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In response to Male Feminism as Oxymoron by betenoire:
If I were to imagine a feminist revolution, I know who would have my back and be an ally and I know who would stab me in the back. Sfguy would NOT be an ally.This wannabe in sheeps clothing is too busy patting himself on the back as a SELF-proclaimed feminist than he is willing to listen to feminists he might disagree with. He is more concerned with how men are represented than he is about listening to feminist's divergent opinions. He is also more eager to give a smackdown to uppity feminists who dare to critique men and to put these uppity feminists in their place. Calling women "man-haters" - Oh yeah sfguy, you are the EPITOME of feminism....Well, I'm calling you on your shit Sfguy - you are no feminist ally of mine.* * * *Male Feminism as Oxymoron
PDF: http://www.uofaweb.ualberta.ca/philosophy/pdfs/kahane_oxymoron.pdf
An essay by David J.Kahane, (University of Alberta) in Men Doing Feminism,Tom Digby, ed. (New York: Routledge): 213-236."This essay is meant to be a skeptical intervention on the issue of men doing feminism, but not a pessimistic one....* * * *(iii) Engagement in activist friendships and communitiesTo the extent that a man understands feminism in more than a shallow way, he faces epistemological uncertainty, ethical discomfort, emotional turmoil, and extensive political demands. It can be difficult to figure out where to start, how to proceed, or when to allow oneself to rest. One can’t solve these dilemmas through mere reflection, and especially not through solitary reflection. Rather, it is through action that one finds ways to negotiate these dilemmas. How you act and how your actionsaffect those around you are more adequate indicators of your feminist commitment and consciousness than how you imagine yourself. What’s more, men gain a clearer understanding of gendered power, in its complexity and intractability, by actively struggling against it .
I'd invite a perusal of The Feminist Memoir Project (Duplessis & Snitow, editors), which I am reading now.
First (setting aside for the moment the imagination/behavior distinction quoted at the end of OOP's citations from the Kahane text), I'm not sure how anyone can identify with the category feminist but by being "SELF-proclaimed" (so long as we allow, arguendo the Cartesian fallacy of "self"). Indeed, the literature is replete with individuals distancing themselves from the label "feminist" (not, interestingly, because they are against the project of feminism, but because they do not believe their own work/activism sufficiently obtains to a feminist standard as they understand it). There is no governing authority or standard arbiter of what constitutes a "feminist", and it historically has even been a point of heated contention when individuals and groups have put themselves forward as epitomizing or exemplifying feminism (take the anxieties of the members of Cell 16, as an exemplar).
Likewise, the above-recommended text offers many autobiographical accounts of situations in which female-bodied feminists encountered within the feminist movement other female-bodied and self-identified feminists that did not seem inclined to listen all that much to feminists they happened to disagree with, those disagreements often festering and wedging apart otherwise productive collectives and/or rearing their head in intersectional disputes that are still even today to be worked out in the broader feminist discourse. Feminism is not a unified front: not unified by female-bodiedness, nor white skin, nor middle class privilege, nor liberal ideological commitments, nor Western culture, nor Northern geography, nor any other source and standard of exclusion/inclusion. Indeed I might suggest that it does a disservice to feminist cause(s) to behave as if it is or ever were, as this plays into the patriarchal (or, in the very least, conservative) rhetoric that would dismiss feminism as its stereotyped caricature, such rhetoric including terms such as "man-hater". To claim authority to deign who is and who is not a feminist by some standard of what a feminist is or is not is to purport just such a unified ideal.
That all said, the weaker claim "you are no feminist ally of mine" comes closer to the mark, I believe. There is no reason to say that any two feminists (however identified) are allies in any meaningful sense of the word. Again, I offer Duplessis & Snitow's anthology. Like any -ism, there are always those who own the label but do not own one another in any form of comraderie.
As for the substance of the whole "man-haters" epitet. It is a sentiment (if perhaps not a specific terminology) that might very well have been considered by female-bodied feminists with reference to other, more radically militant, female-bodied feminists at different historical (although, to the best of my knowledge, no longer contemporary) moments during the second wave.
Alice J. Wolfson's "Clenched Fist, Open Heart" (in above-mentioned volume) describes the schism around 1971 of D.C. Women's Liberation: "It seems incredible, looking back on it, that we could have allowed such a thing to happen. A small group of gay or gay-identified women successfully imposed an ideology identifying male children as the enemy and refused them access to the Women's Liberation office. These women, perhaps twelve or fifteen in number, eventually formed a collective called The Furies." (p. 277)
Although the phrase never appears in Wolfson's telling, I can't help but imagine that in that circumstance the conversation did not work it's way round to identification of The Furies, if only in the distancing of by other feminists of themselves from such indentification, with the "hatred" of men (and by extension, boy children). Mind you, these "ten or fifteen" women were hardly representative of feminism (or, for that matter, of gayness); the formation of the Furies wouldn't have, couldn't have, "destroy[ed] the women's movement in Washington, D.C." if all feminists were aligned with the boy-children-prohibited office policy. The breakdown of the movement in that city came of the differences within the movement represented in that anger and tensions responsive to this stance, not the unified nature of said movement.
Nor is this representative of the movement in a specific city. Wolfson notes that "[s]everal of the women were from out of town." Of one of the "powerful and magnetic" leaders of the Furies, says Wolfson, "I have always wondered if she was an agent"--a suspicion that speaks both to how very non-representative this one individual was of feminism as a whole and to how very broad and inclusive feminism was and is that an agent provocateur could be imagined to be actively passing as a feminist even as they pushed for such radical positions.
Which brings us to the "imagined/behavior" distinction in OOP's closing bit of quotation. We may choose not to associate with someone because of how the act and how those actions effect (I consciously refuse the vogue of writing "affect" here--as affect is an important but not inclusive mode of effect) others, we may even choose to withhold from them recognition of their own self-identification as within the umbrella of our own claimed -ism. Nonetheless, as long as we are dealing in the Cartesian subjectivities of "self" and other, we recapitulate relations of power, and in the case of doing so with regard to bodily sex (whether through hateful [and hate referencing] language or through suggestion that male-bodied feminism is oxymoronic), we approach much too closely, IMHO, to reifying the very gendered power that we would seek to struggle against.
This all said, I'd question whether anyone who would use the term "man-hater" with reference to our OOP has been at all paying attention. One who would direct fellow OkJournalistas attention to this: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fUYaosyR4bE -- clearly is not operating out of a place of hatred. Disappointment and dissatisfaction, certainly, but not hatred.
