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Old 06-13-2015, 05:33 PM   #84
DanaC
We have to go back, Kate!
 
Join Date: Apr 2004
Location: Yorkshire
Posts: 25,964
I'll have to come back to the emergence of masculinities as a field of study - having just smoked something very pleasant, i'm not sure I could give a coherent account ;p

As far as disagreements with radical feminists? God, where to start. I'm semi plugged in to the local activist scene - not as much as I used to be - in terms of party political campaigning and the like - and also some ties to the cooperative movement, women graduates assoc, and the women's assoc. Mostly left-leaning, some centrist, and in the women's organisations more of a spread across the left-right divide. I know a lot of women in those scenes who are feminist - most of them, as far as I can tell, have an eye-roll response to radical feminists.

For myself, I have several fairly fundamental problems with their approach. Most recently, I was pretty disgusted with the way many radical feminists responded to the issue of trans women in women-only spaces.

I don't like some of the attitudes I've seen from that branch of feminism towards masculinity. Aside from being deeply unpleasant, those attitudes suggest a very confused ideology. To whatever extent gender is constructed, it is constructed for both genders (and indeed all variations). It is also as complex for each. And - if we are going to throw off those essentialist chains - well, then we can't also have women as the natural civilising force for brutish men, can we? If women are not contained within a narrow gender definition, then how is it that women's presence in the boardroom is going to bring about greater harmony and a more caring attitude, purely because they are women?

Most of the problems I have with the way our society thinks about gender boil down to a belief that, whilst there are some differences in how our brains work, we are far more united by our shared experience of humanness than we are divided by our disparate experiences of gender. We focus so much attention on differences that are slight, or highly contextual and ignore the massive overlap.

Alongside that is the idea that we all have our own conception of gender - of what it means to us to be our gender. And if that is ok at one end of the spectrum of masculinity then it is also ok at the other. Masculinity is not a problem for feminists to solve.
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