feminism, gender, masculinity, etc

TAP gives a double dose of gender this morning, dovetailing nicely with Joan Scott et al for today's class.

First up: "What's the Alternative to Tucker Max?", with descriptions of cute activist college kids trying to brainstorm alternative masculinities. Makes the good point that most feminist masculinities have so far defined themselves negatively, and not offered programs of their own.

While it's thrilling that there is also a movement of young men all who want to tear down the patriarchy right alongside women, it's dangerous that they don't have a clear picture of what they want to build in its place. At the conference, one young man spoke up against the notion of a new "feminist masculinity," explaining that he feared it would be one more box that young men felt they had to fit into. There's a lot of validity to his argument, but I fear that the old adage is true: We can't be what we can't see. Models help us try on various identities and find one that is truly authentic. The more publicly feminist-aligned men we have, the more opportunities the next generation has to find a positive, masculine gender identity that actually fits.

Many young men, it seems, are stuck in stage one of gender consciousness. They want to prove that they are one of the "good ones" and separate themselves from all the gendered behaviors and beliefs that they now see as oppressive. That, or they wallow in guilt. (This is not unlike the stage many white kids get stuck in upon fully realizing their role in perpetuating racism.) At worst, this point of view is paralyzing. At best, it leads to burnout. It's not until privileged folks, men in this case, can own the ways in which they have a self-interest in resisting systems of oppression that their work becomes sustainable.

Also a story about Kathleen Parker ("Constant Comment: How Kathleen Parker became America's most-read woman columnist"), which points out some ironies in her rise. First, it tracks all the traditional gender stuff she's put out over the years - a very strong theme in her work. Then, the story presents her deviation from other aspects of Republican orthodoxy. Yet she took off because she fit the "Republican woman" checkbox - and because her strong position on traditional gender was enough to trump:

One would be hard-pressed under these circumstances to label Parker a loyal Republican. Indeed, she maintains that she is not and has never registered as such. It was in 1995, when Parker's column was picked up for syndication, that she became a designated voice of the right. "The way the market is set up," Parker says, "there has to be a left, there has to be a right, there has to be a conservative, there has to be a liberal, there has to be a man, a woman, a black, an Asian. Blah blah blah blah."

This political packaging came as a surprise to some. About six years ago, Keyes, Parker's former editor, was managing editor of a paper in Hawaii and searching for a right-leaning columnist to round off the op-ed page. "I called a friend of mine who's an editorial-page editor and said, 'I'm looking for a good conservative columnist,'" Keyes says. "And this person said, 'Oh, Kathleen Parker!' I said, 'What?' I thought, 'Oh, that must be another Kathleen Parker.'"

But Parker's focus on traditional gender roles and impatience with political correctness were enough to sell her as a conservative in a market where a right-leaning woman was an appropriately diversifying oddity. (Which is not to say being a woman was an advantage. "When my syndicate tried to sell me," Parker recalls, "they often heard: 'We don't need Parker, we have [Ellen] Goodman.' Meaning, we already have a woman.")

And it was as a nominal conservative, not as a Palin-bashing would-be liberal, that The Washington Post hired her -- just weeks before she wrote the column advising the vice-presidential nominee to step down.

Goes to show how central traditional gender concepts are to the whole array of rightist politics - even when she deviates in other areas, she covers herself through traditional gender. (Not that she is as crassly opportunistic as that phrasing implies - she writes her thoughts, and others place her work in the larger politico-social gender framework.)