"Feminism, in short, doesn't just empower women. It empowers me."

"It allows me to take on roles that have traditionally been associated with women. It gives me more flexibility in my career. As a man, feminism has had a huge positive effect on my life. It seems like the least I can do in return is own it."

Writes Noah Berlatsky under the heading "All the Selfish Reasons to Be a Male Feminist," posted at Slate's XXfactor. He's certainly not telling us all the selfish reasons, since I can think of at least one additional reason: You can get your free-lance writing published at Slate's XXfactor.

Berlatsky talks about having a wife with a full-time job and health insurance benefits and his own role as primary caregiver for their child while he does his writing, and that catches my eye, because it's the family life I had from 1981 to 1987. He says:

There was a time not so long ago where doing any of those things would have made me the object of ridicule, and quite possibly self-loathing as well. Today, though, it's no big deal — and the reason for that is feminism.

Well, there was feminism back then too, but it didn't save men from the inner turmoil of switching traditional gender roles. We thought we were really sophisticated, advanced, hip, and evolved in the early 1980s. Does that come as a surprise to you, Noah? You say, "it's no big deal," but you're writing at XXfactor, where it's in your interest — you have a selfish reason — to say that. But these things work until they don't work, so don't be smug, and good luck. Have you really thought deeply about your masculine self-esteem? Because, to my ear, your thanks feminism sounds shallow.

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"With no notice, the man stepped forward, grabbed the headband off of Dexter's head and threw it to the bottom of our shopping cart."

"He then cuffed Dexter around the side of his head (not hard, but that is not the point) and said with a big laugh, 'You'll thank me later, little man!'"

At the same time as I stepped forward, Dexter grabbed his head where the man had smacked him and threw his other hand forward, stomping his foot and shouting, "NO!" I got between my son and this man and said very firmly, "If you touch my son again, I will cut your damn hands off."

The guy snarled at me, looked at Dexter with disgust and said, "Your son is a f*cking fa***t." He then started sauntering out, but not before he threw over his shoulder, "He'll get shot for it one day."

That spiraled out of control quickly!

The things that happen to HuffPo mombloggers when they happen to go to WalMart with their 2-year-old sons wearing mommy's pink lace flower headband.

Here's the blogger Katie Vyktoriah's description of the horrible homophobe who was, I take it, monitoring WalMart shoppers for insufficiently instilling gender norms in toddlers:

The man was overly large with a bushy beard and a camouflage shirt with the arms cut off. He had tattered shorts and lace-up work boots with no laces. I could smell the fug of cigarette smoke surrounding him, and there was a definite pong of beer on him.

Smoking and shorts. And overly large. When are men overly large? Don't they know when they are taking up too much space? A camouflage shirt with the arms cut off... talk about the right to "bare" arms. And the "pong of beer"... Pong?



Pong, meaning "A strong smell, usually unpleasant; a stink" is a Britishism. OED examples:

1925 E. Fraser & J. Gibbons Soldier & Sailor Words 226 Pong, a stink.
1936 F. Clune Roaming round Darling xxiv. 257 Avoid the smell of camel. They were complete with permanent, pyramid, and perfume, commonly called pong....
1991 D. Coupland Generation X i. i. 4 Smelling the cinnamon nighttime pong of snapdragons and efficient whiffs of swimming pool chlorine.

There's a blast from the past. Not the old Atari game (whoever forgot that?) but "Generation X." Remember when everyone was reading "Generation X: Tales for an Accelerated Culture"? I'd buy that right now and blog it for its poignant, pungent, pong-ent, obsolescences, but it's not available in Kindle? Not in Kindle! Oh! How the times pass! How the cutting edge dulls!

But, what say you? There's a lumbering, overly large man in shorts, a jack-booted thug with no shoelaces, and he's come to snatch the pink headband off your little boy. Threaten him with hand amputation, that might bridge the culture gap. Or, since he's a stinking smoker, a beer drinker, it might incite him to splutter out some warning about future bullying that will be so badly worded that in print it's good enough to make the HuffPo crowd gasp: Oh, noooooo! Homophobia rages... at WalMart. That's why I NEVER go there. That guy is always there, in his over-largeness, blocking the aisles, shuffling around, graceless... and laceless.

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Tina Brown's war on men: "End the Damn Dickmanship!"

She's not just railing against sexting, but against "testosterone," generally, as a driver of bad behavior.

The no-secrets era of social media makes one consider the built-in risk factor of nominating high-testosterone men to positions of power at all.... Perhaps we need some kind of sexual DUI test developed to tell us what is likely to happen when middle-aged libido meets a whiff of power.

And politics is not the only arena to require this test. 

She goes on to talk about some boat and train accidents, caused by cock, in her view. By contrast, there are women:

Think about some of our prominent women in Washington right now. Can you ever even imagine—forgive me, Secretary—Katherine Sebelius uploading a crotch shot of herself on Instagram? Or Janet Yellen ordering up male hookers during downtime at the Federal Reserve? It’s preposterous.

Can we imagine females causing sexual wreckage? A year ago, we were imagining Janet Napolitano "turning the department [of Homeland Security] into a female-run ‘frat house’ where male staffers were banished to the bathrooms and routinely humiliated." I would have forgotten that had Tina Brown's screed not reminded me.

Brown's pushing the old female superiority theory, which is the sexism that was once used to keep women out of politics and business. We're too delicate and too prissy to do what needs to be done. And what if it were a substance like testosterone — a liquid squirting through ducts — that could be extracted and measured and reported to voters and employers? Tina Brown says she wants that information, so we can discriminate. Imagine the world she suggests but doesn't really want us to imagine. Everyone gets a masculinity score, and we judge his/her fitness for power accordingly.

Ironically, Tina would probably score very high. How much testosterone fueled the headline "End the Damn Dickmanship!?

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"Why don't men pursue women anymore?"

A question someone Googled, which brought them to this old blog post of mine, which links to a 2006 NYT Magazine article that I remember very well. Coincidentally, I had reread that post a couple days ago and had been wanting to re-blog it.  My post title is a quote from the article: "Men don’t marry because women like myself don't need to rely on them." I'd said:

The article is very much like the kind of article that is often written about women: profiles of wistful, sympathetic individuals who can't quite get what they want in life and make a valiant, poignant effort to say it's not that terrible. Then there is an undercurrent that seems to imply that we need liberal economic policies to boost men so that women will be able to accept them. And there's a big overtone suggesting that for all the loneliness, marriage really isn't all that appealing to people. Now that we don't march lockstep into marriage anymore and now that women don't require men for economic support, the reasons for marrying -- for a lot of people -- are never going to mount up to the point where they justify giving up the status quo of singlehood.

The comments thread there is excellent, including some memorable commenters who were long gone by The Last Days of Commenting — comments ended on July 7, 2013 — and including Meade — whom I did not encounter in person before 2009, the year we married. Someone in that thread asks me to marry him... but it's not Meade. Good old Meade says:

... I can't blame anyone for not marrying. Have you ever sat in on a divorce trial? It should be a requirement, before being issued a marriage license, for every couple to do so -- a blood test, a background check, and three days as captive audience in the misery of someone else's divorce trial. I assure you, most couples drunk on love would sober right up and vow to remain just friends. And the world would be a happier place. Forget men being statistically marginally happier when married. Puh. Except for the lawyers who make an often times lucrative income from it, divorce is a ring of hell unto itself and the only guaranteed way of never experiencing that hell is to never get married in the first place.

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"How come it's always the guy who doesn't take his suit jacket off, eats too much red meat, and refuses to use a personal desk fan who controls the AC for the whole office?"

That's a comment under this NYT piece by Ginia Bellafante about how air conditioners ought to be set at 78°.

The title of the piece is "What’s Cooler Than Cool? 78 Degrees on the A.C.," because they'd like you to think that somehow fancying yourself as a hipster, following a trend, will feel better than actual physical comfort. Setting the thermostat high — in this view — is like wearing stilettos. You look marvelous. You should suffer for fashion.

Meanwhile, the male who seeks banal, normal comfort is presumed to be the culprit. The imagined demon man — who's always controlling everything — is just wearing the ordinary professional garb that has been worn with little fuss for over 100 years and eating the food that people who don't think too much about food enjoy eating.

But is it really men who feel the need to set the thermostat low? What does it matter? If at any point you feel uncomfortable, focus on the notion that men, manifesting their male characteristics, are doing this to you. That seems to be an acceptable form of amusement. But if you don't find it funny, you might get heated up... beyond the power of your personal desk fan to deliver relief.

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"Why Men Need Women" — the headline to an article about "Why Women Are Good At Getting Men To Give Away Their Stuff."

Instapundit finds a choice example of "the Althouse rule." Here's the underlying article, "Why Men Need Women," which reports a study that finds that "The mere presence of female family members — even infants — can be enough to nudge men in the generous direction."

Instapundit notes that this is the kind of finding that could rankle feminists, who should resist the idea that society's purpose for women is to tame men and structure their otherwise destructive energy for the good of the group.

Fortunately, though, this political incorrectness is offset, as the piece by Adam Grant adheres slavishly to the Althouse Rule on writing about gender, which is that you can report anything so long as you do so in a way that portrays women as superior.

Here's my post from 2005 stating the rule and demonstrating its application in the context of a study about the response to cartoons, which was reported under the headline, "Women May Enjoy Humor More, if It's Funny." "That's not funny" is a punchline for jokes about humorless women, but somehow the reporter of the study transformed the old deficiency into an asset.

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"I can food."

Did that look like something a LOLcat would say? If so, I guess you haven't arrived at "The New Domesticity."

I knit. I can food. I garden. I cook, and when I’m not actively cooking, I’m thinking about what I’m going to cook next... I didn’t grow up doing these things.... So you can see why Emily Matchar’s new book, “Homeward Bound,” sounded as if it could be a mirror into my soul.

This is the pithiest part of the review (at WaPo, by Becky Krystal):

Some of the new domestics think feminism isn’t just about being in the workplace; it’s also being able to choose to not be in it. 

Feminists have been saying that all along, but kind of only because they have to, and there always seems to be this qualification that if you choose the home life option, you've got to do it the right way, which is not because of tradition and not in subordination to a husband. By contrast, if you choose the moneymaker option, the conventional and/or servile aspects of what you're doing are more likely to go unnoticed (or so it may seem to the go-along-to-get-along subordinates to feminism in its most banal form).

Back to Krystal:

Or, Matchar says, it’s about reclaiming for the hipster set what used to be symbols of drudgery, such as the apron. 

Circa 1970, hippies did this. I remember seeing the women's movement of that time as a dreary and very square challenge to the hippie philosophy, which aimed at transcending commerce. But the women's movement soundly trounced hippies. Can hipsters succeed where hippies failed?

Others rebuff [feminism] entirely, blaming feminism for eating away at family life and demeaning the home arts and those who stay home to practice them....

It's appealing to stay home, but women do feel guilty and in need of justifications when they do it. (And how about men? It's even more challenging, even as one might imagine feminists smiling upon the male homemaker.)

Matchar’s dissection of new domesticity raises other, larger issues of race, class and gender. White women who stay home are praised more often than their black counterparts, who risk being called “welfare queens.”

Doesn't that more depend on whether you're collecting welfare? Who can expect praise for that? And I see no trend in America to praise white women but not black women who are doing the same thing. (The racial problem I see in the Disparate Praise category is patronizing black people with praise when they do things that are otherwise viewed as ordinary.)

Impoverished women with less disposable income and time can’t cook every meal from scratch or stay home with their children....

I'll resist saying things I've said before about the economics of the single-earner family, but obviously if you have a single-parent household, you'll need some kind of income stream to opt to say at home.

Also jarring is the notion, articulated by some of Matchar’s subjects, that it’s only “natural” for women to be in the home, that they are biologically suited for nurturing. That belief is unsettlingly close to the perverse use of “nature” that justifies discrimination, and not just against women.

I love the way the "nature" theme comes and goes in the discourse of discrimination. Nature makes a great argument — e.g., homosexuality is inborn — until it doesn't. But Krystal doesn't really try to figure out what's happening with the nature "notion." She merely calls it "jarring" and "unsettling."

Hell, yeah, nature is jarring. It will jar you one way or the other in the end.

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Up on the roof.

1. Male on female.

2. Female on male.

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"The young men I knew in that fraternity did not strike me as the hyper-sexualized testosterone containers that articles like this basically imply they are."

Writes Marc Tracy in TNR (referring to that big NYT article "Sex on Campus: She Can Play That Game, Too.") Tracy continues:

Some had girlfriends; some wanted them; some didn’t. Sometimes, it is true, they just wanted (or claimed just to want) to get some. They watched lots of Pardon the Interruption. A few were probably gay. (The heteronormativity of the “women’s story” is another subject entirely.) I am positive that at various times some felt uncomfortable walking under the imprecation to “Play Like a Champion Today,” and felt pressured to do just that, and felt ashamed at failing. My anecdotal evidence admittedly dates back several years; other than that, it is exactly as authoritative as the evidence the article marshals.

Kate Taylor, the article’s author, said Tuesday that she did interview some men, though not as many and not as rigorously, and that an earlier draft of the article poured all of those quotes into one section, which then got cut. “Obviously what men want and how men feel is a critical part of the picture, and in my fantasies it might have been a pair of articles, but that wasn’t possible,” she lamented.

In her fantasies, she wanted a pair. Grow a pair.

Now, why wasn't it possible? I'm guessing this kind of journalism is food for women, and men won't stomach this kind of quote fest of fussing over sex without relationships. The women in Taylor's article acted like they were up for no frills sex, but all this blabbering is the frilliness, and it's for the ladies. You may not have a relationship with your sex partner, but you're talking and reading about whatever it is you're doing outside of the time spent doing it. That is a relationship (of sorts). It's even a dysfunctional relationship. So let's talk all about it... for 5,000 NYT Magazine words and 800 comments.

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"3 Mammals That 'Choose' Their Babies’ Sex."

Yes, one of the 3 is the human being.

Interesting use of the word "choose." I assume that's intended to resonate with the right to choose, and the argument is something like: The vaal rhebok and the francois’ langur are doing it too, so we ought go all out with the sex-selection technology — abortions and all. Don't let the beasts get the jump on us!

We used to try to rise above the animals — they also "choose" infanticide and other murder — but that's been turned around. Now, we fuzzily yearn to emulate what we see in the natural world.

And by "see," I mean seeing what we want to see — typical human style. Any other animal indulging in our kind of see-what-you-want-to-see perceptions would have gone extinct long ago.

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9 things Freeman Hunt said...

... in the comments at "If men did this to women..." (##1-5) and at "A somewhat dismissive response" (##6-9):

1. "When I was growing up, the prevailing sex ed was that you, male or female, were wholly responsible for your own birth control and that you should never assume or believe that the other person was taking care of it. That's not the prevailing wisdom anymore?"

2. "Maybe all those traditionally religious people don't hate sex--maybe they have all those prohibitions on sex outside marriage for some other reason... It's like there was a plan for all of this or something."

3. "Odd. This thread is odd. Are some people furious because (1) Althouse suggests men don't go depositing sperm around women they don't love and would despise having children with or because (2) Althouse/the law being in favor of/upholding abortion rights?"

4. In sarcastic imitation of other commenters: "I don't wanna have babies with the skanks I like to hose down with my sperm. Those disposable tramps I bed should be drawn and quartered if they try to pull a fast one on a fine, upstanding guy like me. Just where do these no-good, dishonest women I make love to get off?"

5. About my supposedly "nasty" taunting of males who claim victimhood over their loss of control over the sperm they've released into the wild: "Heh. Oddly enough, I think that was intended to be encouraging. It's encouraging this idea that a person can be more than an animal who ruts around with whoever, even those he doesn't like or know, more than a careless, appetite feeding beast. I think it was an invitation to the recognition of the divine spark in man."

6. "I'd imagine that Althouse, Instapundit, and Dr. Helen are perfectly capable of arguing intensely about an issue and not taking it personally. Surely anyone who comments here, of all places, does the same on a regular basis!"

7. "How many of us have had it out, ripped each other apart rhetorically and gotten on perfectly well afterward? That's one of the best things about this place."

8. "As for my opinion on this small controversy: This is good. This victim man stuff was hitting a tipping point of absurdity, so the push back is well timed.  I write that as someone who adores men and was raised mostly by her father. And I'm proud to say that my dearly departed father would never have advocated such a base vision for manhood, this vision that sees man as a pathetic beast who throws his sperm about with abandon and needs protecting from the women he beds."

9. "@Freeman: It's actually a venerable academic tradition. I learned about it firsthand from an oldtimer and wrote about it here. I thought about bringing up the fact that it's a hallmark of healthy academia. Whenever you see it slide in academia, the result is less rigorous work and meagerness of mind."

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"If men did this to women, it would be considered a species of rape."

Instapundit weighs in on that lying-about-birth-control question we were talking about — a lot — yesterday.

He's mostly focused on sympathy for males who must pay child support, but I think society has chosen to put the burden on men to control where they put their sperm. Imagine endless factual disputes over whether the woman claimed to be infertile or on pills. The child is real and needs support, and anyone who expressed horror — as Instapundit did — at "The Life of Julia" should understand why we hold men responsible for the consequences they risk.

To save commenters the trouble of telling me again: I know, there was an underage boy one time who was the victim of statutory rape and made to pay child support. So craft a narrow exception for people like him. The general principle is a good one.

If you're thinking of bringing up the woman's right to choose to avoid a pregnancy, let me repeat that this is a decision that properly belongs to the woman. Pregnancy occurs inside the woman's body, where the man lost control of his sperm. He should have been more risk averse.

Now, here's a proposal, based on all the attention Obamacare has given to women's health. Let's require health insurance to cover vasectomies. Then there will be some surgery that men have a right to choose. How's that for a pro-equality policy? Men can freeze their sperm beforehand and thereafter have perfect control over when women get hold of their reproductive powers.

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