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Feminist professor calls masculinty 'a hazardous ideology' and tells us to 'be suspicious' of men who stroungly identify as men

iainmf

August 3, 2019

2 upvotes

/r/MensRights

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Title	Feminist professor calls masculinty 'a hazardous ideology' and tells us to 'be suspicious' of men who stroungly identify as men
Author	iainmf
Upvotes	2
Comments	17
Date	August 3, 2019 11:26 PM UTC (6 years ago)
Subreddit	Posted in /r/MensRights
Original Link	https://old.reddit.com/r/MensRights/comments/clpe7k/feminist_professor_calls_masculinty_a_hazardous/
Archive Link	https://theredarchive.com/r/MensRights/feminist-professor-calls-masculinty-a-hazardous.871862 https://theredarchive.com/post/871862

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It all stems from believing men and women are basically the same. That leaves the problem of explaining why more men are in powerful positions (government, CEOs etc). Some bright spark solved the problem by explaining it as the belief in male superiority. Of course, coming right out and saying the problem is 'male supremacy' make you look like a nutter. So the feminist marketing department changed it to 'masculine ideology'.

Edit: From the Encyclopedia of Aesthetics - Oxford University Press (I didn't read the whole thing, just enough to get the idea)

Masculinity.

Masculinity has only recently become the object of sustained critical and cultural analysis. Its status as such is largely the consequence of the broadening of feminist critiques to encompass the more general categories of gender and sexuality, along with the emergence of poststructuralist theories of subjectivity and identity formation. The overall effect of these developments has been two-fold: to question, with the ultimate aim of dislodging, the power and privilege that has traditionally adhered to men and masculinity in human society and to dispute the ontological status of masculinity as an innate attribute or expression of the male sex. Indeed, fragility, instability, contingency, and incoherence are widely regarded by contemporary critics and theorists as the chief characteristics of masculinity, and its ties to men and maleness have come to be considered tenuous at best. Masculinity has emerged, in short, as more fantasy than fact—a posture or position rooted in ideology, not biology, and therefore open to continuous political and philosophical contestation.

Masculinity and Feminism. “A man never begins by presenting himself as an individual of a certain sex,” the French writer and theorist Simone de Beauvoir famously asserted in her groundbreaking manifesto, The Second Sex in 1949; “it goes without saying that he is a man. The terms masculine and feminine are used symmetrically only as a matter of form, as on legal papers. In actuality the relation of the two sexes is not quite like that of two electrical poles, for man represents both the positive and the neutral, as is indicated by the common use of man to designate human beings in general; whereas woman represents only the negative, defined by limiting criteria, without reciprocity…. She is defined and differentiated with reference to man and not he with reference to her; she is the incidental, the inessential as opposed to the essential. He is the Subject, he is the Absolute—she is the Other” (Beauvoir, 2011).

It is precisely the situation posited by Beauvoir that over a half-century of cultural criticism and social and political philosophy have sought to dismantle—not simply the subordination of women to men but, much more fundamentally, the very legitimacy of the masculine/feminine binary, which, as Beauvoir notes, is constructed upon two radically unequal terms. For whereas femininity was deemed to exist as a category only in relation to its “opposite” (a woman was a woman by virtue of not being a man), masculinity was presumed to exist in and of itself (a man was simply a man, not a nonwoman)—an essential, absolute, unchanging entity whose significance does not derive from its relation to anything outside itself.

Breaking the spell of masculine transcendence described by Beauvoir began with the elaboration of “constructionist” notions of gender by second-wave feminists of the 1970s and 80s. According to proponents of this position, feminine identities, tastes, and behaviors were determined not primarily by women’s biological sex but by the array of social, economic, cultural, and political practices and institutions undergirding patriarchy. Women’s subordination to men was thereby deemed to have little if anything to do with inherent physical or mental traits or “natural” aptitudes or proclivities traditionally associated with the female sex but was the result of centuries of institutionalized discrimination, repression, and discouragement. Within the realm of art and aesthetics, this position was expressed most powerfully by the feminist art historian Linda Nochlin in 1971. In explaining why there had not, in her estimation, been any female artists on par with such male masters as Michelangelo or Picasso, Nochlin declared: “The fault lies not in our stars, our hormones, our menstrual cycles, or our empty internal spaces, but in our institutions and our education—education understood to include everything that happens to us from the moment we enter this world of meaningful symbols, signs, and signals” (1988). A less frequently cited but no less consequential passage from Nochlin’s essay challenges the reigning conceptualization of art as “the direct, personal expression of individual emotional experience, a translation of personal life into visual terms.” In contrast to this mythic notion of art as pure self-expression, Nochlin described art making as the purposeful manipulation of “a self-consistent language of form, more or less dependent upon, or free from, given temporally defined conventions, schemata, or systems of notation, which have to be learned or worked out, either through teaching, apprenticeship, or a long period of individual experimentation.” Nochlin’s essay thereby applies a “nurture not nature” argument not only to femininity, attributing women’s abilities and disabilities as artists to the processes of education and socialization to which they have been subjected (or from which they have been excluded); she similarly regards artistic production itself—and here she is referring to the actions of men no less than women—as a material practice rooted in historically specifiable systems and conventions of notation that individual artists learn to adhere to or reject.

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