{"id":266,"date":"2011-08-17T13:57:40","date_gmt":"2011-08-17T11:57:40","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.uab.cat\/saramartinalegre\/?p=266"},"modified":"2011-08-17T13:57:40","modified_gmt":"2011-08-17T11:57:40","slug":"that-sinking-feeling-reading-that-sinking-feeling-reading-david-gilmores-misogyny-the-male-malady","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/webs.uab.cat\/saramartinalegre\/2011\/08\/17\/that-sinking-feeling-reading-that-sinking-feeling-reading-david-gilmores-misogyny-the-male-malady\/","title":{"rendered":"THAT SINKING FEELING: READING DAVID GILMORE\u2019S MISOGYNY: THE MALE MALADY<\/em>"},"content":{"rendered":"

David Gilmore is an American anthropologist who specialises in Spanish masculinism in recalcitrant local areas, which, I\u2019m sure, is enough for several academic careers. Having puzzled over his volume Manhood in the Making<\/em> (1991), which deals with the rites of passage devised by men around the world to access \u2018proper\u2019 masculinity, I embarked this summer on his book on Misogyny: The Male Malady<\/em> (2009). You may read Jenny Diski\u2019s thorough review at LRV online (http:\/\/www.lrb.co.uk\/v23\/n17\/jenny-diski\/oh-andrea-dworkin<\/a>) and I\u2019ll save thus myself the trouble of expressing in too much detail how annoyed I am with Gilmore. Let me quote a tongue-in-cheek bit from her review, and you\u2019ll get the idea of how his main argument runs: \u201cOf course, it\u2019s not women\u2019s fault that it\u2019s all their fault (…) but men suffer from having been given birth to by women from whom they have to separate in order to become men; they suffer from having to desire people of the same gender as their mother (my, this is very awkward, Jocasta), and they suffer because they cannot perform the miracle of reproducing the species directly from their own bodies. Men suffer. No, they do. It\u2019s awful.\u201d<\/p>\n

Gilmore piles up an impressive catalogue of misogynistic attitudes and institutions all over the world but remains unimpressively blind to what links them all: it\u2019s patriarchy, stupid! Once more: yes, patriarchy, the masculinist, hierarchical, power-based social arrangement, which IS NOT THE SAME AS MASCULINITY (men needn\u2019t be<\/em> patriarchal at all). My sinking feeling has much to do with this selective blindness but also with his blanket dismissal of feminism and his deciding to ignore the worst consequences of misogyny for women (\u2018hard to spell, easy to practice\u2019 reads the t-shirt slogan). This is like discussing racism without listening to its victims, just as a white problem. Quite unscholarly to begin with and implicitly, if not overly, racist. Cheeky, cheeky… My little voice remonstrated with me as I finished the book: \u2018what did you expect, silly?\u2019 Yes, you\u2019re right. What did I expect? To be honest: I expected to learn about the patriarchal enemy\u2019s camp but I simply got too much of that. Really not that much, if I think that Gilmore is a nice, highly educated, politically correct man and not at all the kind of bastard who calls 016 (the Spanish number for victims of male violence) to insult and demean \u2013maybe he\u2019d like to study these… But still…<\/p>\n

What irks me most (and it\u2019s amazing how often I use this phrase in this blog) is how easily Gilmore dismisses feminism, even calling a feminist author who is in favour of a more androgynous approach to gender \u2018stupid\u2019 (I have avenged her now a few lines above). This is still too frequent in the texts by male chauvinist authors who seem to believe that we feminists don\u2019t have degrees but just a hazy, unspecified self-training in trashy, men-hating ideas not worth the name. I believe that feminism, which is a pro-equal civil-rights ideology, has this bad reputation because it\u2019s got a misleading name: it should actually be called \u2018anti-patriarchalism\u2019 and be open to all genders. However, how can this change as long as patriarchy is, like Poe\u2019s famous letter, hidden in view of all? Apart from this, please some man explain to me how you can bear your own portrayal as animals dominated by uncontrollable (sexual) urges, which is how Gilmore characterises you in his analysis of your psychogenetic (?) make-up. Here, in the feminist frontlines, we are fighting for the acknowledgment of women as much more than just bodies (to be controlled…). Men, fight your own fight!! I can\u2019t believe you\u2019re just bodies out of control. How can you?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

David Gilmore is an American anthropologist who specialises in Spanish masculinism in recalcitrant local areas, which, I\u2019m sure, is enough for several academic careers. Having puzzled over his volume Manhood in the Making (1991), which deals with the rites of passage devised by men around the world to access \u2018proper\u2019 masculinity, I embarked this summer […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":98,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[212],"class_list":["post-266","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-sin-categoria","tag-gender-studies"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/webs.uab.cat\/saramartinalegre\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/266","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/webs.uab.cat\/saramartinalegre\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/webs.uab.cat\/saramartinalegre\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/webs.uab.cat\/saramartinalegre\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/98"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/webs.uab.cat\/saramartinalegre\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=266"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/webs.uab.cat\/saramartinalegre\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/266\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/webs.uab.cat\/saramartinalegre\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=266"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/webs.uab.cat\/saramartinalegre\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=266"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/webs.uab.cat\/saramartinalegre\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=266"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}