The Background.
Cherryblossom wrote a post about Daly’s concept of the background, which everyone has probably already read by now (being two steps behind everyone else probably serves me right for disappearing for weeks at a time 
).
This is one of the most interesting feminist concepts I’ve come across lately. Cherryblossom describes how the background is invisible and unreachable to men:
Men can’t fathom the Background; they could never enter its portals because they don’t realise it exists, and even if they did they wouldn’t be welcome there. In fact, if a man did inadvertantly stumble upon it, a secret shift of energy would take place and all of a sudden the same space would become the foreground. Only the women would notice.
All men see of women is their own projections, which of course, must take place in public, when women are in spaces that men can see them.
This, I think, is undeniably true.
Men like to pretend that they’re experts on women, that they understand us better than we understand ourselves. But deep down they know this is not actually true.
Go to any writer’s group online, and you will see countless men asking for advice on how to write female characters. It comes up constantly in writerly circles. Men’s understanding of women amounts to their own projection, but on some level they sense that this projection is false. For day-to-day purposes men are mostly satisfied with the projection (indeed, maintaining the projection, this false image of women, is one of things that ensures the continuation of the patriarchy). But occasionally they are forced to confront its hollowness. Hence cases where men have enough integrity and take writing seriously enough that they will seek advice on how to craft an authentic female character.
Witness also, all the men who just roll with the projection and churn out junk (and most books and movies are junk, from a female perspective). False female characters, false female experiences. It’s all foreground. Men give us female heroes (note, not heroines) like Lisbeth Salander.
The reverse is not true. Women can write male characters. We understand male struggles, desires, insecurities and hopes. We understand the male experience. We have been made to understand the male experience. It has been held up to us as the only experience, and imposed on us from the day we were born.
Every woman who grows up in the patriarchy has been socialized to hold three perspectives, or points of view in her head. The first is the male projection of us, which governs our behavior in the foreground. We live up to this projection when we are visible to men, and indeed often when we are not visible to men too. The second is the male perspective, which in turn governs the first. It also allows us to identify with men and their struggles. Empathize with them. Understand them.
The last perspective is the female perspective, and it is the most interesting. A lot of the time it is squashed down and deprioritized. For a woman to survive and navigate the patriarchy, the first two perspectives must take precedence, and we must think, act, speak and behave in accordance with them. The female perspective remains in the background, even in our own minds.
It is also the key to The Background. The place that remains completely out of men’s comprehension and grasp.
As women, we have access to the foreground and the background. Men only have the foreground. This is something I believe we can use to great feminist advantage.
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Filed under: lived experience, what makes a woman? | 34 Comments
Tags: mary daly
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COMMENTS
I’ve encountered this theory before, and while I can see the attraction, I’m afraid it doesn’t seem very likely. To start with the literary case, there really isn’t much of a pattern of men being able to do male characters well and being unable to do female characters; the men you describe as doing female characters egregiously badly are typically the ones who are also pretty bad at writing male characters. That you don’t notice this is itself evidence against your thesis that women have an advantage in understanding men.
In general, lack of privilege doesn’t encourage accurate beliefs, it encourages paranoia. On the other hand, while privilege makes laziness an option, and it is of course an option that is frequently chosen, it does at least allow for a certain kind of objectivity; if your interests are not under constant threat, it is occasionally possible to ignore them (and so avoid being distracted by them) when assessing a situation. The privileged seem to have unfair epistemic advantages to go along with all of their other unfair advantages.
the men you describe as doing female characters egregiously badly are typically the ones who are also pretty bad at writing male characters.
Not so. Look at Dickens. He is considered a master of characterization, yet he renders female characters appallingly. This can be seen again and again in the work of lauded Great Male Writers.
The thing which you do not see is that women MUST understand men, because our survival depends on it. Not understanding men, and not applying our understanding to our dealings with men out in the real world gets us raped, killed, abused and punished.
Men have no equivalent incentive to understand women. In fact, male supremacy requires men to not understand women, because it allows them to oppress women without their conscience getting in the way.
Miska, I understand the theory. It just doesn’t work. Safety requires avoiding false negatives when detecting risks. Even if we grant that women have some risk avoidance skill (though this shouldn’t be exaggerated; quite a lot of rape, abuse, punishment, and death happens, after all), protection from risk requires methods of detecting risk that produce few false negatives. It doesn’t require anything more than that; it doesn’t particularly require even avoiding false positives, and certainly doesn’t require an accurate understanding of the nature and source of the risks.
I don’t want to debate the literary examples in detail, as this is an area which will produce anecdotes to support anyone’s theory, and I doubt we’ll get much agreement as to what constitute believable characters anyway (never very impressed with Dickens’ male characters, myself). I will point out a general problem with distant historical examples; it is not difficult to find examples of historical women who have egregiously poor understandings of women. Being a member of an underprivileged group does not always (indeed often doesn’t) protect you from buying into the stereotypes about your group. Indeed, this doesn’t just apply to historical examples; look at, say, Camille Paglia’s writings about women.
Conversely, it is far from rare for members of the privileged class to question stereotypes about themselves and other groups. The fierce defense of strict, rigid ideas about the nature and legitimacy of privilege is generally carried out by marginal members of the privileged class. Men who are also general losers cling fiercely to masculinity, and become MRAs because male privilege is the only thing they’ve got, and because they hope that displaying enough loyalty to the cause of men will earn them some recognition from the men who have power. The pattern repeats with other forms of privilege; it is white trash who join white supremacists and neo-nazi groups, and it’s not generally the truly wealthy, but rather the wannabe rich who buy into the more property-obsessed libertarian theories like Objectivism. Those who actually have a lot of privilege generally take a considerably more detached attitude toward it. Most of the theoretical tools which are used to criticize privilege were developed by highly privileged theorists. Of course privilege gives you an advantage in getting people to pay attention to your theories, so most theories of any kind come from highly privileged theorists, but it’s striking how dominant they are even in this area. Privilege gives one freedom and resources which are extremely advantageous in investigating anything at all, and the invisibility of privilege ensures that privileged investigators rarely worry that they might undermine themselves.
I don’t just mention this to repeat my point that you underestimate the epistemic advantages of the truly privileged, though. The characteristics of the margins of privilege also bear on your claims about the epistemic advantages of those lacking privilege. Those on the margins of privilege seem especially prone to use violence in its defense. As a result, since those outside the privileged class are constantly at risk, their assessments of the privileged class tend to give these defenders of privilege an exaggerated importance. Radical outside critics sometimes seem entirely unaware that these fierce defenders of privilege are marginal, and they often show little or no understanding of what goes on among the less immediately threatening (but actually much more powerful) members of the privileged class.
Miska, I understand the theory. It just doesn’t work. Safety requires avoiding false negatives when detecting risks. Even if we grant that women have some risk avoidance skill (though this shouldn’t be exaggerated; quite a lot of rape, abuse, punishment, and death happens, after all), protection from risk requires methods of detecting risk that produce few false negatives. It doesn’t require anything more than that; it doesn’t particularly require even avoiding false positives, and certainly doesn’t require an accurate understanding of the nature and source of the risks.
You’re missing the point.
The point is not detecting risk, it’s minimizing harm.
The truth is that women cannot actually avoid risk, because no woman can completely avoid men. Understanding men is a strategy for harm minimization, in light of inevitable risk. On an individual level, consider an example of a girl having to live with an abusive father. Now she may detect a risk, but it doesnt actually help because she’s stuck with him. But understanding his moods,behavioral patterns and his anger triggers and modifying her behavior in accordance is the only method she has at her disposal for reducing the harm she is exposed to within the relationship.
In all relationships with a power differential the one with less power will require more sensitivity to the other’s perspective than vice versa. And the greater the threat of harm, the more true this becomes. This applies on an individual level, but it also extrapolates out to class relationships.
I don’t want to debate the literary examples in detail, as this is an area which will produce anecdotes to support anyone’s theory, and I doubt we’ll get much agreement as to what constitute believable characters anyway (never very impressed with Dickens’ male characters, myself). I will point out a general problem with distant historical examples; it is not difficult to find examples of historical women who have egregiously poor understandings of women. Being a member of an underprivileged group does not always (indeed often doesn’t) protect you from buying into the stereotypes about your group. Indeed, this doesn’t just apply to historical examples; look at, say, Camille Paglia’s writings about women.
Well, I’m not interested in literary examples either. I only referred to literature/writing in my post to illustrate men’s (lack of) understanding of the female experience. And male writers who are in general considered great (by other men) consistently miss the mark when it comes to female characterization and female experience. There are very, very few exceptions. Women can and do miss the mark as well, but I covered that in my post. It’s the second perspective women are socialized to carry around in our heads. Men project onto women, and women internalize this projection and reflect it back to men. Women who do this are rewarded by patriarchy (exhibit A: Camille Paglia). Women who dont do this (exhibit B: Mary Daly) are marginalized at best, punished at worst.
As for your other points, it’s veering off into a derail. It is true that marginalized men are to a degree more prone towards violence against women. But their actions actually benefit the privileged men. In effect the marginalized men are doing their dirty work, and it ensures that men as a class hold onto their shared privileges.
Not all men have to rape and beat women to maintain patriarchy. So long as enough of them do, all men retain power over all women, because of the implicit threat of violence in male/female interactions. And men (the ones who dont rape and beat) routinely leverage this threat. I completely reject the idea that more privileged members of a class are less invested in their privilege, and are therefore more detached and objective about it. They may SEEM more detached, because they arent spouting MRA bullshit and the like, but that’s because they dont have to, because some other man somewhere else is saying it for them. Notice, the men who arent spouting MRA bullshit do not contradict it either. The best that women can expect from men is a position of silent neutrality (which, when you’re part of the privileged class actually amounts to tacit approval). Men are able to rape and abuse women because other men refuse to hold them accountable for it. They refuse to hold other men accountable for it because they are completely and utterly invested in the privilege this rape and abuse confers on them.
Also I want to mention that I am less inclined nowadays to discuss matters of feminism with men.
Your comments came through automatically because you have previously left comments here, and I have since turned off moderation. I have let your comments stand because I happen to have time to address them today (and if I recall correctly you had a unicorn moment in one of the other threads, which has given you a pass for now) But I may or may not choose to continue this discussion with you.
I think we need not discuss anything with men ever within a radical feminist blog context. Men have plenty of space to talk to each other — the constitutional convention, Plato’s symposium, the supreme court of the US up until the 1980s, Greek “democracy”, plays performed during Shakespeare’s time.
We want a place where women of radical mind and intellect can create a powerful discourse for the advancement of women, and to give all women the tools to derail and undermine male supremacy 24/7, and hopefully provide young women with tools and ideas to avoid the near rape experiences… going to frat parties with drunken men, not taking karate classes so they can beat the heck out of male molestors in high school etc.
Men, the best they can do is be completely utterly silent when women walk into the room… they can shut up, because they are the oppressors, the rapists, the mass murderers of the world. Men, by their very nature have revealed their desire to destroy human life on the planet… they have used up their space in time, and now it is women’s time to figure out a way to overthrow them. Our lives, our bodies, our minds depend on our worldwide conversation, which no men have any right to any more.
And when men are threatened with extinction worldwide, perhaps, even when they have meer hours away from being wiped off the face of the earth, some damn man will use a sexist word or call a woman a B—-, and this one trangression in their last possible hour will cause the women to turn their machine guns on the last men on earth and turn their private parts in tomato aspict… when you face the aspict aspect of existence Aaron, well, I’ll listen to you in silence, because I expect you to never open your mouth again when women are present.
Mary Daly and Camille Paglia indeed… Paglia was nothing more than a posturing patriarchal pawn in academentia, not fit to carry Mary Daly’s briefcase.
Oh, entitled powerful men use bombs, war, government, laws, control over access to food and necessities to keep themselves in power. No male CEO need utter a word, he has the power to starve millions for profit. MRAs just celebrate his existence, but the CEO / president has sex with interns in the oval office… if women really were in power, just doing that would end their careers completely. And I’d ship them off to male reeducation camp in Guantanamo… good place for feminists to take over… good place to “retrain” rapists, sexists etc. Train….is that even possible for these dogs? (Sorry dogs no offense in the comparison)
And who’s to say Aaron isn’t a rapist!
This is a great post! Yes, men’s privilege hobbles them in many ways, none moreso than when it comes to really understanding what makes women tick. All they have is their projections to fall back on, which are necessary for patriarchy to continue. Imagine what would happen if tomorrow all men woke up with an ability to empathize with women! The regime wouldn’t last half a day.
Whereas women, like all underlings, have a perogative to understand how men think, and know who they are. It is a survival tactic. Those women who are oblivious to mens thoughts (if there are any) will not survive in this patriarchal regime for long. They will be unemployable, unmateable, or simply dead.
and sorry, but “I’ve encountered this theory before”
Been reading some Daly recently, Aaron? It was, after all, Daly who invented the concept in 1978. I very much doubt you’ve encountered it before, but I you have, I hope the writer credited Daly.
@Sheila
Long time, no see! Good to see you are as righteous as ever
Actually, I thought about you when writing this post, because you have always mentioned that when men are alone among large groups of women they go mute. Maybe it’s cause when large groups of women get together they shift into background mode, and men can understand that somethings going on, but they cant actually comprehend what, so they shut down. What do you think?
I havent read Daly properly, and to be honest the excerpts from her work that I have read have often struck me as too metaphysical/abstract for my style. But, I am so intrigued by her background concept that I am going to buy a couple of her books!
@cherryblossom
Thanks! Glad you like.
And exactly right that women understanding men is a survival tactic. Men make the rules, and we have to know what they are to follow them. In order to do this we must understand men, because so many of their rules are implicit.
oh, I’d never noticed that, but it’s true. Men are very taken aback if a they’re in the company of a group of women who are relaxed enough to let some of the background bubble up to the surface.
Hey Miska— as always love your stuff. And wow, I just went into orbit… then thought, uh oh, probably went too far on this blog. So thanks for the understanding.
Mary Daly seems to throw a lot of new generation radfems, mainly because her work is very complex, is immune to soundbites, and requires detailed reading and study.
I have taken her principles out in the world to great insight and success. She is the one woman out there who cracked the code of how patriarchy works, has detailed steps on how to derail it, and when you apply her insights you’ll literally leap ahead.
And she was a real threat, and men absolutely hated her and did everything in their power to silence her. You really ought to read “Outercourse” her autobiography, because it is probably the most heroic story ever told about lesbian feminist being and intellectual will. It should be required reading from every woman who longs for liberation and intellectual power.
OK, on to your other points. As I’ve said in other posts at other blogs, you need to observe how men behave in different social/business settings to test these Daly theories out. In all female groups, a lone man who enters that world literally shuts down. I’m in a company that has over 100 professionals in my grouping, and only 5% of the people at the corporate level are women. That means at meetings, there can be 100 men in a room, including computer guys, SVPs etc., and only 2-5 women. Those situations are horrifying. White collar white men who are so dead and so sexist and so shut down and hatefilled toward lesbian me, and also so contemptuous of women. This company has all male panel discussions, all white males most of the time, and despite my very vocal protests, very little changes. Not one of those men in that company ever gets outraged at the treatment of women at those meetings… high level, white men, and their dead uncaring natures are a shock to behold.
Mary Daly got PhDs at European universities, and her classes consisted of all male seminarians and her! So I feel a certain kinship with Mary Daly…. her confrontation with male mind and male groups think took place in the 1950s, my encounters with these 100 cockaludicrous cockalorums happens every quarter in 2011! No change has occured in the hearts and minds of men, I can assure you.
Now, women speak up and have to aggressively ask questions to be heard in those meetings, and at lunches and round tables the 2-3 of us do talk in animated and informed ways. We know how to converse in very hostile settings, because we are forced to have to communicate with men.
Put one man in a room full of high powered business women, and they literally go mute. The husbands show up every now and then, and sit like bumps on logs. They have never been forced to learn how to conserse with women as equals ever, so they lose the power of speech, when women power dominates a room. This happens so consistently and so predictably that it’s amazing. So Miska, women do enter a background that men have no access to.
Men have no desire to know women as human beings, and treat women is stock stereotypical ways. I was surprised that someone here mentioned writing groups on line where men asked for help in writing female characters in fiction. Men don’t write female characters at all in fiction, they write projections of female, but have no access to real women and real ideas in real time, because they choose not to know subhumans. Men respond to women purely as objects or customers. A man will engage women in serious discussion only to get sex or sell a product, or out of some family obligation. Out in the general public, men rarely ask women serious questions. I don’t think men have the capacity to know anything about women.
Even when they dare to comment here, they show no knowledge of what patriarchy really is, because as the oppressor class, they don’t have to know.
So fictional female characters that men write are so phoney and unreal, and the books can exist purely with male characters. Most movies are all about male characters…that’s why we have the Bechdel rule: does the movie have at least two female characters, and do they have a private conversation in the movie with no men present about a topic that does not involve men at all. Surprise, hardly any movie passes this test.
Men use women characters in movies as sex objects or as decoration, and the same is true in fiction. So in a male centric world, where men aren’t forced to deal with women because women don’t own all the guns, control the arms and police the streets or control all the corporations, men can be jackasses and nothing bad will happen to them.
If I go to the wrong party or go to the wrong parking lot, a man can kill me, or drug my drink at a club. No man I know fears having the S— beat out of him on a city street by gangs of women. Gang rape of men by women is unheard of. War is a male threat to women worldwide. Men stone women, force them to destroy female babies, dominate meetings, pee on trees…. they are not accountable to women in any way.
So if they are dead, if they refuse to treat women as equals, then it is useless ever to talk to them within a radfem context, because they are unable to understand the material… the background, so to speak. They aren’t up to speed on the texts. The law is men’s law, medicine is men’s, history is nothing but men’s studies, so men erase women, destroy our accomplishments, and then claim we have done nothing of value in history, literature etc., because they refuse to publish all of Abigail Adam’s letters on line, the way Jefferson scholars have access to all his letters, for example.
What would happen if we had an all female supreme court? Or a court with 8 women and one man? what would happen then? What would happen if men failed to listen to women and were killed for their inattention? Would they be able to listen and ask questions if their life depended upon it? Would they be able to function if women controlled all the jobs and all the meetings? I doubt it, and it’s why every time a man enters radfem space he screws up. Because as a man, he doesn’t know how to converse with women, he wants to argue HIS point, take up space, never admit that we don’t point to female characters in Dickins’ novels… there is no equivalent to Mr. McCauber or Mr. Scrooge, for example. But Jane Austen’s women are vibrant real and alive with nuance, as are the women in Virginia Woolf’s novels.
Miska, thanks for engaging me to the extent that you have. I find engagement to be more useful than just passively listening, but obviously it is not the purpose of this blog to serve my own personal quest for truth, and I apologize for aggressively pushing my agenda here. I will of course not be offended if you decline to continue the discussion, and will not compound my errors by continuing it myself.
I’ve never met a man who has read and understood Mary Daly, they try to destroy her character, but have never been able to undermine her ideas or defeat her based on intellect and reason. They just label her a man hating lesbian. Well men are women hating, and they kill women, they rape women, but Mary Daly simply destroyed patriarchal concepts intellectually, and this was enough to threaten the living hell out of the men at Boston College. Aaron has not read Mary Daly, and wouldn’t understand her writing. He has never encountered her ideas, no men have really.
And men do this, because again, they can completely ignore women as part of patriarchal privilege, because they won’t be killed or fired for not understanding women.
Mary Daly was fired from Boston College because she dared confront patriarchy and by outwitting it, making fun of it, and revealing how women can achieve liberation from male thought control. Her ideas are about supreme liberation, and the more you engage Daly seriously, the more powerful you will become. You’ll know every male move and tactic in advance, you’ll know they are foreground beings, and that they are destroying the planet. I believe women are waking up worldwide because men have pushed us to the brink of extinction as a species. And they won’t stop. It is no accident that the worst industries like Wall Street and oil are completely male dominated. The military, the catholic priesthood. Whenever men are alone in a room with too much power, you can be they are going to blow up another undersea oil well, or cause millions of people to lose their homes, or carpet bomb a major city.
Whether they rape Nanking (i.e the women of Nanking), or destroy middle class assets or underpay and under promote thousands of female workers (Wal Mart), whether they steal women’s labor and expect them to care for kids with no pension, no benefits and no paid vacations, whether they underpay social security benefits because they base all payments on wages and not actual work… everything that men do is in their reptillian self interest… their porn, their rape their Wall Street. And they won’t stop until they destroy the world… they have created the idea of a second coming of christ… a scenario of worldwide destruction that that follow like an assembly manual.
Mary Daly looked into the heart of darkness of men worldwide— footbinding in China, the witch craze in Europe, genital mutilation in Africa, the entire theology of the catholic church. She uncovered foresisters like Matilda Joslyn Gage, a 19th century radical feminist all but buried and forgotten. Mary Daly told us to reverse the male reversals and to take back what men have stolen from women.
I cannot condemn that species more harshly, and am convinced that men are a certain spectacular species of incredible evil. I don’t think their minds can grasp the full personhood of women, and I don’t think they care. That is what is truly frightening about male supremacy, its utter lack of caring, its complete lack of conscience. And men are threatened by any criticism whatsoever, they don’t intend to ever learn, all they can do is dominate, and they come here to attempt the same, and they still haven’t read the course material…. the arrogance stagers!
Men think that listening is passive. Then they need to go out and confront other men and get them to stop raping us. Men can’t talk within a radfem place, but I charge you arrogant bastards to do real work— stop the porn, stop the rape, you go out and stop your brothers from exploiting us, and you stop exploiting your wives.
Men need to listen and listening you damn fool is not passive, it is a very active enterprise, but as a man you’d never know how to listen to women. It’s why you clueless idiots are destroying the world. Wow, you’re going to do it, and you are doing it. I’ve never met a more dehumanized collective… and the more you see them up close the worse they are.
Men don’t have access to the background because women change their energy when men are around. They know killers and rapists have entered the room. On rare occasions, however, women are so powerful, so connected, that the few men in a setting like that can witness this powerful sisterhood hilarious bonding. They sit in silence, because they can’t access that level of connection. They are constantly thinking of having sex or raping the women there. Or they are sitting like dead wood to placate a wife. No doubt the wife has to endure the man’s boring colleagues and bosses.
The background is powerful women centered ancient knowledge, which we have access to when we bond in sisterhood, when we are political together, when we create and honor the herstory of radical feminist freedom. The artifical world is what men live in, their cities, their pollution, their toxic waste that is the male being… a toxic pornified wastedump. I can literally feel the toxicity of men these days, I know the porn addicts when I meet them, a friend told me police came and arrested a man at his desk for looking at internet porn during work hours. Men at the SEC were doing this too, until a woman took over the SEC and said that looking at porn at work was subject to summary firing…. watching porn as the market crashed… now if that isn’t the male soul I don’t know what else is.
If I post two or more times, I’ll be able to kick that male name off of the recent blog post blogs…. here’s my boot …
And one more drop kick, and that patriarch is out of the stadium. Had this been the reverse, there would have been rape threats, and sexually charged insults.
I love your post Miska, and also the additional comments that you made round out the entire post. Particularly how, for survival, females need to understand (even though there is a lot of propaganda leading to misdirection, and this is females get harmed).
Actually, I thought about you when writing this post, because you have always mentioned that when men are alone among large groups of women they go mute. Maybe it’s cause when large groups of women get together they shift into background mode, and men can understand that somethings going on, but they cant actually comprehend what, so they shut down. What do you think?
This could well be part of it. The other part I guess is that they are grossly outnumbered, and don’t dare try any of their usual controlling shit. Whatever the reason, they really don’t like women gathering in large numbers too often.
Men hate it when women form political male excluding groups. That’s why MTFs have arrived in such force, to undermine previously all lesbian groups, and women’s groups. They make a bee-line for all womyn controlled, womyn powerful traditional groups— hense the attacks at Michigan.
Men have no power in large women’s groups, no ability to pull their usual tricks, and when women don’t much give a damn about them and feel safe, the male power evaporates.
If you see male silence in a majority of space with women, you know something is going right. When women are in male majority space they are under psychological threat, have to endure outright sexist remarks, and women who would normally be powerful are cowed and silent. That’s the difference–male dominance exudes harm, threat, terror, manipulation and gaslighting, female dominant spaces threaten male supremacy itself, but they are no physical threat to men. Feminism never killed men in the streets, but all male so-called liberation movements do bring on violent street fights, and people are killed. Mass movements of men = terror mass movements of women threaten men.
We should have stats posted every day about the types of killing men subject women to– the stats on male rape of women and girls, male killings, male controlled infanticide of girls… the percentage of time men control the airwaves, movies–total number of male characters in all newly released movies annually vs. female characters, total number of minutes men speak on TV vs. women. Men don’t want these stats, they don’t want women to focus on other women; their attempt is to always play dumb and always waste our time, and always hide the stats….
I love your post Miska, and also the additional comments that you made round out the entire post. Particularly how, for survival, females need to understand (even though there is a lot of propaganda leading to misdirection, and this is females get harmed).
Thanks fablibber. Yeah, I think it’s really interesting, how women are forced into understanding men in order to survive. But also I think we are forced to understand men simply because they dominate culture and all the Great Books we are forced to read in order to get our high school certificates will be all about men and their gallant male struggles. But maybe its a good thing that men force us to understand them. We can use this knowledge against them. Did they ever think of that? LOL.
OK, on to your other points. As I’ve said in other posts at other blogs, you need to observe how men behave in different social/business settings to test these Daly theories out. In all female groups, a lone man who enters that world literally shuts down. I’m in a company that has over 100 professionals in my grouping, and only 5% of the people at the corporate level are women. That means at meetings, there can be 100 men in a room, including computer guys, SVPs etc., and only 2-5 women. Those situations are horrifying. White collar white men who are so dead and so sexist and so shut down and hatefilled toward lesbian me, and also so contemptuous of women. This company has all male panel discussions, all white males most of the time, and despite my very vocal protests, very little changes. Not one of those men in that company ever gets outraged at the treatment of women at those meetings… high level, white men, and their dead uncaring natures are a shock to behold.
Ugh. I too have worked in an all male environment. I was literally the only woman in the company. The men there were not openly hostile towards me, but I still felt uncomfortable, cause even when men arent openly hostile, they’re still kind of hostile, if you know what I mean (which I’m sure you do). The biggest thing I missed at that job was friendship with female colleagues. I love working with women. My favorite job ever was one where three women and I shared a space down the hall from the rest of the office. we got along so well and had so much fun. It was a shitty job but I miss it, because of them.
If you see male silence in a majority of space with women, you know something is going right. When women are in male majority space they are under psychological threat, have to endure outright sexist remarks, and women who would normally be powerful are cowed and silent. That’s the difference–male dominance exudes harm, threat, terror, manipulation and gaslighting, female dominant spaces threaten male supremacy itself, but they are no physical threat to men. Feminism never killed men in the streets, but all male so-called liberation movements do bring on violent street fights, and people are killed. Mass movements of men = terror mass movements of women threaten men.
I have come to value women-only and women-majority spaces so much. I said over at FCMs that when I started blogging I never understood the big deal with whether men should be allowed to comment on radfem blogs and “contribute” to the discussion. Well, that has all changed. it only takes ONE man to derail an entire thread and divert women’s energy. If we address all the male-points that they insist on bringing up and arguing again and again, we never get around to discussing what we NEED to discuss.
Most discussion spaces online are male-majority (or if they are not male majority they are male-centered, which amounts to the same thing). The atmosphere is just completely different in women-majority spaces.
I was reading a (non-feminist related) forum the other day, which is almost all women. In the midst of a discussion, a man interrupted and left a comment spouting off the usual misogynist drivel. And about 4 women all responded to him saying “this is misogynist drivel and we’re not going to put up with that”. No discussion. They just completely shut him down. So he went away, because he had no other choice, lol, and the women resumed their conversation.
Now that would NEVER happen in a male-centered space. Instead a man will interrupt a female conversation with misogynist drivel. And women might object to it. But then they will be made to explain in minute detail why it is misogynist drivel, using multiple examples. But by then other men will have come on board to back the first man up, and they will mansplain why all these examples are wrong. And then a few male-identified women will jump on board and back the men up. And eventually a few of the women who originally objected to the misogyny will halfheartedly concede that yes, the men do have a few valid points. And now we’re left with 20 men and a handful of women arguing against 2 women.
That’s the way it rolls in male-centered online spaces. Who’s got time for that shit? Not me.
And also I want to say that since I’ve been “converted” to women-only spaces online, I have been seeking out women-only spaces in real life too. I value the time I spend with women much more than I did.
This has been a fascinating thread.
I love the idea that men are “frozen” when in a group of women, because as I sit here reading your thoughts I remember and incident just like this a few days ago. It was a barbeque at somebody’s house, roughly 50/50 men and women, and then at one point the women just sort of connected in the centre of the room and began talking really intensely. THe men were just silent; one kept sort of interrupting and belittling what we were saying with “pah! women’s talk” inferences. Now I realise he just couldn’t *understand* anything we were saying, he had no concept of the wide range of experiences we were discussing, and he had no way of empathizing with what we were saying, which would have been the only way to understand it. ANd yet he kept drawing our attention away from our thoughts.
YES! Great example. Men disparage female conversation all the time. And it is because they so often just DO NOT understand it. Which must feel really threatening to them, because after all, we are their property, so we should only ever talk about things they understand. If they dont understand the conversation it makes it more difficult for them dominate it, and we cant have that now, can we? Belittling our conversation is a way for them to reassert their superiority in the face of their own blatant conversational inferiority.
Hello !
Thank you so much, SheilaG, that´s EXACTLY how I feel !
Regards,
Trip
I have some thoughts that i would like to garner opinion on.
1. What indicators would one use to determine when a society has achieved true gender equity (which i qualify is when no gender holds legislative, cultural and economic dominance).
2. Where do you decide when feminism has achieved its goals? (given the ambiguous responces i get when asking what the goals are i would ask that you note passingly what these goals are. unfortunately people love to put alittle spin on it).
3. How do you deal with or consider misandry?
4. What is your opinion on a hypothetical matriarchy. (a female dominated society; when women hold dominance in the ways mentioned in thought 1.)
And finally a simple thought. Let’s suppose that the world was a matriarchy identical to the patriarchy now. Would you , given you had the “upper hand”, strive for gender equity for men who in this society be the oppressed?
1. I’m not interested in “gender equity”. I’m interested in women’s liberation from male supremacy.
2. Feminism will have achieved its goal (it only has one goal) once women are liberated from male supremacy.
3. “Misandry” can only refer to an individual’s hatred of men. Misogyny refers to an individual’s hatred of women and societal misogyny, for which there is no male equivalent. Anyone who equates “misandry” with misogyny is an idiot.
4. I’m not going to waste time speculating on hypothetical matriarchies for the benefit of drive-by commenters who use the word “misandry” without irony.
Thanks Miska, this is a great summary! Female liberation from male supremacy is the goal of feminism. Equality is a very stupid term, because that would mean if you had Eastern European dictators, they could still have power, and the people of those countries would not be oppressed by the dictators still in power.
Equality with men, means you are still using men as a measuring stick (dick), rather than posing that the complete liberation of women has nothing really to do with men, and everything to do with ensuring half the human race is free of male tyranny. Quite a different context don’t you think.
I find this focus on equality ridiculous, and it has killed the radical edge of many a movement. Lesbian equality with straight people? I don’t think so, my life has nothing to do with a heteronormative anything. It is free of that measuring stick.
What an amazing discussion! (I skipped over the dood part after reading a bit of what he said. He clearly didn’t “get” the background and tried to turn it into foreground, thus illustrating what we were saying). I am going to read Outercourse, and other Mary Daly books. Thanks for your thoughts about it, SheilaG.
This discussion brought back something that happened to me years ago. I volunteered to be on council that had some power in an organization I belonged to. The council was all men except for me. They elected me the head of the council. I was decent at group facilitation, so perhaps that was why. Even though they elected me, I began to notice that they never listened seriously to my ideas. I’d bring up an idea. No one would listen. Fifteen minutes later, one of the men would bring up my exact point and they’d all discuss it eagerly. My facilitation was welcomed, but my ideas were invisible, always to be taken over by one of them. I was frustrated after every meeting. I came up with a strategy. I’d bring up an idea. I’d turn to one of them and say, “What do you think about thus and so in my idea?” Then I’d turn to another and say, “What do you think about thus and so #2 in my idea?” I’d force them to respond. I had to do that consistently in order to get listened to. Not only was I facilitating the group, I was doing all this other exhausting tap-dancing to contribute as a volunteer.
I learned, over the years, that I did not like being on commitees at work with men. Sometimes I had to, but if there was a choice, I’d choose the ones that were mostly or all women. We had more fun and actually did some things that were meaningful. Unlike the men’s groups that were unnecessarily bogged down in stupid and awful ways. It was not uncommon for the women to acknowledge how much these groups meant to them, and sometimes they were aware of the energy that women create together.
I also had the opportunity to work in two organizations run by women who were second-wave feminists. I now realize what a privilege that was and how rare. The background was there. I learned so much from those women. Goddess bless them!