[Robin McAlpine Blog] Don’t pretend to debate an anger you’re knowingly fuelling

[ALBA-Bot]

Don't pretend to debate an anger you're knowingly fuelling

Last week in the Herald Rebecca McQuillan asked why there is a global backlash against contemporary feminism. Keen as always to be helpful, let me see if I can point her in the right direction.

Before I go on, as a man writing about issues that relate to woman I need to do the standard disclaimers. I was the kind of child who pulled up my friends for using sexist language at school, who had a Zero Tolerance poster on my wall at university and studied feminist literary theory, who had largely de-gendered my language before my 20s were out. I’m hardly hostile to feminism.

Yet I find myself often quite hostile to some modern forms of ‘feminist’ rhetoric, and McQuillan shows why – she just can’t ask why there is a global backlash against feminism without an awful lot of pretty extreme descriptions of men.

Go and have a look; see if you can find any linguistic modifiers (adjectives, verb phrases, contextual illustrations) which are negative about men and then see if you can find any that are positive about men. There are dozens of the former (‘vicious’, ‘angry’, ‘self-pitying’, ‘false notions’, ‘woefully wrong’ and much more). I couldn’t find an example of the latter.

Or let’s have a look at ‘boilerplate insults’ versus ‘attempt at empathy’. There is a single short paragraph in which McQuillan attempts to have any empathy with the state of life of a young man in the modern world, but this is done only so that in the following paragraph she can dismiss it as irrelevant.

I have never demurred from my belief that we need to change our culture – to be less violent, to be less abusive, to be less exploitative. I do not demur now from the view that those who have lived with less power not only need that change in culture more, they benefit way more. That undoubtedly includes the broad category of women. We need a less violent and less exploitative culture because woman are often at the sharp end of its harms.

But let us not for a second elide the need to change culture with a justification for a culture war. Anyone who knows anything about changing culture knows that you can’t change it through force alone, that you can’t beat a prevailing culture out of someone. To change a culture you must first understand it and second be able to summon some empathy for it.

A culture war is quite a different thing. That is not about doing things that change culture, that is just a process of using insults and bullying to strengthen your own position. It isn’t just the right that is engaged in destructive culture wars. Not even nearly.

This conversation is explicitly designed to be had about men, absolutely not with them

Is McQuillan’s article an effort to engage seriously and thoughtfully with the problem (and it most certainly is a problem)? Overwhelmingly not. It comes across as little more than a shallow excuse for name calling. This is just the educated, middle class version of shouting ‘cheer up love, it might never happen’ as a means of social control through ostracisation and mockery.

Both take the subject and places them in a category which becomes unworthy of respect. For the ‘cheer up love’ guy he is framing the target of his comment as somehow inherently sour-faced and therefore unreasonable, while McQuillan is framing men as angry, woman-hating and self-pitying, and therefore worth of study but only as objects, not as participants.

Why is there a backlash? Because this conversation is explicitly designed to be had about men, absolutely not with them. If there was a young man who was unsure of himself, questioning whether some of what he had heard online was fair and somehow found his way to this article, would it help him consider his stance in a more thoughtful way?

Absolutely not. It is just a string of lazy insults and lazy statistical dismissal. Various instances in which there is a more nuanced statistical story to be told (woman are stretching their education advantage over men substantially just now, the gender pay gap now mainly applies to those without a university degree), she simply ignores them.

I’ve wanted to write this for a while but such was the furore for so long I could never have penned any of it. It is routine these days to read articles written from a feminist perspective which overtly argue that the problem is men are genetically inferior, incapable of overcoming their misfiring testosterone, cortisol and adrenalin. I’ve read many of these and wondered when we’re going to start having our skulls measured.

This is a vocabulary which is designed not to be engaged with. It is one of those Kafka Traps in which not agreeing with something absolutely proves it must be true. If a man writes ‘not all men’ then that basically means it must really be all men, and almost certainly means the guy that wrote ‘not all men’. If you don’t claim to be a feminist ally you’re a baddy. If you do claim to be a feminist ally your probably just tricking someone for sex.

This has reached absurd extremes. A group of neurologists discovered that actually the rates of sociopathy in woman are pretty well exactly the same as men (sociopathic men control through power, sociopathic women control through manipulation, both lie effortlessly) – but they were too nervous to publish because people don’t ‘criticise women’ in academia.

Meanwhile one of the greatest acting performances by a woman in years (Cate Blanchett in Tár) was criticised by feminists because the character wasn’t virtuous. How dare they centre a story around a woman who isn’t very nice! That’s not right! Instances of this clumsy ideological overspill are too numerous to count.

As men we are told that any sense we have of being treated unfairly is totally wrong in every way. Well I’ll tell you what, since I only get two phone calls from the BBC (the first ‘we really want you for this panel because you have something important to say’, the second ‘eh, sorry the producer has asked me to stand you down because we needed gender balance’), I disagree.

To be clear, I recognise that it is necessary for my interests to come second here. The overwhelming gender bias in political media in particular had to be broken and that meant that an ‘optional extra’ TV guest like me has to be used to achieved balanced social representation. It has to happen. It’s getting lectured for thinking I ever had the right to be chosen in the first place I find hard.

These kinds of articles aren’t honest explorations of why there really is a dangerous backlash against progress towards equality for women in society

Men – and let’s be honest, we mean white, working class men without a university degree here, don’t we? – face a world of normalised public insults as per the McQuillan article, exist in linguistic traps from which there is no way out and are told that all their feelings are irrelevant all the time, or that those feelings must be insignificant compared to the feelings of a woman, given all they suffer.

I genuinely have a lot of empathy for the societal sources of this situation. Women really have had the worst of it for a long time and they would be right to feel angry. I’ve read objectionable commentary about men written by women and rather than get angry or even speak about it at all I’ve tried to understand the conditions that led to it.

I read my way through an article in The Guardian which literally argued that yes, all men really were rapists (it then published another claiming that those who claim feminists ever said that are gaslighting us, in the same week). As someone who has neither raped a woman or fantasised about it, I could have been pissed off. I was a bit, but instead I tried to understand what drove a highly-educated woman to such an extreme position, and how we can change the culture that caused it.

But that was seven years ago and this debate is not moving on. Round and round we go with the insults. How many weeks of the year are there not at least a dozen articles penned by woman telling men how to live their lives published in mainstream outlets? I’ve got a load of thoughts on how women should live their lives (a lot relates to the time and investment in hairdressing)

Would you like me to share those thoughts with you? Extensively? Over and over and over? Using pretty extreme language dominated by insults? Nope? What on earth would make you think that the same treatment for men would be received more positively, engaged with more enthusiastically?

Nothing. Nothing at all. These kinds of articles aren’t honest explorations of why there really is a dangerous backlash against progress towards equality for women in society. They are pseudo-intellectual revenge fantasies, sanctioned insulting, cheap point-scoring.

They are not a contribution to a better society. They are the causes of a descent into a worse society. They are, ironically, the macho posturings of a macho media and political culture which takes important issues and converts them to clicks through the power of outrage, simultaneously debating rage while knowingly fuelling it.

Why is there a backlash Rebecca McQuillan? Because people like you write in a way that screams out that what you really want is revenge rather than justice, when what we need is justice, not revenge.

Source: Don't pretend to debate an anger you're knowingly fuelling