Just One Question…
July 22nd, 2008Al Rae, you’ve been very polite on my site and I really haven’t engaged you other than to say I suspect we will always disagree. Your recent post on gay & lesbian rights will no doubt applause from your choir because they share your general worldview and “progressive” vision of “equality.” To me, I see the same old ideas, scare scenarios and what have you that inspired Androphilia in the first place, so I’m not going to waste my time getting into a circular debate, nit picking about the same old issues. (People always assume I’ve never heard the “good word” from the LGBT gender studies evangelists, and mistake ideological disagreement for uninformed savagery.)
I would like to draw attention, however, to the tone of that post and the insults directed at me personally.
Not because I want a fake apology or because I’m crying myself to sleep every night. I’m not GLAAD; I don’t require or value coerced, staged apologies. I knew exactly what to expect when I published my book, and if anything, I was braced for far nastier tirades. Any man, especially a homosexual man, who speaks positively about masculinity will have his own manhood mocked and picked apart by those who believe that any masculinity unmediated by feminism is toxic, dangerous, oppressive or simply and dismissively ‘outmoded.’ If I lose sleep tonight, it will because I have a pulled rib muscle, or because my car is in the shop. Sticks and stones…
Because you seem to be someone with an interest in sociology, my point here is to draw attention to the way you use your own language to enforce your own brand of normativity. Did you, perhaps only half-consciously, go out of your way to attempt to emasculate me to bring those who might be sympathetic to my views (or similar views) into conformity–to show that shame and ostracism and emasculation will accompany non-conformity?
It’s a tactic, as I’m sure you know, that men have employed throughout history to influence the behavior of others. I’m saying this because you and several of your commenters rattled off a litany of what I recognize to be “stock” insults and “boilerplate” arguments frequently used not only against me, but against any male homosexual who expresses a positive (as opposed to “neutral”) view of masculinity as an aspirational “ideal” (rather than simply as an inborn essence of no particular value, or as one of many social masks of no particular value).
If you read through the online commentary and press commentary about me and my book, very predictable patterns emerge–especially from people who are expressing knee-jerk reactions based on their impressions of what they think the book must certainly be about. These patterns, I think, actually tend to validate the idea–contained in that very book–that gays socialize each other to become more effeminate by validating/celebrating effeminate behaviors and treating masculine behaviors with suspicion (socially and publicly, even if the same behaviors are validated in the sexual realm). The stock argument is that any publicly expressed interest in masculinity must belie an extremely insecure (whatever that conveniently vague and malleable insult means) individual who is lashing out at others to make himself look better by comparison–which is overly simplistic at best, especially if you assume that the individual is aware, as most adult men are, that proclaiming one’s own masculinity brings it into immediate question.
I am OK with normative behaviors and aspirational ideals that not everyone can meet. I am OK with shaming people in an attempt to influence their behavior. All people are not actually created equal, but normative behavioral ideals encourage certain behaviors for certain reasons. You can tweak the ideal and question the reasons (and question the questions) but my opinion is that rejecting normative behavior and social coercion altogether is dumb, dangerously naive and out of sync with human nature.
From what I gather, though, you seem to be against social coercion through the traditional means of establishing clear cut aspirational ideals and shaming those who do not meet those ideals.
If this is the case (though I suspect you would qualify that statement), how would you characterize and justify your comments about me in “A Tip for the Butch Obsessed?”
Though it is a typical charge, I have never, anywhere or at any time, seriously represented myself as the exemplar of all things triumphantly manly. Gays love to build me into a straw superman and then burn me down by pointing out how terrifically, almost impossibly effeminate I am. No one who knows me would characterize me that way, including a fair number of traditionally masculine straight men. When gay males portray me that way–it is generally a reaction to an idea of me, their scripted response to that idea, and a projection of that response on to me, with an emphasis on any details about me or my presentation that seem to validate it (but would not necessarily do so if presented out of the context of me being a homosexual advocate of traditional masculinity).
An example: what you wrote was not so very different from something written about me before any of my current photos were available–and before the book was even published, before it had its final title or real concept down, when it had a more “fun” cover mock up. Same patterns.
My response hasn’t changed much, either, apparently.
There’s an interesting anonymous quote in the comments that is of interest here–right before the creepy spam comments start.
Repeated exposure to a particular paradigm desentisizes and devalues the rest. Gay Radicals do not neccesarily lead for a ‘progressive’, because any Archaeologist and student of the Social Sciences will tell you that ‘progress’ is defined by the group ‘doing’ the defining.
Appropriate.
