once again, another claim that men are oppressed too

My friend Ruben posts a link to New York Times blogger John Tierney’s post about Roy Baumeister’s APA talk “Is There Anything Good About Men”. Baumeister’s talk includes this passage in his introduction:

But rather than seeing culture as patriarchy, which is to say a conspiracy by men to exploit women, I think it’s more accurate to understand culture (e.g., a country, a religion) as an abstract system that competes against rival systems — and that uses both men and women, often in different ways, to advance its cause.

Also I think it’s best to avoid value judgments as much as possible. They have made discussion of gender politics very difficult and sensitive, thereby warping the play of ideas. I have no conclusions to present about what’s good or bad or how the world should change. In fact my own theory is built around tradeoffs, so that whenever there is something good it is tied to something else that is bad, and they balance out.

I don’t want to be on anybody’s side. Gender warriors please go home.

Baumeister goes on to argue that culture uses both men and women, and that we shouldn’t necessarily view them as victims, but rather understand that both men and women have advantages and disadvantages and are used as such by culture.

Which, of course, has some validity. However, Baumeister dismisses the feminist perspective that culture is patriarchal, because, well, look at the bottom of the rung: there are as many men there as women.

But why is that? Is it because they are exploited as men? Is it because their dignity is maimed because they are men? Is it because they are oppressed as men?

In a word, I’d say no. Women are oppressed as women, as well as for a myriad of other values placed on their identities: working class, colonized folk, people of color, queer, differently abled, etc. Men, however, are not oppressed as men, but because they are working class, colonized, people of color, queer, differently abled, etc.

Are men harmed as men? Of course, but I think that Baumeister isn’t on the right track here. They are harmed because of their role in the oppressor class. One commenter on Tierney’s blog writes:

It is high time that we recognized that there is systematic oppression of men that is equivalent to although different from the oppression of women. I am defining oppression as conditions of society and culture that distort and limit the expression of the individual’s full human potential in consistent ways. I would add that for men the prohibition against crying as a sign of weakness prevents healing from painful emotion, contributes to the earlier death of men than women, prepares them for the oppressive role of soldier and killer, and tends to diminish their capacity for deep personal relationships.

I agree that men are harmed, but it is not because they are oppressed. I think it was bell hooks who I read that argued we need to be careful about using the term oppression. It doesn’t do much good to say that everyone is oppressed, and as commenter Michael Maratsos writes on the blog post, this talk does the danger of reifying culture, making culture an object that “uses men and women” and is constantly progressing. I don’t think culture oppresses people; people oppress people. Culture isn’t some abstract object outside of our control.

I follow Philip Hallie’s definition of oppression, as “institutional cruelty,” where cruelty is defined as the maiming of dignity, the cruelty must be part of institutions, and one group must have institutional power over another. Although Baumeister does not use the term oppression, he and those who seem to like his work fail to take into account the way men and women are treated differently: men do have more institutional power than women and no man’s dignity is maimed as a man like a woman’s is maimed as a woman. Instead, if a man’s dignity is maimed in our society, for instance, it is because he fails to be a man, which we mark as being a “woman” (e.g., “pussy,” “fag,” “bitch,” “wuss”).

I’m annoyed by what I’d call the banality of this speech. One commenter on the NY Times blog post remarked that this was just a rehash of Freud, only instead of reducing people to psychoanalysis, Baumeister has reduced us to biological evolution. He asks sarcastically, “Isn’t it nice to know that humans are so simple that one element of their existence is sufficient to explain all aspects of their behavior?”

Ugh. I haven’t been too articulate here, I don’t think, but I wanted to post on it anyway. Maybe I’ll come back to this when I have had more time to think about it.