2009-09-11 10:20 | "Well, what about them?"
Here's Your Big Chance to Ask: What About the Men?, by Melissa McEwan at Shakesville. She wrote about a New York Times Magazine article, entitled Saving The World's Women.
Interesting. From whom are the world's women being saved? From themselves? From just the women and girls in the developing world? Or are those the only women and girls who need saving? Everything's peachy in the developed world, is it? And then there is this: Can the lives of women and girls, anywhere, be changed if the lives and men and boys aren't changed, too?
[...]
It's just the most amazing thing that the jack-booted enforcers of the patriarchy can't stop demanding, "What about the men?" in every feminist thread on the planet, but when there's actually a place in which it is not only appropriate and useful, but necessary to ask and answer the question, "What about the men?" there's a yawning cavern of silence.
M. LeBlanc at Ph.D. wrote a jumping-off post, Systems, Not People:
The problem with the WuDunn/Kristof piece is not that they painted third-world men as misogynist oppressors each and every one. It's that they left out of the conversation any discussion of the systems that endeavor to keep women oppressed and poor, leaving the racist, xenophobic and triumphalist Western reader free to assume that it is the fault of the dark and violent nature of the men of the developing world. It's a familiar and comfortable reflex, to paint non-Westerners as other. It creates a cocoon of fake security. [...]
Contrary to Okong'o, what WuDunn and Kristof needed to do was not qualify their statements by reminding us that not all men are evil patriarchs bent on oppression, but put their narrative in an analytical context, of why and how these things happen, and why and how they go unpunished in silence.
Tags: source:bitch phd, source:shakesville, what about the men?
