next day, I got in my VW Bug, and drove off to Portland, Oregon, where I lived for the next 22 years.

TEH END

Posted byPortlyDyke at 11:55 PM 9 comments  

Labels: Freedom, Fulfillment, Hope, True Stories

Portly Dyke's Guide to Things That Do Not Exist
Saturday, December 22, 2007

(Please update your records)

Thing Which Does Not Exist	First Foisted on the American Imagination ON/BY:
Santa Claus	1881 -- Thomas Nast
War on Christmas	2005 -- Bill O'Reilly
The Tooth Fairy	1900 -- Rosemary Wells 1949 -- Lee Rothgow
The Gay Agenda	1992 -- Family Research Council Also not existing -- Gay Destruction of: 1) Marriage 2) Family 3) Western Civilization 4) The World
WMDs in Iraq	2002 -- George W. Bush
Liberal Fascism	2007 -- Jonah Goldberg and others

When people decide to
A) Graduate from MSU (Making Shit Up), and then
B) Go around distributing their Master's Thesis from MSU as if it is fact . . .

Well, that really pisses me off.

This technique is called "The Big Lie"

“If you tell a lie big enough and keep repeating it, people will eventually come to believe it. The lie can be maintained only for such time as the State can shield the people from the political, economic and/or military consequences of the lie. It thus becomes vitally important for the State to use all of its powers to repress dissent, for the truth is the mortal enemy of the lie, and thus by extension, the truth is the greatest enemy of the State.”~ Joseph Goebbels

"It would never come into their heads to fabricate colossal untruths, and they would not believe that others could have the impudence to distort the truth so infamously." ~ Mein Kampf

Case in point: There is no "War on Christmas" -- it doesn't exist. It never did exist. There are no brigades of people vandalizing Creche scenes across the nation or participating in gang assaults on individuals who say "Merry Christmas" on public transit.

Case in point: There is no "Gay Agenda" -- it doesn't exist. It never did exist. There are no queer parents kidnapping their children and forcing them to enter homosexual-indoctrination programs, and no school administrators attempting to shut down student organizations that promote acceptance of heterosexuality.

Case in point: There are no "WMDs in Iraq". They don't exist. They never did. I think this needs no further illustration.

Case in point: There are no "Liberal Fascists" -- they don't exist. They never did. There are no true liberals who are advocating wire-tapping, illegal imprisonment, false arrest, or allowing one person to become supreme leader of the entire government in case of an "emergency" -- and all for the "Greater Good" -- a justification used again and again by Fascist regimes. (Under National Socialism, Hitler used this justification for all four of these activities.)

So, the next time someone wants to toss these MSU phrases around at you, I suggest that you say:

"Well, I'd be glad to talk to you about the [War on Christmas/Gay Agenda/Liberal Fascists], but first, we're going to have to establish whether Santa Claus and the Tooth Fairy exist or not. You better pee first. I have a feeling it's going to be a long conversation."

(I'm guessing the whole WMDs thing probably won't come up --even the staunchest winger seems to avoid the subject these days, but if it does, the phrase above should work just fine.)

This has been another educational moment and Rebuttal-Readiness tool from PortlyDyke.

Posted byPortlyDyke at 12:00 PM 3 comments  

Labels: Advice, Freedom, Politics, Queers, Shakesville, Speaking Up, Truth, Xtians