"Grass-eaters" in Japan

I probably need to stop going to Rod Dreher's so often. Sometimes he's almost one of the Reasonable Conservatives, but then stuff like this comes out. And yet, he is definitely on the up side of a really pitiful bunch -- he's a Green in many ways, just so goddamned enraging about gender issues.

In any even, poor Rod was shocked by this article about 20-something male behavior in Japan. Rod calls them "grassy-eating sissy monkeys". *HEAD. DESK* I commented:

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I'll have to check with my Japan-based sources, but there's one thing you should remember, Rod: Japanese masculinity does not have the same signals or boundaries that American masculinity does. In particular, the sharp boundaries of gender roles in Japan means that men there have a much wider ranger of behavior available to them.

Think of it this way: the defined border between masculine and feminine in Japan means that a man can go right up the edge and yet still count as firmly on the masculine side. In the US, the border is comparatively broad, shifting, and ill-defined, so a man who is anxious about appearing masculine has to keep much further away from the edge. American masculinity is subtractive; I don't know Japanese culture well enough to talk about how their gender roles are evolving.

The Japanese also have a very different approach to makeup and costumes than we do in the US. Thoreau said "beware of all enterprises that require new clothes" -- the Japanese say, "what's the point of one that doesn't?" So the makeup sales (which are likely to be the most accurate part of that story) don't necessarily mean what you think in your fevered American brain.

I wonder, too, if the use of "grass-eating" or vegetarian as an insult has a religious undertone, because vegetarianism is associated with Buddhism.

But as someone whose children are older than yours -- for all your sakes, don't box yourself into thinking that clothing, hairstyle or music choices are the appropriate battlefields for their upcoming teen and young adult years. Worry less about whether they seem manly to you, more about whether they're decent human beings.

Smarty-Pants

Is this the smartest person in the world?. The youngest college professor ever: a 19-year-old Muslim Iranian-American woman, Alia Sabur. Taught herself to read at the age of 8 *months*. High-school grad at 10, college grad at 14. Now going to Konkuk University, S.Korea, to work in materials science (nanotubes). Also a concert-level clarinetist who has studied at Julliard.

Meanwhile, it turns out that boys aren't necessarily better at math, when you start to compare test results in different countries:

In countries where women occupy an equal position to men in society, such as Sweden, there was virtually no gender gap in maths ability. However, in countries with lower levels of gender equality, such as Turkey, the boys performed better in maths tests than the girls.

"The gender gap in mathematics doesn't seem to be a feature of every society," says Sapienza.

What's more, the girls produced better reading scores than the boys in all the countries looked at, but did even better in countries with higher levels of gender equality.

Gay-hatin' and Subtractive Masculinity

Fred Clark at Slacktivist has been asked to put in another post on the sources and support of the Gay-hatin' Gospel.. My comments got to be a bit long:

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I'm surprised, Fred, because I think you're overlooking the point, again.

A big part of the issue is gender roles. And that means that a big part of the issue is *women*. Even though (as several people have pointed out) 99% of the vitriol & repugnance is directed against gay men specifically and anal sex even more specifically, I think the thing which is being talked about without being named is *women*.

Same-sex marriage is in fact a threat to traditional heterosexual marriage, because SSM is obviously between equals. Anal sex is a deep threat to masculinity because it involves a man -- a full human being, just like the default "me" of patriarchal society -- being penetrated. And if human beings (=men) can be penetrated and not scorned, then maybe the people who are traditionally penetrated (=women) ... are human beings.

The idea that women might be human beings threatens J. Matt Barber profoundly, because the view of masculinity that has developed over the past century (I'm not sure about earlier) is subtractive. That is, a Man is defined as someone who is Not A Woman. This worked OK when men could do a lot of things women can't. But if women can be smart, then men must be stupid; if women can be moral, men must be evil; if women love beauty, men must love ugliness. You can see this all too clearly in the link Brel found in Part.5: creativity itself (long a male prerogative) has become suspect.

And at the end, Barber and his ilk are faced with the horrific consequences of their subtractive masculinity: if women are human beings, men ... cease to exist. He's reacting like he's facing an existential threat because he *is* facing one: he's standing what used to be a glorious castle but which turned out to be a pile of sand, slipping away into the tide. His idea of masculinity is part of his *self*, and eroding the one is eroding the other.
(continued on next rock)

One of the best illustrations of how subtractive masculinity works is in a old, not all that good science fiction story, "The Last Man" (written by Wallace West in 1929, anthologized in The Pocket Book of Science Fiction). My copy seems to have disappeared (or crumbled into dust), but IIRC the narrator talks about how women's energy and ambition couldn't be suppressed forever, and they moved into one field after another until all that was left for men to consider important were sports and war. And then war became unthinkable, and women got into sports, and then all the men just died out, useless (our hero is a throwback in a zoo).

Subtractive masculinity isn't confined to the evangelical Right in America, by any means. After the 2004 election, religion journalist Jeff Sharlet admitted what he'd been reluctant to say before: that homophobia is the true unifying factor for strongly religious Americans of every stripe. The stresses currently in the Anglican Communion over homosexuality are largely coming from churches in the Southern Hemisphere, based in societies that don't have all that much in common with the US Bible Belt. But they *do* still face stresses from changing gender roles, just as traditional Muslim societies do, too.

Amanda has a post up at Pandagon about the anthology Choice and about how too many men react:

abuse and control is less an obsession for a lot of men and more the natural result of thinking of women as functional objects in your life. Like if she starts behaving in ways that are inconvenient (like getting pregnant or trying to prevent pregnancy), then it’s appropriate to treat her like a malfunctioning appliance. ...

... Anything outside of functional use is considered irrelevant at best, an infringement on functionality at worst. Not that all men are like this, by any stretch, but this way of viewing women as objects is endemic and honest men will admit that even if they resist it, they get messages that it’s an appropriate way to view women.

But with a subtractive model of masculinity, men *have* to think this way -- because if women are not objects, then there's no humanity left for men.