Men Doing Feminism

Tom Digby

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781135772154
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Philosophie
• Subtopic: Histoire et théorie de la philosophie

The relation between feminism and men is often presumed to be antagonistic, so that men are expected to resist feminism, and feminists are assumed to hate men. That pattern of opposition is disrupted, however, by the continually increasing numbers of men who are participating in feminist theory and practice, trying to integrate feminist perspectives into their scholarship, teaching, work, play, friendships, and romantic involvements. Responses to this male feminism have varied. Sometimes male feminists find some female feminists critical of men who oppose or decline to join feminist projects, but also rebuff the few men who do undertake feminist projects. On the other hand, some women feminists have unequivocally welcomed men as allies in political, business, religious, and academic contexts. The essays in Men Doing Feminism reveal that there is justification for both views, the skeptical and the enthusiastic, because feminist men are as diverse as feminist women. Many of the eighteen contributors to this book--women, men, blacks, whites, gays, straights, transsexuals--use personal narrative to show ways that men's lives can shape their approaches to doing feminism and to convey the opportunities and challenges involved in integrating feminism into a man's life. Some authors argue that men's experiences prepare them to make contributions that are of crucial importance to feminist theory. Others argue that men must radically reform, or even abandon manhood and masculinity if they are to be feminists. In Men Doing Feminism, feminist theory is used to illuminate men's lives, and men's lives serve as a basis for feminist theory. Contributors: Michael Awkward, Susan Bordo, Harry Brod, Tom Digby, Judith K. Gardiner, C. Jacob Hale, Sandra Harding, Patrick Hopkins, Joy James, David Kahane, Michael Kimmel, Gary Lemons, Larry May, Brian Pronger, Henry Rubin, Richard Schmitt, James P. Sterba, Laurence Mordekhai Thomas, and Thomas E. Wartenberg.

part I

Feminist Theory from Men’s Lives

Chapter 1

My Father the Feminist

Susan Bordo

I

Most of the images of Judaism that I grew up with were strongly patriarchal. Some of these images came from popular culture: Charlton Heston on the mountaintop, Immutable Commandments in his arms. Some of them came from Christian renderings of Judaism, to which all Jews are subjected in this culture: the stern, unforgiving God of the “Old” Testament versus Jesus, God of Love. Some of them came from my slender understanding of the (undeniably) patriarchal laws and institutions of Judaism. But most of them derived from childish analogy with my father; he was a stubborn patriarch and he was Jewish, so Judaism must be stubbornly patriarchal, too.

My father made most important decisions for our family: where we would live, how we would spend our money, what we would do on the weekends. In Manhood in the Making, anthropologist David Gilmore describes Jewish-American culture as “one of the few in which women virtually dominate men.”¹ This information would have come as a big surprise to my mother. My father’s preferences shaped our lives. Because he didn’t like my mother’s relatives, we rarely saw them. Because he didn’t swim or enjoy the beach, our trips to the Jersey shore (essential for deliverance from the sweltering heat of the Newark tenement in which we lived) were for walking the boardwalk, loading our stomachs with hot dogs and knishes and playing Pokerino. I’d look over the wooden railing at the rambunctious, physical crowd on the beach, diving into waves, cavorting like human creatures, and feel myself exiled, my body developing into something non-American and graceless. Because my father adored the racetrack, we spent our family vacation at a shabby boardinghouse in Saratoga Springs, New York. Over breakfast, he would dope out the morning line with his cronies while we kids hung out on the stoop, trying to avoid the acrid cigar smoke and odd, sweaty cooking smells from the kosher kitchen, hoping not to be caught and trapped into conversation with an old person. At the track in the afternoon, we would pick through the sad, discarded tickets that littered the pavement, looking for carelessly castaway “place” or “show” winners, restlessly marking time until he had placed his final bets and we could leave.

My father had been popular and successful during his Brooklyn youth. He was a track star and a straight-A student, but somehow managed—through his keen iconoclastic wit, feisty spirit, and willingness to take a dare—to win the respect and affection of members of the Jewish Mafia and their “dolls,” with whom he hung out on occasion. I grew up hearing stories of his romantic exploits and brushes with danger. There were two parts to the story of how the gorgeous, thrill-seeking girlfriend of Louis Lepke (“Bugsy”) Buchalter, head of Murder, Inc. had taken a shine to my father. In the first part, my father takes her up on the roof, where the two get drunk and presumably have sex (although he always left that detail out); he then falls asleep, and wakes up to see her walking stark naked along the edge of the roof. In the sequel, Bugsy—having found out about her dangerous and near-fatal liaison with my father—sends word out that he wants a meeting with my father at a specified hour later that day. Not knowing what might happen, my father arranges to have a gun purchased and brought to him by a flunky-pal. The established meeting time approaches and no gun has appeared; my father is getting very nervous. Bugsy arrives, and still no gun; my father is beside himself. They exchange a few Damon Runyonesque words (dialogue I unfortunately cannot remember). The tension builds. Suddenly, the flunky arrives, out of breath, and thrusts a crumpled brown paper bag into my father’s hands. In it is the gun, in pieces, unassembled. Buchalter bursts into laughter, and lets my father go with just a warning.

Did these incidents actually happen? Told to me by a plump, balding forty-five-year-old man, these tales belonged to a time and place as distant as Camelot and as unavailable to factual confirmation. (My mother never disputed my father’s accounts, but she never confirmed them, either.) There were photographs which suggested that the stories could be true; ones showing my father as well-built and as dashingly handsome as John Garfield, the tough, Jewish street-kid who became a Hollywood star. Whatever the literal truth of the stories, my father had thrived in his dual role of a promising scholar and street-smart adventurer. It was the more sober, unromantic requirements of provider-manliness that let my father down. The Depression forced him to abandon his dreams of college and a career in journalism. After the war, my father returned from the South Pacific to his wife and small daughter, my older sister, and a job as a poorly-paid employee of wealthier relatives: selling candy “on the road” for the family business. The job was not entirely unrewarding. He enjoyed making sales and loved traveling to exotic places like New Orleans, where he ate and drank in fancy restaurants, swapping stories with the pleasure-loving southern brokers who reveled in “Yosh’s warmth and wit.” But coming home from these trips was always a return to his subordinate status in the company, and what he increasingly came to experience as a “failed” life. He identified with Willie Loman.

When men did “wrong” by his wife and daughters, however, my father’s boyhood skills could re-surface. An abusive gym teacher was told on no uncertain terms that if he called me “fatty” one more time he was going to have the shit kicked out of him. The summer after my first year at college—a year in which my main accomplishment was that I had “gone all the way” on my eighteenth birthday—I dared to close my bedroom door with a boy inside the room. He was the boy with whom I had celebrated my birthday. My father had suspicions, which I subtly encouraged, that I had come home changed. He pounded on the door, threatening to break it down if we did not come out. These scenes left me confused about what I admired and wanted in a man. It was embarrassing for a modern girl to have her father behave like a caveman. But these were the proofs of love my father offered, and they had an archetypal zing that I couldn’t deny.

Contemporary theorists distinguish between the penis (a part of male anatomy that can be soft as well as hard, that pees far more often than it penetrates, and that was once probably wiped by a mommy) and the “phallus”: everything cultural that advances or is symbolic of the unity, mastery, immutable logic, law, and authority that have been associated with male dominance in Western cultures. My father spent much of his later life pining for the street- “phallus” that he embodied so brilliantly as a youth, and—like many working class and minority-men—often looked to the women in his life for proofs of the respect that he couldn’t get from the dominant culture. Along with his sample cases of candy, he carried the requirements and failures of his “manliness” heavily with him. Monthly payments and investments in the future were somehow demeaning to him, as though reliance on banks and other bureaucracies threatened his autonomy; as a consequence, he never owned a house and died without life insurance. He refused to “let” my mother work outside the home, although we had little money and nothing in the bank; all three daughters paid their ways through college. Although he was pleasure-loving, generous and expansive, his shame over not having done better in life was a low-lying cloud perpetually threatening to erupt into a storm of bitterness. Any small insult to his authority or any minor wound to his pride could set it off. His eyes would darken and his mouth would set, almost in a snarl; often, he would leave rooms and houses, slamming the door behind him and managing to convey, with impressive believability, the possibility that he might never return. He always returned, as I remember.

Our nuclear family had little to do with the institutions of Judaism, religious or social. My mother, born in Poland, had come from an orthodox family; her own mother had remained fiercely observant to the end of her life, keeping kosher, lighting candles, faithful to Yiddish. My father, brought up on Hollywood and hot dogs, regarded the religiosity of my mother’s family as an Old World encumbrance, and—remember—he made the rules. We did not belong to a temple, nor attend Hebrew school. We did not have a tree at Christmas (my father drew the line on what he took to be goyish paraphernalia, or symbols of Christianity), yet we exchanged presents on Christmas morning. Father’s parents had just arrived in America when he was born. They were more worldly than my mother’s clan and remained steeped in tradition. He had no patience with my maternal grandmother’s rigid adherence to Jewish law, but loss invariably brought out something deeply planted in his own body: on Yom Kippur he davened in Yiddish; at my mother’s funeral, he tore at his shirt (an Old World symbol of grief). He regarded his WASP brokers and their blonde wives as classy and my mother’s relations as peasants; but he adored taking the family on a weekend afternoon to the Brownsville section of Brooklyn, which even into the 1950s was an Old World Jewish ghetto of pushcarts, live chickens, and Yiddish theater.

My father’s Jewishness was rent with contradictions. He was by nature rebellious and skeptical of orthodoxies. But like Job he was in continual conversation with Jehovah about the trials and sorrows of his life; his sense of personal injustice was cosmic. In Avalon, Barry Levinson’s film memoir of growing up in an immigrant Jewish family, Levinson presents an incident that nearly jolted me out of my seat in recognition. The film follows the changing lives of a family of brothers who arrived in Baltimore early in the twentieth century, and depicts with nice ambivalence, the losing struggle of family cohesiveness against the fragmenting attractions of individualism, consumerism, suburbia, and mass-media culture. In the film, mealtime is a metaphor for this struggle, as extended-family gatherings around the dinner table give way over the years to frozen dinners taken on trays to the living room, where TV is the only real dinner companion. In a pivotal scene, the eldest brother of the clan—at his point in the film he is about seventy years old—arrives for Thanksgiving dinner to find that the turkey has already been carved by his younger brother. It had been the unquestioned family custom for the assembled clan to wait for the eldest brother’s arrival before carving the turkey, and he had always made them wait, in a yearly ritual testing the waters of respect and authority. This time, screaming kids and growling stomachs won out over symbolic fealties to the patriarch. The eldest brother, injured beyond repair, swears never to speak to his younger brother again. And doesn’t.

When the needs of others collided with and overruled my father’s expectations of how things should be, his overwhelming tendency was to interpret this as lack of respect; his retaliation, although rarely physical, could be as harsh, irrevocable, and consequential as Zeus’s. Throughout my childhood, my father constructed numerous small tests of loyalty and devotion. Love me, love my cigar. My father sometimes said this jokingly, but we all knew he meant business. We knew, too, that much more than his freedom to smoke was at stake. Our willingness to tolerate burning eyes and gagging throats was a measure of our love for him. Once, at age twenty-nine, I made the mistake of requesting that he smoke his cigar outside the airless basement apartment that I was living in as a graduate student. He blew up at me with a fury that surpassed the considerable furies I had witnessed throughout my childhood. My half-brother, my father’s son by an earlier marriage, made the fatal mistake of siding with his own wife against my father in an ugly (and to me, still obscure) exchange of insults and injuries. I know that my father’s generosity—a badge of pride with him—had been called into question and that terrible words were spoken and written, words that cut my father to the quick. It was a genuine crisis, an awful fight. But when my father declared that Gary was henceforth cut out of his life, I could hardly take that threat seriously. I was wrong. My father died a decade later without ever having spoken again to his son.

II

Traditional Judaism is patriarchal. It would be an anomaly within dominant Western cultural traditions if it were not. But there is an element within Jewish paternalism that seeds its own deconstruction. While trying to cram as much learning about Judaism as I could into one weekend of preparation for writing this essay, I found this amazing story “from the time of the Romans” in a book about Bar Mitzvah—the Jewish ceremony signifying a boy’s becoming a man:

A group of rabbis were arguing an issue of religious law. Rabbi Eliezer ben Hyrcanus offered an opinion. It was rejected. Rabbi Eliezer protested the decision. “I am right and I can prove it. If my opinion is correct, let the stream outside this study house flow backward.”

The stream began to flow backward.

Rabbi Joshua ben Hananiah, who led the majority, said, “A stream doesn’t prove anything.”

Rabbi Eliezer continued, “If my opinion is correct, let the walls of the study house prove it.”

The walls started leaning toward them.

Rabbi Joshua held firm, and told the walls to go back to their place.

Finally, Rabbi Eliezer said, “Let Heaven itself bear witness that my opinion is the correct one.”

A voice came from out of the sky. “Why do you reject Rabbi Eliezer’s opinion? He is right in every case.”

To which Rabbi Joshua responded, “The Torah is not in heaven. We pay no attention to voices.”²

Pay no attention to God’s voice? I read this story aloud to the Protestant man with whom I live and his mouth fell open. But then, so did mine. The association of Jewish scholarship with radical and ongoing disputation and debate is not new to me, of course. I have no schooling in Judaism, but I know that Jews consider the Torah—God’s covenant with Israel, given to Moses at Mount Sinai—a much more extensive and flexible body of literature than the classic pictorial version of Ten Commandments indelibly burned in stone. Far from ten straightforward commandments, the Torah includes not only “all the rules, obligations, history, poetry, and literature contained in the first five books of the Bible” but also “all subsequent interpretations and adaptations.”³ The latter, known as the Talmud, is the subject of continuous interpretation and contestation among scholars and theologians.

Within popular culture, too, the Jew’s enjoyment of and limitless capacity for tenacious argumentation has been a motif of many Yiddish jokes and humorous self-depictions of Jewish life. In Avalon, the family engages in a running debate about the most efficient route from New York to Brooklyn, jousting with each other in the same combative, stubborn style as Rabbi Eliezer and Rabbi Joshua. The implication is that if we don’t have something serious to debate, we will invent a dispute around something trivial, just to satisfy the itch for argument. The same idea figures as well in less affectionate, arguably anti-Semitic depictions, such as Mousorgsky’s musical sketch, in Pictures at an Exhibition, of “Two Jews, One Rich and the Other Poor.” In that sketch, two musical voices yammer at each other argumentatively, one bossy and the other whining (“kvetching,” as Jews would say), stubbornly unable to come to agreement.

The Eliezer/Joshua story, however, is not about how Jews love to argue. Eric Kimmel reads the story as signifying that “the Torah is a living document … not the property of mystical fanatics. Reason and logic could be used to adapt its teachings to changing times and conditions.”⁴ In my opinion, this reading doe...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Halftitle
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Foreword
• Introduction
• PART I. Feminist Theory from Men’s Lives
• PART II. Feminist Theory in Men’s Lives
• Contributors Notes