"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.

The Gender Gap in Voting

Thinking vaguely through a political issue, again.

echidne of the snakes notes The Secret Demographic Topic in These Elections:

[quoting a Time poll:

Non-college-educated white women split virtually evenly, 46%-45% for McCain. By contrast, Obama remains weak among white men. That group supports McCain 57%-36% overall, and non-college-educated white men back the Republican ticket by an even greater margin, 63%-27%.

Do you know what I think? I think we can learn enormous amounts about the culture by asking why we don't discuss the voting patterns of white men.

I've been thinking about the voting gender gap: the fact that since about 1980 American women have been more likely to vote Democratic than men. Or that men are more likely to vote Republican, though it's usually not phrased that way.

This is a modern development. female conservatism was for many years a feature of voting behaviour in Europe and the United States. In Europe there is currently no particularly clear pattern -- in some countries women tend to be more conservative, in other countries it's men. Overall, there's a tendency for women to be risk-averse, which in many countries makes the average female voter slightly right of center.

All of the studies of the voting gender gap take male voters as the norm. But statistically, if there is universal adult suffrage *female* voters are expected to be the norm, because men have shorter lifespans and thus women will be more than 50% of adults.

If you assume female voters are normal, then what we've seen in the US looks like men moving rightward. Because men have disproportiate power, both major parties end up being toward the right. And that's just how it looks to our European friends: the US has one slightly-right-of-center party and one far-right party, but no significant leftist party by their standards.

I've just started reading "The Developmental Theory of the Gender Gap: Women and Men’s Voting Behavior in Global Perspective." by Pippa Norris and Ronald Inglehart. (pdf), and it looks as though their conclusion is that women are becoming more leftist than men in most post-industrial societies:

the modern gender gap is more strongly the product of cultural differences between women and men in their value orientations, especially attitudes towards postmaterialism and the women's movement...

in postindustrial societies the modern gender gap was strongest among the younger age groups while the traditional gender gap was evident among the elderly.

What it looks like to me is not so much women moving toward the left, but a pervasive and even growing sense of aggrieved entitlement among men (especially, in the US, white men), which is moving them toward the right, and dragging the mostly-male power structure with them.

In the US, at least, I think there's also something about war. War has become a distinctly conservative value, and a distinctly male value, in a way that wasn't necessarily the case historically. I tend to link this with subtractive masculinity, in which only sports and war are safely masculine endeavors, but there may be something else at work, too.

Macho Sue and reconstructing the hero

In the discussion at slactivist on the Appeasement Meme, I wrote:

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It is simply not possible that these people are sincere

I must respectfully disagree, Fred.

IMHO they *are* sincere. It's not so much that they are ignorant of history, etc., as that they are filtering everything through a narrative. They are telling themselves anot story, and I think our own Praline has most accurately nailed it: Macho Sue:

The essential story structure of a Macho Sue tends to revolve around untouchable pride. If love means never having to say you're sorry, being Macho Sue means the whole of reality loves you. Typically, Macho Sue's storyline follows a certain trajectory: he begins by acting egregiously, picking or provoking fights and causing problems. However much the ensuing difficulties can be laid at his door, Macho Sue is not about to apologise, in any way. So the problems continue - only to be salvaged by some immense reversals that give the impression that he was right all along. The man he insulted turns out, suddenly, to be a bad guy. The woman who dislikes him falls into his strong arms when he solves a problem that is not the same problem he caused for her. People change their personalities, storylines shift and flip like a mechanical maze popping up new paths and lowering old gates in order to keep Macho Sue from ever, ever having to backtrack. As John Wayne says, 'Never say sorry - it's a sign of weakness.'

Your crazy uncle/co-worker/President is telling himself a Macho Sue story, he's invoking Munich because he's re-imagined Winston Churchill as the Macho Sue star of WWII, the unshakable fighter who was right all along.

IMHO the parallels to "Left Behind" are exact. It doesn't matter to their fans that LaHaye & Jenkins have re-written or tossed out great swaths of the Bible -- "Left Behind" is a more satisfying, simple narrative for them, so when they do go to the Bible they will read it through the filter of "Left Behind".

I'm starting to think that what we need isn't logic, history, thought, or knowledge; what we need is better *stories*.

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Fred picked that up and asked, Is there a third possibility, a way to get through to people using Macho Sue narratives? A great discussion is taking place, with some wonderful writing from Praline (Kit Whitfield) and others. My comment so far:

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unless you can somehow create epiphanies on demand

We call that "story-telling". As Praline said, If people want heroes, give them better ones.

We need *better stories* -- not just in blogs, but books and movies and TV shows. And I think there's a specific need for better stories about men:

In the same way that Bush challenges people's manhood, B Clinton and Obama challenge people's principles - and men are supposed to be principled, so it can form an alternative template of manhood.

I've seen some tentative speculation that "Iron Man" could be the start of such a template, and that may have something to do with the film's huge and immediate popularity. I'm not sure yet, myself.

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Over at her own blog, Praline writes about separating manhood from violence. I commented:

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I think the problem is subtractive masculinity. If manhood is defined as "being a good person and male" it's easy to have role models like Atticus Finch. But if manhood is a virtue that women do not display, then only strength and violence will do. At the extreme, every other virtue becomes effete, unmanly, because it does not show you are a *man*.

I think the idea that men and women are complementary, "made to match" and balance each other, very easily slides over into subtractive masculinity.

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.

The Wimp Factor

Amanda at Pandagon (I will post my thinky thots about her 15 minutes of fame! really! and long may they wave) just posted a review of Stephen Ducat's The Wimp Factor, which I've been meaning to read for a while. Get cracking, public library! I'm poor!

Ducat’s basic thesis is that boys grow up having a harder time than girls creating a positive gender identity, and therefore grow up too often to define themselves as Not Women, creating misogyny, war, etc. I think there’s little doubt that this is true, though the reasons it is true are in dispute.

Ducat is a Freudian, which I didn't know before this review. Freudians generally write really, really well, have interesting ideas and make wide connections -- and usually go off the tracks toward Looneyville at some point. But at least their sentences aren't dipped in sociologese, so they're never *boring*.

I can't remember if it was in Louise Kaplan's Female Perversions (she's another Freudian) or in a book (by a male author, maybe?) that is linked to Kaplan in my mind, but whichever Freudian it was pointed out that on trouble with dichotomous gender roles is that it restricts what virtues a person can practice.

As Ducat says, sharing *any* quality with women provokes anxious masculinity. Therefore, if feminism lets women cultivate intelligence, anxious men must act stupid. If some women are prudent, men must be reckless. If women do well in school, men must do badly.

I actually think this is where a lot of the anxious-masculine anti-environmentalism comes from. It's not so much that women are associated with nature, but that women are encouraged to show qualities of caring for the future (especially children), of compassion, of prudence and restraint. So a male can only get guy-points by being reckless, greedy, wasteful, and short-sighted.

It's a kind of subtractive masculinity, where the only qualities that make a guy a Real Man are ones women do not display. So if feminism lets women become more fully human, Real Men must become less -- as though being human is a zero-sum game.

This is why we get so much "feminists deny the important differences between men and women! You think everyone should be androgynously bland!" When we say, "the truly important virtues are ones both men and women can display: honesty, courage, intelligence, compassion" they hear, "the important game is one that doesn't define Manhood." And in that way, of course, they're right.

Speaking of Kaplan, one of her most interesting ideas is "homovestism": getting a sexual charge out of dressing up as a member of one's own gender. I think this explains a lot about what fashion means to many women.