Category Archives: Male Dominance

Toxic Masculinity; Toxic Femininity

 

 

 

When  recently I was frantically trying to see all 10 movies that had been nominated for best Picture, I never realized that the Oscars ceremony would so closely mirror the films and life. After they award show was over where Will Smith walked up to Chris Rock who was  introducing an award and made a poor joke about his wife I was amazed. It is amazing how much we can learn about life from art and about art from life.

 

I had noticed from the stunning film The Power of the Dog how masculinity could be toxic. Phil one of the two brothers in that film shows himself as a vessel of toxic masculinity when he mocks the “art” of Rose’ son Peter who he clearly sees as effeminate and weak. Later he comes to change his views, perhaps because of his own latent homosexuality. Then Peter is driven to extreme measures to protect his mother, much like Will Smith at the Oscars was driven to extremes to defend his wife from a perceived insult. This may have been brought on by the fact that  at a young age Smith saw his father beat his mother and always considered himself a coward for not defending her. At the Oscars he tried to be more manly and do better. Did he succeed or cruelly flop again?

I noticed that when at first Smith heard the poor joke about his wife that he was laughing and enjoying it. Then the camera switched to his wife who started laughing but quickly switched  to disapproval when she realized what was being said.  Did she communicate her disappointment to her husband? Did she goad him to act? That was not shown, but it was remarkable how quickly Smith’s manner change from jocularity to menace. It is also remarkable how quickly men can stoop to violence to defend the honour of their women. Do women like that?  Do they want their men to get violent in their defence? Sometimes it seems so. I was surprised to read 2 New York Times female writers  presumably, weak kneed liberals, say they thought Smith did the right thing?

I had just the day before watched the film The Tragedy of Macbeth. The tragedy was that Macbeth’s  wife goaded him into killing the king  and in doing so mocked his lack of courage. If that is not toxic femininity what is? When Macbeth hesitates to do the dirty deed she urges him to do it. This is part of what she said,

 

“When you durst do it, then you were a man;

…I have given suck, and know

How tender it is to love the babe that milks me:

I would, while  it was smiling in my face

Have pluck’d my nipple from his toothless gums,

And dash’d the brains out, had I sworn as you

Have done to this”

 

Then after he kills the king but still has doubts,  she mocks him and finishes hiding the evidence for him.

 

I realize that this entire Oscar  incident was coloured by the ugliness of a black man defending his insulted wife. Many a black man has been cruelly emasculated by such actions. Violence is deeply engrained in American and Canadian societies. This is true even in societies where black men react violently against other black men.  This is one product of centuries of oppression. Deep and persistent hatred has led to deep and persistent self-hatred. After all they learned it from their masters. What can be more cruel than that?

 

But to deny this painful and ugly fact, as we are urged to do by white supremacist pundits today, is to drive the hatred and resentment deeper where it can do even more perverted harm. Ugly truths must be faced. Denying them is not the way out. It just makes things worse.

 

What really bothered me about this incident at the Oscars was that about an hour or less later, when Will Smith won the award for best actor, and he stumbled through a tearful speech that included an apology to the Academy and fellow actors, but notably not Chris Rock, the audience erupted with applause.  What are the rest of us (including children who witnessed it) to think? Are we to think that violence is the answer to insults? That after all is the American way (with Canadians not far behind). Is this not how cycles of violence perpetuate themselves harming no one more than the victims turned aggressors?

 

Art can help us understand such questions, but it offer few clear and definitive answers.

 

Power Shift: The Longest Revolution

 

The 2019 Massey Lectures were delivered by Sally Armstrong. You can listen to them on CBC radio by using the free CBC app. A book on the lectures is already out called Power Shift: The Longest Revolution.  The theme of the lectures was the arrival of women’s fundamental equality. Armstrong argues The better off women are, the better off we all are.

Many parts of it were very interesting. The last 5 minutes of the last lecture were one example. With passion she concluded her lecture series this way:

“Man the hunter is bogus. There is no evidence that woman was not right there beside him hunting. The ancient past is a flawed account that was history recorded mainly by men and mostly about men. In fact, for millions of years we now know that men and women had equal status. And then they didn’t. It was during the agriculture era when food became plentiful, when they could focus on development rather than sheer survival until tomorrow, then both men and women realized that the future depended on producing more labourers and only women had the sexual reproductive capacity to deliver a child. Pregnant women were appropriated by men to produce the next generation, as much as land was prioritized and acquired by men at that time. That was the birth of patriarchy and subordination of women. That subordination was heightened when religion was formalized and institutionalized in the early legal codes. It has taken 10,000 years and a million years to right those wrongs. The power shift came from goddesses and priestesses, seers, diviners, nuns, healers, writers, reformers, activists, suffragettes, and feminists who took on the prophets and the kings, the orators and the philosophers, the politicians and the bullies, to find justice, fairness, and equality for all. It has been indeed the longest revolution.’

It really is time for male dominance to end. Even men would be be better off if that happened.

Montreal Massacre: Not a Mad man

I watched the film Polytechnique as part of a local event reminding us of the Montreal Massacre of 30years ago. The film is a powerful re-enactment of the horrific event at the  Université de Montréal’s École Polytechnique on December 6, 1989.

There was an interesting disjunction that evening.  Our Member of Parliament, Ted Falk, failed to attend, but did send a written, well written in fact, comment. But in it he referred to the killer, who killed  himself when he was done, as a “madman.”  During the film the killer called himself “a rational person.”  This may surprise, but I think the killer was right. Our MP was wrong. He was not a madman. And that is the real chilling aspect of this case. He was not mad. He was not errant. He was the natural product of more than a century of male dominance. He was the logical conclusion of that dominance.

People who have power rarely give it up gently. In fact, people who have power see any opposition to that power as deeply irrational. It does not make sense, because their power makes perfect sense. They deserve the power. So invariably they believe. That is true of tyrants and it is equally true of ordinary male supremacists. They can’t even see the incongruity.   White male power is natural. Many even claim it is endorsed by God. Just goes to show you how irrational men can be.

All too often men who see their power slipping away react badly. Sometimes, as in the case of Marc Lepine, the Montreal mass killer, their resentment explodes into irrational rage.  No I don’t think Lepine was a madman. I wish he was. It would be easier to deal with than the truth.

 

I am a feminist

 

OK my cousin, who actually knows what she is talking about, unlike me, says a sex change operation won’t work. I have to face the hard facts.  I plan to do that. So I have cancelled my sex change operation, but I have a plan B.

I herby announce that I am a feminist! Just saying we believe in equality is not enough either. Men who have been the beneficiaries for centuries of a system that rewards males  and are so embedded in that system that we don’t even see our own privilege, have to take a hard look at that system, our place in it, and what we can do about it.  We must renounce that system clearly and unequivocally. It is a noose around our necks, not just our wives, daughters and grand daughters. It is grossly unfair and the first step is to acknowledge that. We men must all do that.

We must also admit that we can never fully experience or appreciate what it is like to be on the pulverizing side of that system of dominance. We can never appreciate how women are often in fear when we think there is nothing to be afraid of.

Last night I watched a powerful film, Polytechnique, that gave me a glimpse into that world of fear, when I saw the faces of the women who had to stay behind in the class room with Marc Lepine holding an automatic rifle at them, as the men slunk off sheepishly, to relative safety. Lepine came after them too later, but none of the men died. 14 women died. The fear is real and it is justified. Women live in a society in which they are vulnerable to attack and weak men will attack them. It happens. Just like weak men take advantage of a system that erodes the opportunities for women in favor of men. That has happened for a long time and it must end.

We men have to speak up. It is not up to women to speak up. We must do it. Each in our own way. If we don’t speak up we acquiesce in a system that is fundamentally unjust and we are stained by our own silence. We are weinees.

Marc Lepine said he hate feminists. He blamed them. So I say, “I am a feminist.”

I am undergoing a Sex Change Operation

 

I have an important announcement to make I am undergoing a sex change operation. I have changed my name to Johanna Erica Neufeld. I’m done. Please call me that the next time you bump into me. I renounce my gender.

Today I went to the Steinbach version of a day to commemorate the death of 14 young women in the Montreal Massacre of December 6, 1989. The killer, Marc Lepine, was a young man, who was in despair over the fact that women had the nerve to apply for positions as Engineering students at Montreal’s Ecole Polytechnique. These women, he believed, had ruined his life.  They got the positions he deserved because he was a man. So he went to the class with a rifle, divided the class into 2, women on one side, men on the other. Men were told to leave and then he shot the 9 women, killing 6. Then he went on a rampage through the school killing 8 more women and injuring 10 more along with 4 men, but women were clearly the target. He could not bear giving up his privilege which he had enjoyed for most of his life, though it did not do much for him. On that day, his resentment spilled over into blind irrational rage and he went on a rampage. It was the largest mass murder in Canadian history, I have been told.

I was disappointed at how many men attended this event in Steinbach. I think I counted 5 of us.  We got to see a great film too–Polytechnique. I admit there have been many commemorations of this grisly event in our town over the years, and until today never attended. I guess I did not think it was important. I was profoundly ignorant in other words.  Male dominance over women is a sick and pitiful enterprise that has not died. 11 women in Manitoba have died as a result of violence against them by men in the year since December 6, 2018.

Many men are wieners who can’t stand the thought of women being equal to them. They are like the whites in the US who could not stand the thought of seeing a black family in the White House.

As comedian Jim Jefferies says, “We can do better.” I don’t apologize for my introductory comment. After all this is not a joking matter. I wanted to draw in as many people as possible. More than 5 men need to think about this.

I am a feminist; and that’s no joke.

Toni Morrison on Hate

 

 

I have still not got over Toni Morrison’s  novel–Love. It is that disturbing. The novel is actually much more about its opposite. Hate. It is about a specific kind of love—love that is transformed into hate. How can that happen?

Morrison has a fine understanding of hate. She described how the Cosey girls fought over the coffin of Bill Cosey, the patriarch of the family , until one of the women, L (does that stand for love?) restored order. But the hate lived on. Hate is darn hard to destroy. Morrison described the haters this way: “their faces as different as honey from soot, looked identical. Hate does that. Burns everything but itself, so whatever your grievance is, your face looks just like your enemy’s.”

The novel is deeply imbedded into a racist society infused with white male dominance, even though there are very few white characters in the novel and none of them is a major character. The natural product of such a society is that the dominated black males turn to dominate those  “beneath” them. And of course that is only other non-whites.

The man at the centre of the novel is Bill Cosey a 52-year old black man who rapes an 11-year old black girl with the consent of her family. The girl is so young and ignorant that she “grinned happily as she was led down the hall to darkness, liquor smell and old man business.” And as so often happens, the young victim ends up hating herself after the abuse. “I must have been the one who dreamed up this world, she thought. No nice person could have.”

Heed and Christine–11 and 12 year old friends—end up competing for a 52-year old man, entirely unworthy of either of them, and the two become transformed into enemies in the process. They learn to hate.  “The eyes of each are enslaved by the other’s. Opening pangs of guilt, rage, fatigue, despair are replaced by a hatred so pure, so solemn, it feels beautiful, almost holy.” Can you imagine a hate that is “almost holy”? Even the holy is turned perverse in a world ruled by hate and dominance. The dominance of whites over blacks turns the blacks into dominating other blacks.  That is the world that is a product of hate and in such a world even the holy turns evil.

Heed and Christine had a hard time maintaining their hatred for each other. Hate does not come easily and it is difficult to maintain. As Morrison said, “Like friendship, hatred needed more than physical intimacy; it wanted creativity and hard work to sustain itself.” They had “bruising fights with hands, feet, teeth and soaring objects…once–perhaps twice–a year, they punched, grabbed hair, wrestled, bit, slapped, never drawing blood, never apologizing, never premeditating, yet drawn annually to pant through an episode that was as much rite as fight. Finally they stopped, moved into acid silence, and invented other ways to underscore bitterness.”

Both of them ultimately realized that neither one could leave. They were married to each other in a dark perverse marriage. They both had “an unspoken realization that the fights did nothing other than allow them to hold each other.” That is what undying hatred is all about. It bonds the two in unholy matrimony. “There in a little girl’s bedroom an obstinate skeleton stirs, clacks, refreshes itself.”

 

Toni Morrison’s “Love”

 

I came to appreciate Toni Morrison late in life. That is a pity. But at least I did it. I finished her book, Love, just a couple of days before she died.

Love  is one of the best novels I have ever read. Of course, I think I have now said that about every one of Toni Morrison’s novels that I have read. She was a brilliant writer. When I started to write this review I said, “she is the finest living novelist.”  The only writer I could think of to compare her to was  Marilynne Robinson. Both of them were astonishing writers.

Loveis a difficult read. I was half way through the novel when I realized I had to start over from the beginning. I was missing too much. I had not caught on to enough. I hate to start over, but sometimes I just have to do that.

Though difficult, the novel, like any great novel, rewards the effort to understand it. That does not mean the reader has captured it. Far from it. It cannot be captured. But the reader can be captured by it.  the novel is about 2 “love” stories.  But they are hardly ordinary love stories.

The novel is a story about women and how they relate to a powerful man. The novel is told through or from the point of view of those amazing women and centres around a horrid incident at its core. Ultimately it is about the violence and its consequences inflicted on one of the women–but really all of them–by that strong man at the centre of the novel. It is a violence that is as unredeemed as it is chilling.

The man at the centre of the novel is Bill Cosey—“the Big Man who with no one to stop him, could get away with it and anything else he wanted.” He is a 52-year old man who can molest an 11-year old child with impunity and then marry her to make it ‘all right’.  her 12 year old friend saw this as a  “real betrayal,” by her “friend who grinned happily as she was led down the hall to darkness, liquor smell and old man business.” She was only 11 and did not know better so she “grinned happily.”  After all the adults who loved her would not abandon her to such a ravishing would they? Yes they would. As so often happens the young victim ends up hating herself after the abuse. She concludes, “I must have been the one who dreamed up this world, she thought. No nice person could have.”

Heed the Night, as she is called, has learned that this world into which she has been thrust by her family with the connivance of his family, is a terrifying world where evil catches fire and is doused with sugar creating a sickening black “caramelizing evil.” It is a world haunted by perverse love. It is impossible for her to escape, so Heed became “grown-up nasty.” How else could this have turned out?  Christine, Heeds friend, who is 12 years old, and is one of those women who betrayed Heed  and ends up with a mother-in-law who is her friend but younger than she is. Of course as Christine says, “most people married young back then (the sooner a girl was taken over by a man, the better.” In the end we learn a bitter black truth in which “the problem for those left alive is what to do about revenge–how to escape the sweetness of its rot. So you can see why families make the best enemies. They have the time and convenience to honey-butter the wickedness they prefer.” That sweet caramelized evil.

Heed and Christine–11 and 12 year old friends–competing for a 52-year old man are transformed into enemies. They learn to hate. Only hate is natural in this most unnatural world. “The eyes of each are enslaved by the other’s. Opening pangs of guilt, rage, fatigue, despair are replaced by a hatred so pure, so solemn, it feels beautiful, almost holy.” Even the holy is turned perverse in a world so infused with dominance. The dominance of whites over blacks turns the blacks into dominating other blacks.  The topsy-turvy world is a product of hate where even the holy turns evil. “There, in a little girl’s bedroom, an obstinate skeleton stirs, clacks, refreshes itself.”

There is another “love story,” if the first can be called a love story. This is a passionate love story. Young lovers this time. Such love should be pure and innocent. It is the story of Junior and Romen. When Roman sees Junior, “she seemed to him as beautiful as it is possible for a human to be.” It starts out innocent, but nothing in the novel is innocent for long.  In such a world how could it be different? All the principal characters in the novel are African-American. Of course, all are victims of white dominance and oppression that transforms their lives in the most ugly way imaginable. Mainly that oppression is entirely overt, but it is real. It curdles all love into caramelized evil where love is transformed into hate. Perverse love is the bastard child of oppression.  As Women says, Junior “plays hard, that’s all. I mean she likes being hurt…She didn’t just like it. She preferred it.” And Romen in response, was “cold, unsmiling, watching himself inflict pain and suffer pain above scream level where a fresh kind of joy lay.” No wonder that when in the abandoned hotel she undresses for him she keeps on her socks, then ties one around his neck and into the other inserts her foot and “the foot she slipped into the sock looked to him like a hoof.” His innocent passionate lover becomes the devil incarnate–caramelized black evil again. After all,  “A dream is just a nightmare with lipstick.” And he becomes her “Sugarboy.”

In the novel family is as twisted and s curdled as love. Junior is assaulted by her uncles (“the howling uncles”) who are “idle teenagers whose brains had been insulted by the bleakness of their lives, alternated between brutality and coma.” They are the products of a racist society.  The uncles threatened to turn Junior over to another old man–Vosh. This woke her up. The threat was real. As she thought, “the possibility that it could happen, that she could be handed over to the old man in the valley who liked to walk around with his private parts in his hands and singing hymns of praise, jolted her up from the floor, out of reaching hands and through the door.” For Junior prison is a reprieve from the maniacal madness of family. Prison is better than life with her family!

The world of love is no paradise. “People with no imagination feed it with sex–the clown of love. They don’t know the real kinds, the better kinds, where losses are cut and everybody benefits. It takes a certain intelligence to love like that–softly, without props.”

One of Morrison’s novels is called Paradise. This is certainly no paradise. But it is real. It is the product of a profoundly racist society where those at the top dominate with impunity and those at the bottom  accept the dominance while “grinning,” because they don’t even know anything better.

Priests and Nuns

 

Priests have been not just been assaulting young girls and boys in their parishes. They have found other victims. They have found nuns.

I heard a former nun speaking on NPR and she demonstrated this phenomenon. She said that when she was a nun she was not allowed to think for herself. She was always taught that priests were superior to her, as was her Mother Superior. It was her duty to do as they directed without question. With hindsight, she believes this was spiritual abuse that prepared the way for later physical abuse.

One day a priest came to visit her in her room, and he started to remove her clothes. She told him, “You are not allowed to do this.”  He continued his actions. He continued to remove her clothes and then raped her. She felt compelled not to scream out. After all she was expected to do as the priest desired.

When the nun reported the incident to her Mother Superior, the superior got so upset that we was shaking violently and jumped on the table shouting wildly. And she was shouting at the nun. The Mother Superior was radically upset at the nun. She was mad at the nun for reporting the incident. Of course she did nothing to help the nun. Somehow it must have been the nun’s fault. The priests could do harm in the eyes of the Mother Superior.

Only years later did the nun realize that this was part of a pattern of abuse in the church. When she learned how some priests had abused young girls and young boys, the nun realized that she had to speak up. She had to challenge the abuse. She realized she had to speak out, even though other members of her church would not support her for that. Everyone believed the nun had done something she should not have done to lure the priest into trouble. It was the victim’s fault.

The woman who interviewed the nun could not understand how this happened. The nun explained to the interviewer that this is what happens often. When powerful men have power over powerless, defenceless, or vulnerable women (or even worse children) some men choose to use that power for their own self-satisfaction.

Such abuse reveals an ugly element of abuse. When the abuser is thought to have authority from God the abuse is even more poisonous. If God sanctions it, the victim feels, it must be all right.

Of course this is problem that is not unique to the Roman Catholic Church. It is a problem in every region where men have authority over women

This is actually what happens in many institutions. For example, this year in Phoenix it was discovered that a man who worked in an institution of seniors, had impregnated a woman who was basically in a vegetative state. When the powerful find themselves in control of the vulnerable, power often leads to sin.

The same thing happens in politics. As Martin Luther King said, the United States is the world’s greatest purveyor of violence. The United States is the most powerful country in the world, and it uses that power to get what it wants, as powerful countries have done since time began. The problem is inequality of power, not who is holding it.

Recently I suggested that maybe it is time to give women the chance to have power over men. I was not really serious about that. I don’t want anyone to have power over others because so often it leads to abuse. What I really want to see is equality, not just a changing of the guard.

Inequality of Power in the Military

https://www.dropbox.com/s/iqn5jwmvsk8cb60/Screenshot%202019-03-27%2023.13.07.png?dl=0

 

The military is peculiarly powerful. This is particularly true in the United States where I have spent the last 3 months. It is also one of the most hierarchical institutions on the planet. Wherever you have a military you have those in power and those subject to power. You have the officers and the grunts. You don’t want to be a grunt.

If you add sexual/gender power imbalances things get even worse. Arizona, where I have been living, has been exposed recently by an American Senator of all people. Recently Arizona U.S. Senator Martha McSally surprised the state and even the country by announcing during a Senate subcommittee meeting that she had been raped while she was in the Air Force. McSally spent 2 decades in the Air Force before she became a Senator. Much of that time was served here in Arizona at very bases close to where we are living. In fact she was the first female pilot to see combat. She also said she felt like she had been victimized again when she reported the incident to her superior officers. Interestingly, she said, “I thought I was strong, but I felt powerless…The perpetrators abused their position of power in a profound way…I was horrified at how my attempt to share generally my experience was handled…Like many victims, I felt like the system was raping me allover again.”

If this could happen to a woman who ultimately was promoted to Commander, we have to wonder what would happen to a less powerful female in the Air Force? The uncomfortable fact is the American military, probably like every other military in the world, Canada’s included, has for too long been a male dominated institution in which there is a strong power imbalance that is magnified when gender inequality is added creating a truly toxic brew.

As reported by the Arizona Republic, The Pentagon officially reported 6,769 sexual assaults in 2017, nearly a 10 percent increase over the prior year. But advocacy groups such as Protect Our Defenders say the true number is likely 15,000 to 26,000 annually. I don’t know about you but I found that a shocking number. According to the Pentagon’s own statistics that amounts to about 20 sexual assault per day! If you accept the number from the critics it could be as high as 722 per day! According to a Rand Corporation Report last year, in a Sierra Vista base here in Arizona, about 1 in 12 female soldiers were sexually assaulted during the year of the survey. Remember these are assaults not harassments.

The American military, like the Canadian military, has for years been trying to stamp out sexual assault and harassment under pressure for various sources. Clearly their success has been about as great as the Roman Catholic Church. In fact, the Arizona Republic reported that a recent Pentagon report showed that sexual assaults spiked nearly 50% in 2017-2018 despite years of focus on the problem. That report also showed that 60 percent of military victims who reported rapes suffered career-ending retaliation. It is hardly surprising that young women are reluctant to come forward with complaints.

The report also identified 2 particularly vulnerable groups: young, unmarried females of lower ranks and personnel aboard ships (where women are far from protection.) It is clear that the issue is power. Powerful men (and yes most of these are men) abuse vulnerable women. It really is that simple. Not all of the men, but too many. The inequality of the power is the key. Just as it is in cases of coaches abusing athletes, priest and nuns or priests and young people in the church , employers and employees, teachers and students, parents and children, and men and women. Wherever power is uneven, people must be on alert.

I don’t know if there is any evidence that women would do a better job of this than men, but it is difficult to believe that they could do worse. Maybe its time to give women a chance. We need someone like John Lennon to create a song about that. We can’t all compose songs, but at the very least it is time for men to speak up. All of us.

Male Dominance: a Dying Ideology

 

There have been more discussions of the ongoing mess in the Catholic Church. Recently the highest Catholic yet was found guilty of sexually assaulting young boys. The mess never seems to stop.

It is my belief that this will never stop until the Catholic Church democratizes and adds women as full members including giving them the right to become priests. The bishops just don’t catch on. Pope Francis called a meeting of cardinals and bishops to discuss the issue in Rome. What took so long?

We heard a leading Catholic bishop from Chicago discuss the issue. He acknowledged that women had to play an important role in the church. He said before he makes any important decisions he always asks for advicefrom women in the church.  The bishop did not realize that this is not good enough. The reason is that he“decides.”  Women can give advice but only men decide.  That is a big difference.

The Roman Catholic Church needs transformation and until male dominance is ended it will never learn. The sickness in the church will continue. It is in its DNA. Male dominance must collapse or the church will.

I still remember seeing a portrait of the board of directors of T.E. Eaton’s and Sons just before they went bankrupt. Each and every member of the board was a man. Not one woman. Most of them, if not all, were also white. No one took into consideration that most shoppers are women. So how could women’s views be important? To me it was not surprising that a company that had been dominant in Canadian retail shopping went belly-up after 110 years in business. Could the same happen to the Catholic Church? Why not?

Male dominance is a dying ideology. It can’t die fast enough. It won’t be missed.