MISCmedia for 5/12/00
How to Be A Male Feminist Without Hating Yourself

BEFORE TODAY'S MAIN TOPIC, the next live MISCmedia event will be a part of the live event of the litzine Klang. It's Thursday, 5/18 (20 years after the Big Boom) at the Hopvine Pub, 507 15th Ave. E. on Capitol Hill, starting around 8 p.m. Yeah, it's 21 and over.

YESTERDAY, we discussed the newly-ascending adolescent sex-role stereotypes. Instead of depicting boys as all privileged-and-powerful and girls as all suppressed waifs, the new stereotype depicts girls as empowered achievers and boys as lost, clumsy oafs.

Part of the reasoning behind this new conventional wisdom is the notion that boys, particularly boys with feminist teachers and/or divorced moms, are growing up receiving a steady dose of overt and covert anti-male messages. These boys, the argument goes, come to see themselves as inherently and irrepairably stupid, insensitive, brutal, and immature; even as personally responsible for every bad thing any male ever did to any female.

These depictions, and the explanations used to justify them, are just as irresponsibly oversimplified and overgeneralized as any stereotypes. Still, just as a stopped clock is right twice a day, there are a few young males who have been caught up in the futile trap of self-gender guilt tripping.

I've seen a few such young and less-than-young males out there. For them, and for any of you who may be caught up in this self-esteem ruination, some words to ponder:

• It's just as OK to be male as it is to be female.

• It's just as OK to be straight as it is to be gay.

• You're not individually to blame for anything that happened before you were born.

• The relative socioeconomic status of women and men is due not to innate gender goodness or evilness but to historic patterns of privilege. Other such patterns include nationality, race, religion, and especially class.

• If men really were as identical and united as the stereotypes claim they are, they wouldn't have killed so many other men in all those silly wars.

• If you like to look at women's physiques, it doesn't necessarily mean you hate women. It probably means you like women. Maybe even love them.

• You can only truly love another if you at least like yourself.

• Guilt-tripping is ultimately a self-serving, myopic indulgence. Any fetishist will tell you so.

• A more equitable future doesn't need men to wimp out or to wallow in guilt. It needs strong men working side-by-side with strong women.

• Men hold up half the sky.

MONDAY: WIth or without the antitrust hoopla, is Microsoft's era over anyway?

ELSEWHERE:

• Neo-neo-liberalism: the radical idea that business isn't everything (found by Arts and Letters Daily)....
• Could book-publishing conglomerates be the next doomed industrial dinosaurs? Maybe....

RECENT HIGHLIGHTS:

• The new adolescent gender stereotype.
• Electric cars--here now at last, pretty soon, maybe.
• Could a split Microsoft be a bigger threat than a whole one?
• American Psycho as anticapitalist tool.
• Modern art as capitalist tool.
• Prepare to say goodbye to the Children's Hospital thrift store.
• Parts one and two of Matthew Stadler's look at urban dreamers in the distant and more-recent past.
• Dissecting the Way-New Left.
• Parts one and two of luxury-box stadia as a sort of Utopian vision.
• Harper's Magazine discovers those Dreaded Eugene Anarchists.
• The new world capital of photography.
• The continuing story of CNBC.
• James Twitchell-- one English prof who (hearts) marketing.
• Announcing the launch of MISCmedia Radio.
• Parts one and two of a poet's fascination with the business press.

ARCHIVES:

• 2001, 2000, 1999, 1998, 1997, 1996, 1995, and 1986-94 columns
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