as small as a world and as large as alone

4:03pm July 11, 2014

feliscorvus:

fierceawakening:

Also regarding the “why some women don’t jump to call themselves feminists” post I just made:

I think some subgroups of women have more reason to show solidarity with men than others, and I think for better or for worse the public face of feminism is often assumed to be separatist or anti-men.

What I mean by this isn’t “ugh hairy lesbians ew.” It’s… mm, let me try to find words.

A few days ago I made a post asking if other women with disabilities had experienced men with disabilities acting entitled to our bodies, our time, our emotional care, etc. in a particular way. I got a flood of yeses; male entitilement is a thing, and it seems to be a thing in every community. (This is of course not the same as “every man acts entitled,” just to cut that shit off at the pass.)

But many of the people who answered me were quick to add that they felt uncomfortable even answering me, because men with disabilities (especially developmental disabilities) are stereotyped in horrible demeaning ways. These posters worried that sharing their stories might add fuel to “creepy disabled guy” stereotypes that alarmed them.

Which is a kind of… our way of looking at fighting ableism includes solidarity with men who experience it. We were, in the end, willing to say there’s a problem, our experiences are different, etc. But “our” men, and how the larger society sees and thinks about “our” men, are also important to us.

I don’t want to put words in people’s mouths here when I’m not one of their group, but I think I’ve also seen this from black women/black feminists/womanists. Yeah, misogyny (and misogynoir) are real and important… but we also live in a world where powerful white people see black men, especially young black men, automatically as threats. That affects what critiques of black men’s “misogyny” mean coming from white feminists.

Where other subsets of women — white lesbians who are fairly well off, for example — have the luxury of wanting things “not to be about men” or putting “all their energy into women” or being separatists or the like. They have the luxury of looking at us, when we try to navigate this complicated field of both standing in solidarity with oppressed men and recognizing and speaking up when those men behave hurtfully, and calling what we say and do “What about the menz?” 

I think this is part of the reason I’ve always been ambivalent about feminism too. Because the things that affected me when I was younger that were the most obvious generally had to do with ableism, not sexism. I’m not saying that I’ve never experienced sexism or misogyny. Far from it. But the stuff that wasn’t subtle was ableist. 

And the ableist stuff happened both to me and to men and boys around me. And I saw them get hurt and I cared for them and wanted to fight with and for them. 

And separatism, or “my politics isn’t about men,” or those sorts of things that some women say and do, would make it much harder for me to do that.

Breaking my “don’t reblog people who have’t reblogged me” rule for this. So much “stuff I’ve been thinking about but couldn’t figure out how to articulate” in here. 

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