Infantilizing complex issues for pageviews – Rebecca Kamm feat. the Good Men Project
Another week, another unthreatening-yet-just-threatening-enough-to-stir-up-plenty-of-pageviews column about “ladies’ issues” (sexism doesn’t count if it’s ironic) from Rebecca Kamm in the Herald.
This week, that most troubling of questions, the issue which all other feminist work should be put aside so we can properly focus on it: can men be feminists?
The comments … I can’t even, but Megapope on Twitter provided all the commentary necessary on that front.
Thing is, it’s just another Rebecca Kamm column. Very little original content, lots of hip links to other sites (which, you know, I should probably be thankful for, given how the Armstrong types still like to pretend that they’re working only in print) …
And then she goes and quotes the founder of the “Good Men Project”.
Tom Matlack, founder of the The Good Men project, is also unconvinced [that men can be feminists]. But not because men don’t “get it”, or because – like Celie’s Revenge – he suspects falsity. He strays from the term because he’s experienced firsthand the furore it sparks:
“I am a feminist of the kind my mum was, and is,” he tells me via email: “She raised me in the 1970s with the idea that the Equal Rights Amendment to our constitution was just a crucial as the Civil Rights Act.”
Yet, “modern cyber feminists”, as Matlack puts it, “tell me, through heated and personal attacks, that I have no right to discuss gender because I don’t understand what it’s like to be a women who is oppressed.
Gee, Rebecca, sounds like Tom’s had a rough time!
Or maybe he’s received a lot of flack because he helped create a “project” which is so antifeminist that Hugo fucking Schwyzer resigned from it, saying “It was not ethically possible for me to remain silent while the site with which I am now best associated took an increasingly anti-feminist stance.” (You can google the original post if you like, I ain’t linking to that creepfest.)
A project which delights in publishing pieces justifying rape if the rapist is enough of an OK dude or if it ~highlights~ the ~struggles~ of being a man in the modern world surrounded by slutty bitches.
Maybe Tom Matlack has no right to discuss gender because he’s a fucking misogynist pig.
But that conversation might be a liiiiiiiiiittle bit too radical for the readers of the Herald.
Ideologically Impure 
This is why we need feminist – and call me a sexist old bastard – but those feminist should be women.
Whether or not men can be feminists doesn’t particularly bother me, per se. It’s enough for me to share many of the values of feminism…
I’ll settle for the “label” of social democrat. It seems to fit liberal, leftist blokes like me.