#michael messner

[genderandcriticaltheory]

“Fathers’ Rights” and the Realities of Men’s Family Labor

“Fathers’ Rights” and the Realities of Men’s Family Labor

“Fathers’ rights activists, who are predominately white and middle- or working-class, tend to ignore how work and family institutional relations benefit them, both before and after divorces. Instead, they focus entirely on the economic and emotional costs that are attached to these masculine privileges–among them, the common legal assumption after a divorce, that children are better off spending…

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[stuffmomnevertoldyou]

How have male allies worked within feminism?

Michael Messner, co-author of Some Men: Feminist Allies and the Movement to End Violence Against Women, spoke with Good about male feminists.

So a lot of the men who end up entering the movement to stop violence against women were themselves at some point victims of bullying, harassment, gay-bashing, violence, sexual assault, abuse when they were kids, or they saw their mothers and sisters getting beaten up by fathers. So they’ve been in environments where they have experienced violence. Often times, they were guys who were not conventionally masculine and were punished or marginalized because of that when they were young—because they were sensitized to these kinds of issues.

There are a few guys in the book who are more [conventionally masculine]. Ironically, those guys are probably most successful in the movement, in a conventional sense of success. They tend to be the ones who rise to positions of leadership. They get audiences. People listen to them. And that’s partly because they mobilize that more conventional masculine posture that they’ve developed. That’s another one of the contradictions of experience in the field, I think.

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[chapelofthechimes]

Chris, a boy well-known for his verbal prowess, and I were in a 'cut fight.' Back and forth we went. I thought I was doing pretty well, until Chris hit me with one [an insult] for which I had no answer: 'Messner,' he asserted, 'blow me!' I didn't know what to say back, and so of course I lost the cut fight. But behind my lack of response was confusion. In my eleven-year-old mind, I knew a few things about sex but was unclear about others. One thing I had recently learned from friends was that there were some men who had sex with other men. They were called homosexuals, and I was told that they were sick and sinful individuals. So, my confused mind spun, if Chris was saying 'blow me' to me, he was in effect asking me to be involved in some homosexual act with him. If homosexuality is such a bad and shameful thing, why then did he win the cut fight? [...] Now I can see that insults like 'you suck,' 'blow me,' or 'fuck you' smuggle into children's and preadolescent groups a powerful pedagogy about sexuality, power, and domination. In short, though children obviously do not intend it, through this sort of banter they teach each other that sex, whether of the homosexual or heterosexual kind, is a relational act of domination and subordination. The 'men' are the ones who are on top, in control, doing the penetrating and fucking. Women, or penetrated men, are subordinate, degraded, and dehumanized objects of sexual aggression.

Michael Messner, Taking the Field: Men, Women, and Sports

[rgr-pop]

In my intro to women's studies class, we read Michael Kimmel in the first week. We read Full Frontal Feminism (because ugh) and the first chapter we were assigned was "Boys Do Cry." Right now I'm in this intro to the sociology of sex and gender class (because ugh) and our first readings are Messner's "Becoming 100% Straight" and C.J. Pascoe's "Dude, You're a Fag." This is different and better.

I like Michael Messner, I will defend Michael Messner. Messner's work, unlike that of Michael Kimmel and Jackson Katz (and other unmentionable pseudo-intellectual male feminists), approaches masculinity without defending its borders. Michael Messner does not outline "good" masculinities. Michael Messner does not talk about "good" men. [Probably because he is a sociologist and not an overpaid talking head douchebag but whatever.] Michael Messner examines how masculine violence is socialized into men without positing that men are the ultimate victims of socialization. Michael Messner writes about how homophobia is used to police masculinity without trying to ultimately normalize a strong, "comfortable," straight masculinity. Michael Messner, in studying the experiences of men with masculinity, occasionally, somehow, talks to queer men.

Michael Messner, to the best of my knowledge, has never seriously applied the term "crisis in masculinity."

Mostly I like Michael Messner because I like sports theory and am glad to get to use it without having to take classes in our (really good) sports history department that are full of scary History Major Bros.

For what it's worth, I've read "Becoming 100% Straight" at least twice but this was the first time I realized that it's a really, really good introduction to a feminist sociological methodology. I think it would be worth parsing the difference between positioning yourself as a scholar-activist (half-assedly self-styled in a Du Bois tradition, maybe) and actually applying a feminist methodology to situate yourself in relation to your work as a means to demystify and decentralize yourself as a subject (a la Dorothy Smith). [Feminist] sociologists cannot/should not be objective, but I think people like Michael Kimmel are kind of abusing that tradition in order to talk about themselves and maintain a masculine subject.