About ten years ago, I was sitting in a coffee shop with graduate student friends. One was black and one was Latina. As we sipped coffee, the two friends started talking about a white guy’s research on minority populations. I was quiet, just listening to them, and then they said, "white guys should not be talking about race." They said it was a knowing smile as if people said this quite often.
I was shocked. Did this include open minded types like myself? Why would they want to limit the number of voices who agreed with them? Were they upset that whites were taking over another academic discipline? Or did they think we just get it all wrong?
A couple of months ago, Katha Pollitt pointed out the problems with men talking about feminism. She said that it always comes out a bit icky when men talk about abortion.
My question of the day. Can men talk about feminism?
Apt. 11d 
Ampersand does, over at Alas, A Blog
http://amptoons.com/blog/
And I think he does a damn good job. Of course, he always listens as much as he talks, and has several female co-bloggers chime in.
It can be “icky” when men talk about abortion, because of all the experiences women have, pregnancy is probably the farthest from their own, and therefore they quickly reveal how little they can grasp it. Which is not their fault, so long as they understand that. I prefer men to ask women questions about abortion, respectfully, rather than “debate” the right or wrong thing to do in a life-altering situation in which they can never find themselves. The problem always seems to be that it’s *men* talking to *other men* about abortion–never men trying to find out what the real situation is like from women and being respectful of their insight and experiences.
I can see the same frustration around racial issues…if you’re latina, and all you ever see is white people talking to other white people about race, you would get tired of it.
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I think it sort of depends on what the nature of the talk is, but also what kinds of claims are being made about feminism or gender in any given conversation or political campaign.
Certainly if the discussion is about experiences of abortion, pregnancy, discrimination, etc., a man who tries to enter in the conversation as if there isn’t an inherent asymmetry is being an idiot. On the other hand, if women in such a conversation assume it is impossible for a man to ever even minimally understand the experiences of women no matter how hard they try, that a man can’t progressively gain a clearer and clearer sense of understanding (and conversely, if it’s assumed that all women share an intrinsic, unspoken understanding), then it’s not clear why anybody talks about abortion, ever: the men can’t understand, and the women already understand. I have a problem with any argument that says it is impossible to gain a better understanding of the life and experience of someone unlike yourself. Difficult, yes; requiring humility and the willingness to listen long and deeply, yes.
If the premise of the argument being offered about why abortion rights matter is a highly particularist one (e.g., that abortion rights are not related to the general way that liberalism imagines rights, but instead ought to be understood entirely and exclusively in terms of gender relations, in terms of patriarchy, and so on–that the rights claimed aren’t here “human rights” but are exclusively limited to gender relations, almost a gender “nationalism”) then almost by definition men don’t have a say. Though this runs into the same trouble that strongly nationalist or exclusivist claims about racial justice run into: there’s also no reason, given this premise, that men should be sympathetic or accepting of such claims. This approach, strongly articulated, is a struggle philosophy (e.g., it starts from the premise that rights are only achieved by taking them through concerted social effort).
If the claim being made about abortion rights (not experiences of abortion) is rooted at all in universal liberal rights, whether the right to privacy or self-ownership or individual autonomy or anything else, then men are pretty much equal participants in the conversation. They have to be. They have just as much at stake in an illiberal or oppressive denial of rights in this context on the logic of “first they came for the Jews…”
There’s also the other problem that men are involved in pregnancy, in a way. It’s not their bodies: they don’t have to deal with that profound problem. But the potential life that results from it is something that they have a stake in. If we want to hold men accountable for babies once they’re born, to expect them to feel the consequences of pregnancy in that sense, we can’t just tell them, “But for the previous nine months, shut the fuck up: you’ve got no stake, no say and no role in that, it’s all women all the way down”. The more strongly we say that pregnancy is just a woman’s experience, the more we feed another problematic beast, the ideology of natural motherhood, which dictates that women always and inevitably have to be the ones who care for and are responsible to children.
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Good points. BTW, I have no strong opinion on this topic. That’s why I wanted to throw it out and get some feedback.
Yes, of course, it’s good for many reasons to have men talk about women’s issues, if nothing more than for political purposes — to make men care about the domestic issues that women have traditionally had to shoulder.
But I have noticed that whenever men bring up certain topics on the blogosphere (i.e. why aren’t women talking about politics, why would women stay home with kids) things get hot really quickly. Maybe these are just sore topics for other reasons, but I was wondering if the gender of blogger was affecting the response.
(running out the door, no time to reread this.)
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Saying X can’t talk about Y is usually masking the real message, which is that the speaker doesn’t like or agree with X’s opinion.
The idea that you can only talk about (which is code for have an authoritative opinion about, otherwise why have the discussion–of course anyone can talk stupidly about a subject) something if you have direct experience of it is pernicious. One of the best ideas we have as a society is that you can learn from someone else’s experience without having your own; cutting off a potential source of insight, analysis, and answers just because they don’t fit the profile is a huge waste of talent and skill.
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Can Americans talk about Chinese? Should we ignore Tocqueville because he was a French talking about America? Of course men can talk about women’s issues, just as women can talk about men’s issues. The more interesting question is: is one perspective more real or authentic or valuable than another? And I think the answer is “no.” Remember, there is no singular, purely objective truth (or, at least that is what a fair amount of feminist theory would hold); and if that is true (I know, I know, reductio ad something or other) then a woman’s view on women’s issues is not the be all and end all of the discussion. Yes, men have to be careful not be be jerks here. But just because there may be some, or even many, jerk-like comments from men on women’s issues, does not mean that all men’s views on women’s issues are somehow fraudulent. A particular standpoint does not necessarily invalidate the claims put forth, but the standpoint might give us another (but not the only) criteria for assessing the truth-value(!) of the claims…
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Can white people talk about race? Probably, but if you look at the public opinion surveys, you see that white people are, for the most part, radically out of touch with African-American opinion. Given that disconnect, I can see your friends’ point. However, I think it is risky, as Tim points out, to say that only those who fit the gender or racial profile can discuss that issue, since that risks turning the issue into “merely” identity politics. I also think that this runs the risk of turning discussion solely into activism, at the expense of analysis. It can be as difficult to analyze a phenomenon from inside it as it can be to understand it entirely from without.
So, I certainly wouldn’t say that men can’t talk about feminism. However, I think men should think very carefully about what they say and how they say it. There is a tendency on the part of some male interlocutors to take the position of authority and assume that they can lecture to a female audience how to best achieve a properly feminist position (I think it’s rather pathetic when a man tries to shut me down by telling me that his understanding of my path to empowerment is better than mine). In the same vein, I don’t think that men have no right to an opinion on pregnancy and abortion, but I’ve also had men tell me “what’s the big deal…it’s only nine months of your life?” That kind of disconnect makes me feel entitled to shout “it’s not your body, what do you know!”
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Kai Jones: The idea that you can only talk about…something if you have direct experience of it is pernicious.
I totally agree. It’s basically a variation of an ad-hominem attack designed to end the debate before it starts. In fact, it’s pretty similar to when academics claim an opponent isn’t qualified to debate something because they haven’t read a certain paper, or when people debating about a war claim you can’t criticize/support a war unless you’ve served in the military.
I can understand why it happens, because lack of experience can often lead to incorrect assumptions (or being radically out of touch, as Mrs. Coulter puts it), but one of the purposes of debate is to help people realize this by sharing their different perspectives.
So I think it’s a mistake to try and stifle debate by just automatically shutting out perspectives. That kinda defeats the whole purpose.
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I had a male friend in college who convinced me abortion should be legal. It was illegal when he was in high school and had only recently been legalized. He described taking one of his friends who was pregnant (not by him) down to Mexico for an abortion, and watching her die fromt he botched job.
Believe me, after that, I’ve been a feminist ever since.
So, yes, men can be feminists, and can talk about it, and abortion. If they have somthing sensible to say. Those who just want to exert their control over women can of course STFU.
Women, though, seem more open about abortion when talking to other women. I have three close friends who have had abortions, all told me in confidence. Recently I had a meeting at my home of my political group, and only women showed up, which is actually pretty unusual for this group. Over the course of the evening and a few glasses of wine, the topic of abortion came up, and it turned out three of the seven women there had had an abortion at some point in their lives. I don’t think it would have been as easy to discuss with the guys there.
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I have been in this argument myself many times. The first time, a man actually suggested it to me. I freaked out. It hadn’t occurred to me that men shouldn’t talk about abortion. I had pretty much *only* seen men talk about it. I often take the stance that they shouldn’t, but I think that stance is greatly affected by the men I do see talking about it–the men in our government and fundamentalist religious leaders. I don’t trust them to learn from someone else’s experience. I don’t trust them to *get* what it’s like for women. I jump to the conclusion that they have an alterior motive. Whether they do or not, it’s hard to tell. It certainly seems that way. So perhaps it is an ad hominem attack for me at this point because of specific personalities on the other side who happen to also be men.
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Lots of excellent points here.
I think a lot depends on context. In a mixed group, if race/abortion/etc. comes up for discussion and the white/guy is the first one to hold forth, then s/he is an insensitive ass.
One person of colour said to me once that we whites would do better to talk more about racism, than about race. I think she was right, and I think the same could be said of men.
There used to be a group of men in Toronto who would meet to talk about sexism and how to battle it. How can anyone argue with that?
Tim Burke makes excellent points, as usual, but I think there is some danger in his last paragraph. It is a vexed issue, but we have spent so long fighting the idea that boyfriends/husbands have equal stakes — stakes, yes, but small potatoes in comparison, during the pregnancy at least. Remember the situation here in Canada some years back when a man got a court injunction to block his ex-girlfriend’s abortion. The fight went on, she got more pregnant; she ended up, desperate, going down to the U.S. for a late-term abortion, and he, some while later, was had up for assaulting a subsequent girlfriend. But I digress. I think we have to accept some sort of “sliding scale” of gendered involvement in pregnancy/childbirth/parenting. Men and women have a similar stake in the creation of a potential life/implications for their own lives, but the reality of pregnancy, and of who gets left, statistically, holding the baby, cannot be denied.
Not to say that Tim is in any way denying it. But I want to reiterate that we need to keep a clear eye on the practical implications when looking at such issues.
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