La noune

english has no good words for it -
and little love.
but I'm not bound by one set
in many settings.
but you are not concerned with good words,
need em not.
but, between word and world, I
but felt your heart beat through it
but one night just then.

the male feminist paradox

"We're told over and over that any action that doesn't involve men is radicalism, is separatism, is fringe. For credibility, for legitimacy, for mainstream appeal, we need men... in order to achieve our goal of liberation, we have to have a greater influence in the world, a louder voice. They tell us, and it seems to make sense, that we need men to model good behavior for boys, since boys won't listen to us, and so our movement must go out of its way to court men for their credibility."
- Male Feminists are Unicorns

"Men's relation to feminism is an impossible one ... the point after all is that this is a matter for women, that it is their voices and actions that must determine the change and redefinition ... my desire to be a subject there too in feminism - to be a feminist - is then only the last feint in the long history of their colonization."
- Stephen Heath

Allow me to mansplain mansplaining: Patronising explanation by some man to some women of something the women know fine well about already - if not better than he ever could know. Also ill-founded contradiction of their views. (see also gaslighting.)

Allow me to mansplain the Male-feminist Paradox: "If you're not part of the solution to sexism, you're a part of the problem - and sometimes even then." (Since society at large grants men a certain status and at least negative freedom. All men are voluntarily or involuntarily oppressive, and lots are voluntarily. A small number want to work against this influence.) But can I do feminism?

[Disclosure: am man, am cis, am breeder]

Is it possible to be male and feminist?


1. Sure! We'll use our privilege against Privilege!

"I'm pretty good at thinking, and I'm ok at speaking; how may I be of service? Let's see - one of the more insidious expressions of sexism is the credibility gap between a man and a woman presenting the same information; let's close the gap using the gap." Can it be so simple?

Well. Self-identifying as a feminist is too easily a means of ducking male privilege without really changing your mode ("fauxminism"). I'd add that self-identifying as a "pro-feminist" is too easily a means of ducking obligations of social justice.

It is maddening to be aware of the power relations that surround you, soaking every thing anyone does. You can't but be changed.


A few prominent examples (insofar as any deviant is really 'prominent'):

• John Stoltenberg, m-f emeritus (Dworkin would hardly have put up with him otherwise)


• Paul Kivel, right-on educator, though loud.


• Robert Jensen, a journalist who's energetically seen the light, or at least a light.


• the "3 Michaels" of male academic gender, Kimmel, Flood and Messner. (bizarrely, there's a fourth prominent Michael, Kaufman. Colonisers.)


• and (more sensational and egotised) David Futrelle.

...and some disgraced ones

• "Good man" Hugo Schwyzer, recently banned from one large feminist community for his past (which reflects badly on everyone).


• Kyle Paine.

2. No.

"First, what the fuck is up with men calling themselves feminists? I don’t call myself a feminist, because it’s not my call whether I am or not. It’s women’s call ... Making a big melodramatic display of tagging oneself with the “feminist” label seems like transparent male cookie-seeking at best, and cover for some seriously nefarious wackaloon shit at worst..."
- Physioprof

Well, that's the most macho way of putting it possible, but yes. If I were challenged on my use of 'feminist', could I insist, however politely, that my power-position does not necessarily disqualify me? That an 'us' and 'them' dialectic set up by segregating by gender can only make things worse? Seems dubious.

Arguments:

- "Feminism is a movement developed by and for women, voice for the voiceless."

- "Men can never really understand what it is like to be a woman (extra premise: & this is necessary to feminism)."

- "Must not rely on men to make feminism credible, because this reinforces shitty discourses."

- "If conceded, men might eventually dominate the movement (& dilute it)."

- "There are too many cases of abuse by 'allies'. It is an unworthy risk"

- "We're not segregating by gender; we're segregating by unjust power."

I'm not convinced that tact and empathy can't compete with shared experience. But the point stands:




3. You tell me.

It isn't up to me if men can can or can't be, and if I am or amn't one. Anyway I don't need membership to support it, and the support is anyway the point.



Are male feminists needed?

Notwithstanding the point in the opening quote (that very-long-term progress against gender will be a matter of changing parenting and male role models): it's outwith my jurisdiction.

(The bigger utopian picture, where the liberation of all genders follows from the final dissipation of the patriarchy is accordingly everyone's business. What might have been called 'feminism-masculism'. Except we seem to have let the word "masculism" slip away to the anti-feminists; derp.)

What would it take to be a male feminist?

"This process of changing a mental framework — of "feeling like shit" — is something everyone from a privileged group has to deal with in order to work honestly and effectively with a less-privileged group. It's difficult, and it's probably the reason more progressive men aren't feminists — because becoming a feminist man means giving up the idea that you're one of the good guys, and recognizing that male privilege affects everyone, good guy or not."
- Anna North

If it is possible, some criteria suggest themselves:

a. Self-aware: Admits his privilege, and tries to limit it. (e.g. doesn't interrupt, doesn't mansplain, gives the women in his life their due autonomy & voice.)

b. Media-aware: Boycotts media that objectify and degrade women. (to counter the line, "Sure I’m a feminist; I love women!") Perhaps this could shift to "criticises media he sees that..." since you shouldn't simply shun controversy - e.g. watching The Help to analyse its treatment of race for yourself.

c. Socially aware: Is aware that many institutions he's tied into oppress women...

d. Active: ...and works to change or protest them. Most importantly, calls out sexism by men in his personal life. Problematise!

e. Feedbacked: When acting, makes sure he's reflecting women's lived experience.

f. Able to listen: Does not lead except by invitation. (This 'follower' status will rankle with many. So what? Sit down, please. Also jars with a certain intellectual tradition which is keen on impersonality.)

g. Knows the mens can wait. Doesn't insist on equal time for men’s issues in feminist spaces. ("Feminist men need to understand that their liberation from standards of masculinity goes hand in hand with smashing patriarchal social structures." - Megan Milanese)

h. Seeks understanding: i.e. has read more than bitty blogged basics of feminism. (Does this seem arbitrary, and pretentious? Well, it ain't the former: unless he respects the movement enough to listen to the ideas and react to their often deeply unsettling challenges, he can't be. The goal is understanding, and it ties in with (e).)

i. Promoter: Encourages women in his life to defy gender roles, at expense of own prestige/control. (This conflicts with criterion (a) when you're faced, as I often am, with unfeminist or post-feminist women. Do we have a right to reject liberation?)

j. Untagged. Is not a self-promoter, not a white knight. "Self-naming and self-identified labels mean nothing. There must be substance to the label they identify with, substance to who they claim to be." - Lucky Nickel

k. Takes care.

Is this so strict as to be alienating? ok kewl.

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A more frivolous question:

Do I get to wear my ^ t-shirt? I've had more encounters and challenges about gender, good and bad, wearing this tee than all others combined. It genuinely does jolt people to see the word i) worn proudly and ii) on a man (even if on my effeminate frame). But it could also be seen as the egotistical, self-honorific thing.

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Am I just whining? Is the above itself colonisation, a cry of "wat about the mens?!" (or 'boo hoo hoo, damned if I don't, damned if I do')?

Well no. First, cos I hope that that objection entails feminist spaces should not be hijacked - not that we shouldn't speak about men in general.

But also because paradox need only be occasion for pain if you are possessed by your need to make the world make sense. Incoherency is destructive because it offends a very common view in intellectual aesthetics (i.e. metaphilosophy, a.k.a. spirituality), not because it is intolerable or nihilistic in itself. I don't suffer from Platonism, much, anymore, so I will sit myself down in this paradox, and wait.

baby baroque

My baby brother, now 6, has a surprising grasp of English. (This is more surprising to me because it means he's left behind the awful Nickleodeon American accent of 2010 and 2011's bastard blend of American and Glaswegian.) He now sounds like a very skilled foreigner. Some choice cuts:

- [after running around and vigorously helping us move boxes] "I found that fun!"

- [after reporting being mooned on the playground] "I wouldn't have thought that a girl woulda done that." (that's an abstract past negative subjunctive ffs! Almost remarkable enough to outweigh my being sad at his gender indoctrination.)

- [seeing Gaelic for the first time, being told that Gaelic (text in which covers my brother's wall) has been a tiny preservationist's language for 120 years now] "That was a time before me. And you. And daddy. And gran. And gran's gran!"

- [during a lull] "I like it when you are here."

On the order of rank in intellectual labour

Magritte (1936), 'The Philosopher's Lamp'

"...not every critic is a genius, but every genius is born a critic..."
- Lessing

"Anyone who calls themselves a philosopher is a bit of an arse."
- Bob Plant

What you get called, as a cultural processor, is not an incidental tag. I've tried to sense out the hierarchy of terms, our snobby job descriptions of wordy people. (This is not to endorse that hierarchy.) The formal question I'm after could be: 'how much cultural capital is attributed by the title?' This is clear when we keep the activity constant and note the change in Distinction:

Take two media examples, "writer" and "author". "Writer" is completely unregulated - a guy who drools out one piece for his student newspaper is one, and so is Antonio Gramsci. "Author" is reputedly the broader category (and legally I suppose it is), but it's got a pretty clear ring of positive evaluation - of authority. But it's also pretty loosely regulated.

Two ideas examples: "thinker" and "philosopher". "Philosopher" is only uncontroversial when it is used as a job description - for that woman in teaching in that university department. Demarcation is difficult, because the field is a wilful fucking mess, but also because there really is an element of congraulation in calling someone a philosopher. Despite my disowning the following in general, I still don't want to allow just anyone to claim the title (e.g. Ayn Rand).

(Ones which often get used pejoratively are italicised:)

• Media people: blogger < journalist < columnist < reviewer < pundit < creative < screenwriter < writer < editor < essayist < author/novelist/poet/playwright < person of letters < artist.



• Ideas people: student < guru < writer < researcher < academic < analyst < author/... < thinker < expert < scientist < lecturer < intellectual < scholar < visionary < theorist < professor < philosopher < genius.

LIMITATIONS OF THE ABOVE

- You probably disagree (and there's not much we can do about that).

- It's rarely a simple matter of rank. Obviously we don't always have relative esteem in mind; obviously context is the determiner of meaning in basically all contexts; obviously there are loads of screenwriters with far more cultural capital than loads of playwrights; obviously the following assumes all other things remaining equal (an assumption which is never true).

- Nonetheless: in media, I think the ones from "essayist" on are honorific terms.

- And in ideas, the ones from "scholar" on. (Admittedly "theorist" gets applied to a heap of empty bullshitters - but what doesn't?)

- I've left out the real pejoratives - e.g. sophist, e.g. hack - because we soon get into Content going down that road - to nihilist and to yellow journalism.

- I've also left out trying to give the complex hierarchy across "academics" - anthropologist < linguist < physicist... (!)

- Are "novelist", "poet" and "playwright" really equivalent? Since theatre is rare and metropolitan nowadays, you could view playwrights as a little more Authorial and Classy, as happened whenever Pinter talked about large things.

- And "artist" is maybe not much of an honorific in most circles.

- The terms also don't exclude each other (e.g. Gramsci was a philosopher but also a theorist of intellectuals).

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Why care about all this cultural-conservative nonsense, though? Why not just revaluate these values, hold the people relevant to our lives - our webcomic artists, our bloggers, our tv satirists, and our youtubists - over the older thoroughbreds?

Well, cause Year Zero cultural revolution is usually needless, and perhaps impossible, and anyway vitiating. There's lots to learn, kids! Those things that are or will be new under the sun are not revealed by setting fire to the ones already sunkissed, at length, by the world.

come, see my inconspicuous consumption (songs about products)

"The Believer: You wrote some Lacanian-style quotations for last fall’s Abercrombie & Fitch catalog. How did that come about?
Slavoj Žižek: Oh yes, I was helping someone who helped me once. It was easy, he sent me a series of provocative images, and I just wrote silly Lacanian statements about them. My critics attacked me, 'how can you conscientiously accept money from such a company?' I said, 'with less guilt than accepting money from the American university system'."

"We only rap about things we like. I'll mention Cheetos because I like them, but if I didn't they wouldn't be in our songs."
- Damon Dash

Product is everywhere, an integral part of life and chat. Product placement is still repugnant - see Polanski's BMW nonsense for a painful example - and the ethics of advertising are indeed deeply murky. But the brainwash theory of advertising - as put forward by Baudrillard and Naomi Klein and Fight Club and swallowed by many like me - is based on a muddled view of commerce and of human nature. Moreover, it has proved endlessly exploitable by the corporate forces it demonises. So let's put aside for a moment whether deception is inherent to the commercial sphere, and whether our minds are polluted by hypersexual hypercommercial saturation.

People like things, and should admit this to themselves (even if it's not the only sort of thing they like). When musicians eschew this massive bit of contemporary life, they lose something. Products are at very least the most concrete particulars of lyrics. Perhaps the worst thing about the MOR lyrics of (e.g.) James Morrison is not that they are clichéd, but the dumb airless abstraction of them.

Anyway, this list is not songs written for ads, nor ones used in ads, nor even anti-adverts (e.g. This Note's For You by Neil Young; "Don't make another Rickenbacker" by the Dressmakers; "Deathcafé" by Oi Polloi). It is bands using products to express themselves, not the other way round. The choice is not one between being a venal shill or a chaste Marxist.


1. Corona - Minutemen
(you could for instance summon a cultural moment, express your cultural guilt)




2. My Adidas - Run DMC
(song of the joy of ownership - a real, if transitory, thing)



Obviously synecdoches are generally acceptable: see the use of 'vaseline' for all waxy lubes (and so also for gay sex); 'valium' and 'prozac' for all psychiatrics (and so also for modern alienation); etc.

3. Rum and Coca-Cola - Andrews Sisters
(Back then they wouldn't pay you anyway. Note that Jack Daniels is of course shorthand for being krazy.)




4. Shop Vac - Jonathan Coulton
(it's easy to avoid product-placement nausea if you set it amidst enough pathos)




5. Golden Boy - Mountain Goats
(also if you pick an obscure product. This song is product as apotheosis.)




6. Whiteness thy name is Meltonian - Half Man Half Biscuit
(and also if you are absurd about it. HMHB are the kings of artfully concrete lyrics: e.g. one song ending with the baffling chorus "Sturmey-Archer Campagnolo", x9)




7. Driver Education - Indigo Girls
(if products quickly make you dated, they also let you evoke an era)


see also 7'. Village Green Preservation Society - Kinks
(childhood products as institution; capital killed by new capital.)




8. Drink Nike - Future of the Left
(Can be used to communicate a character's culture (here, elderly alienation). see also)




9. Mercedes Benz - Janis Joplin


(compare The Jeep Song by Dresden Dolls: few more perfect expressions of that thing where you nervily see an ex in utterly specific objects)



10. Kodachrome - Paul Simon
(nerds too are safe)




11. Little Red Corvette - Prince
(In line with the long tradition of driving-as-sex songs. Cadillacs in particular seem to get free rein from all sorts of bands.)




12. Wearing My Rolex - Wiley
(the key to a good product song is to invest objects with meaning without losing yourself. And to 'bubble' (< bubble bath = laugh.) see also.)




13. Can It All Be So Simple - Raekwon
(the fledgling rapper uses posh drink and flash to expand his sense of self)

13'. Pass the Courvoisier Part Two - Busta Rhymes
(the established rapper does placements without much hypocrisy - since most never much pretend to be any more than a clotheshorse lashed to its cultural present.)


13''. All I Need - Jay-Z
(or he'll have his own shit to plug anyway)




14. Diet Mountain Dew - Lana Del Rey
(like MCs, postmodern pop divas carry their consumerism lightly)




15. Wallet - Regina Spektor
(she wants to describe this stranger tersely: and somehow the material trace can suggest his spirit!)




16. In McDonalds - Burial
(Just like old feelings spurred by an unwelcome meeting in a public place, Aaliyah's vocal, out of nowhere)

"A good ad should be like a good sermon: It must not only comfort the afflicted, it also must afflict the comfortable."
- Bernice Fitz-Gibbon

Rating the C20th

Ray Johnstone (2010), "Francis Bacon - Icon of the C20th"

Recently asked friends what their favourite decade of the twentieth century is. Answers are varied and cannot fail to say things about us.

Noughties (1900-1909)

RH: The first one. Cos still optimism.

SS: Early 1900s e.g: 1900-1910!!! The wild west was still vaguely wild but on the wind down!!!

HW: 1903-1913. Few will pick 90s - we're too burned by hindsight.

Teens

CK1: Sassoon, Owen, Thomas, Rosenberg. Death of Enlightenment scientism.

Twenties

RM: I had a dream once I was brass player in 1920s-type town with trams. I was in a café when I suddenly felt a strong pull to run. So I ran outside - the light fell softly and air was pleasantly cool. I saw a streetcar pull away in front of me and felt an immense melancholy as a result. I fell on my knees and cried, a trumpet in my hands. Based on this I would go 20s.

AS: 20s! What style, no? Class was not dead.

AK: Jazz Age.

JC: 20s. Why?
Me: I think it's a nice, indirect way of saying something large about ourselves.
JC: ok.

Thirties

PC: Different decades connotate different cultural events, and since I wasn't there for most of them, one culture is as good as another. 1930s says I: I picture 1930s Britain as Bernard Shaw trying to finish a play, but this bloody neighbour Mr Huxley is tripping balls and playing the same record over and over again. In the street below Orwell rummages in the pockets of a grubby overcoat, certain he had money for a box of matches to light his last limp cigarette as it dangles from his lips. (or maybe it didn't happen like that)

JH: 30s. Witters in full flow, good trains, everything presumably was like the early scenes in the film Iris.

Forties (!)

MB: Most historically interesting. Most technologically important etc.

Fifties

CK2: 1950s. well cool tech and rock n roll. Computers, Everest, Little Richard.

Sixties

No one. (The backlash in full force!)

Seventies

CW: Tough i'd say 70s i guess.
Me: Stagflation, Pol Pot and prog rock?
CW: Lax health and safety rules!

Eighties

RM: 80s
Me: Controversial. Is the style epitomised in Drive really enough to compensate for the ideology epitomised in Wall Street?
RM: Yes. Plus the best and worst ever music. The distance between peak and trough is important.

Nineties

AM: 90s: calm before the storm.

MM: 90s cos it was the only one I actually experienced.

LH: Everyone's gonna say 60s, but I'm not! [This thought was apparently universal] 1990s: the days of unrestricted wealth, naive optimism, when it was still okay to believe in multiculturalism, and China wasn't scary yet.

PJ: Tough call. I'd say the fight is pretty much between the 90s and the roaring 20s. (:

Most of the selections were eC20th. What does this say about us? People seem to have taken the question to be one of style or tone, and not history, politics, or even music (since we do not listen to swing or blues as a rule, and yet). We are nostalgic and a little historically conscious (since you don't passively see much of the period, or even the aesthetic, except in certain genres of films).

As for me, I think the strongest overall case (not of style) belongs to the noughties:

• Sheer optimism:



• they thought they were going to finish science;



• only one big war (didn't they think the great Alliances made them impossible?);



• thought they would create a perfect language and spread it universally;



• technology punched society in the mind a dozen times: (the first powered flight, first film, first affordable portable camera, first united telecoms, first radio broadcasts, Ford Model-T, Einstein, Freud, washing machine, suffrage in Finland...)



• Culture ain't so stellar; Mahler being the pop star of choice.



• inklings of modernism tho

miscellany three

1, Is the signal-to-noise ratio of the internet deteriorating? (Yes.)

Is the divergence between actual content and the automated link-spider adsites, the thriving apocrypha trade, the articulate nonsense, the inarticulate rage, and the endless incestuous copy-paste regurgitated spam accelerating? ...

One day we may need state provision of mythbusting, meme-history, and quotation-sourcing: The Ministry of Snopes. ("An Enema for the Bottom Half of the internet since 2021.")

(And that's before accounting for the operation of the iron law of trolldom: )

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2, Several women I have known have eventually told me, more or less sternly, "Let's not talk philosophy."

An awkward position, surely - for what else is there?

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3, Was aggressively asked the other day if I thought that being a vegan makes me better than other people. I thought about this for longer than he apparently would have liked.

What I can say is that I am superior to myself, before. We are too different on too many counts, and our measures are too incommensurate to make the glib comparisons of elitisms past mean much at all.

But actually the superiority (moral, environmental, spiritual) balances out to zero, I think, when we consider the aesthetic, commercial, social, and spiritual friction of it. (The spiritual tension comes from that risk that my reactionary interlocutor resented: the risk of setting oneself aside from people; and so disowning them; and so becoming one of those awful Kierkegaardian / Nietzschean atoms. But there's also e.g. the nagging consciousness that our world is built on pain. And, e.g. your lack of ease at friends' meals.) This does not, however, relativise our obligation away. The moral superiority remains pretty clear, and overrules, me.

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4, An absurd CV (skills which we do not view as skills)

- Can tell time
- Can tie shoes
- Can write (joined-up)
- Can withhold comment on social superiors.
- Can toilet.
- Act my age.
- Act my attributed gender.
- Know what foods I don't like.
- etc.

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5, A man called Grice once wrote down some rules he thought people do and should speak by:

a. Maxim of Quality: Truth
Do not say what you believe to be false.
Do not say that for which you lack adequate evidence.

b. Maxim of Quantity: Information
Be as informative as is required for current purposes. (No more or less.)

c. Maxim of Relation: Relevance
Don't go off-topic.

d. Maxim of Manner: Clarity
Avoid obscurity of expression, prolixity and ambiguity

To be fair to the man, he couldn't have seen trolls coming. But! We may be able to reconcile John Gabriel's theory of dickwaddery with Gricean conversational maxims. Though Trolls have shattered the above for the {internet} context indexical, we can save it with the following Overriding Gricean norm for {internet}:

0. Maxim of Suspicion: Consider all statements possibly insincere.

0*. Maxim of Selection: Do not feed the trolls.

And this is the only real evil of trolls: they force us to adopt the above defensive distrust. The internet is sans innocence.

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"Epistemology is the ethics of belief"
- Roderick Chisholm

v

"Epistemology is the ontology of knowing."
- Gustav Bergmann

I know which side I'm on.

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7, Realists are wrong but necessary.

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8, Entropy is Satan for secular people. It is the great Beast waiting at the end of all paths, jaws agape. One that we cannot even cross ourselves against. On this reading, thermodynamics is the real dismal science. "Every action is corruption, and every restoration contributes to degradation." (Peter Atkins)

But entropy is not a process; it is the product of all* processes, including everything people do. We increase entropy, smash up the place, a little, just by existing!

Those secularists still ridden by Plato will be broken by this news. (The ones that think that contingency is nihilism; that something must be eternal to be meaningful.) They will take no comfort from our agency; it will in fact sharpen the irony; entropy as not only the devil but original sin too.

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9, "Let's all embrace Elgin!"
- new ad campaign back home

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