Over at my friend Eivind’s site (Masculinity Movies) there’s been quite an intense discussion over the past few days (scroll down to see the recent interaction). It was triggered by a woman, called Marianne, who stormed into the discussion thread, claiming that people were ignoring and minimizing women’s pain. Marianne also adheres to an extreme form of the feminist framework, in order to support her stance.
Eventually I posted a long comment over there, which I will repost here since I believe it will be valuable to my blog readers as well. Let me know what you think:
This is an internet forum. Or an internet blog on an internet site, if you so prefer. The ways of communicating on the internet cannot be the same as in real life, by definition. I cannot see your body language, your tone of voice, your facial expression – and you cannot see mine.
This means that behaviors that may work in real life do not work here. If a woman is ragingly angry at me in real life, then I can stay with that, and see what the resolution will be. I can listen to her, and as I listen she will likely calm down. Eventually I will hear her message, and if that message is “Men have done so many wrongdoings towards women throughout history!”, then I can acknowledge the truth in this statement, and we can both stay within that space and feel into all that pain.
So far so good, and I truly would do that for a woman, if she has some kind of meaningful role in my life, or if I come across her when teaching.
However, there are two things that worry me.
The first one is that because of the twisted worldview of “gender feminism”/”radical feminism” – or whatever you want to call it – women’s suffering can only be made visible by minimizing, ridiculing or even ignoring men’s suffering. Men have chosen their gender role no more than women throughout history, and men having to face violence, injury and death in quite extreme proportions has neither been a choice nor something deserved. Gender roles were stereotypical by need in historical times, not by choice (today, however, we have much more choice – men and women alike).
Ultimately this first worry of mine means that I doubt that many women in this world will be ready to truly listen to men and truly take in their pain, without judging them. After all, if you’ve been taught all your life that men are the cause of all bad things in society, how can you feel deep empathy for a man? If you haven’t been taught about the expendability of men, and the fierce evolutionary competition between men to mate, how can you even begin to understand the story of men and the fate of men? Usually you cannot, and it’s through no fault of your own. Women don’t deserve to be taught this very one-sided view of gender issues that dominates our worldview in the West (and beyond).
This first worry of mine does not mean I and other men cannot listen to women’s pain, but it does mean that I keep on working towards spreading a more complete view of gender issues – for the healing of both sexes.
The second thing that worries me is that some people expect men to meet, contain and stay open to women who rush into internet forums, hurling insults and being more or less out of control. This is not a real life interaction! We need other rules of engagement. It’s impossible for me to tell whether Marianne is even open to some kind of resolution, open to being heard, and eventually open to calming down. What if she is only here to inflict pain and “get back” at men? Since these things are impossible to judge I would suggest that it’s unhealthy to allow a person – woman or man – to behave that way in an internet forum. I will not allow Marianne inside my boundaries, quite simply because I do not know if she deserves it – and it’s impossible to gauge what she will do next. Therefore I keep my boundaries much further out than I would have done in real life.
Does this mean that my own behavior has been perfect here? No. To some extent I am fed up with reading Marianne’s kind of rhetoric on the internet (i.e. extreme feminist rhetoric), and because of that I may be excessively cold and dismissive, when I could just ignore her. I have likely been doing some of that in this thread. But then again, I probably needed my own internal process which led me to this post – which feels like some kind of resolution for me, at least at this point in time. Who knows what kind of response will seem appropriate to me next time I come across this kind of situation.
, but the eight reasons listed in the article are a good summary of some key factors.