I am attempting to work my way through thoughts that have been percolating for a few days now. I had what I thought was a breakthrough in the shower, but now I'm not so sure. It's the old men and women problem again. Specifically, the whys and wheretofores of feminism and the patriarchy.

My hang up is this: men don't need to rediscover a community of men because everything, being geared as it is towards masculinity and the perpetuation of masculinity, is already geared towards the community of men. There is no large social silencing of men going on. However, men as individuals are under pressure to conform to societal ideals of masculinity the same as women are under pressure to conform to societal ideals of femininity. To some degree, recently, the objectification of men has grown exponentially. This means that why men aren't as abused and silenced as women as a whole, men as individuals still suffer from the objectification and pressures placed on them that many individual women do.

There isn't a "men's studies" department alongside women's studies for good reason--just about everything is men's studies. But men are people too. I'm not saying that to sound patronizing (haha) but because I'm caught between the disconnect of understanding women and minorities and what is/has happening/happened to them and not forgetting the humanity of the straight white male while we're at it. Obviously the answer is not to do away with multi-cultural studies any more than it is to place an obscene amount of guilt on young straight, white, males, but how do we account for the individual pressures withstood, even as we acknowledge a larger lack of societal pressures or bigotry?

At the risk of sounding existentialist I want to say something hippish like "we all just need to know ourselves" but that doesn't do anyone any good. Men are denied their emotions, pressured to change their bodies, and marked by their gender for particular activities. Forgetting for a minute how much these things happen to women I'm more concerned with how much the damage that is done to men is forgotten in an effort to discuss women. Of course, the solution might very well be found in women's studies--in the best classes I've taken it isn't about a male versus female situation but looking at how the patriarchy affects all genders indiscriminately. Which leads me to another thought.

Is this evaluation of women to the exclusion of men a reality or the spin placed on women's studies to devalue it and make it appear like feminists exist in an either/or reality? There can be little argument that feminist is a dirty word; in my classes many of my freshman girls, sweet church-going freshman girls, would rather be called sluts than feminists. What does that tell us? I wonder if real women's studies, the kind I have been exposed to honestly, doesn't look more at both genders and the effects of society on both genders more honestly and realistically than any portrayal outside the classroom offers. We only see on tv and in movies the angry man-hating dyke feminists. Chasing Amy presents a really fantastic representation of that.

So maybe this discomfort I'm dealing with isn't about the silencing of men in order to empower women at all, but some unvocalized awareness of further silencing of women and men, through the accusation that men are being silenced. After all, in order to really look at men the way women's studies have begun to look at women we would need new theory and new language. That theory and language isn't going to come from the traditional classes, but may very well be available in feminist theory.

Is it possible then that men are continuously silencing themselves in order to attack feminists? Isn't there an old cliché somewhere about cutting off your own arm to spite your enemy or something? It wouldn't surprise me at all if that were what was going on because society, patriarchal as it is, doesn't look at its members as individuals and so causing men to suffer would be as inconsequential as the suffering of anyone else. Perpetuating in-fighting between the members would, however, ensure that our demands for individual recognition continue to go unheard.

Obviously this isn't something that's going to be figured out in a few thousand words written by an armchair philosopher, but it's interesting and, I think, worth considering. How often do we suffer what we think we suffer, and how often is our suffering created specifically to manipulate us into ignoring what is actually causing the pain?