“Refusing to Be a Man: Essays on Sex and Justice” by John Stoltenberg
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REFUSING TO BE A MAN Since its original publication in 1989, Refusing to Be a Man has been acclaimed as a classic and widely cited in gender studies literature. In thirteen eloquent essays, Stoltenberg articulates the first fully argued liberation theory for men that will also liberate women. He argues that male sexual identity is entirely a political and ethical construction whose advantages grow out of injustice. His thesis is, however, ultimately one of hope—that precisely because masculinity is so constructed, it is possible to refuse it, to act against it, and to change. A new introduction by the author discusses the roots of his work in the American civil rights and radical feminist movements and distinguishes it from the anti-feminist philosophies underlying the recent tide of reactionary men’s movements. John Stoltenberg is the radical feminist author of The End of Manhood: Parables on Sex and Selfhood (rev. edn, London and New York: UCL Press, 2000) and What Makes Pornography “Sexy” ? (Minneapolis, Minnesota: Milkweed Editions, 1994). He is cofounder of Men Against Pornography. REFUSING TO BE A MAN Essays on Sex and Justice Revised Edition JOHN STOLTENBERG London First published 1989 by Breitenbush Books, Inc. Revised edition published 2000 in the UK and the USA by UCL Press 11 New Fetter Lane, London EC4P 4EE The name of University College London (UCL) is a registered trade mark used by UCL Press with the consent of the owner. UCL Press is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group This edition published in the Taylor & Francis e-Library, 2005. “To purchase your own copy of this or any of Taylor & Francis or Routledge’s collection of thousands of eBooks please go to www.eBookstore.tandf.co.uk.” © 1989, 2000 John Stoltenberg The right of John Stoltenberg to be identified as the Author of this Work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs, and Patents Act 1988 All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data Stoltenberg, John. Refusing to be a man: essays on sex and justice/John Stoltenberg.—Rev. ed. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references. 1. Sex role—United States. 2. Masculinity—United States 3. Sexism—United States. 4. Men—United States—Sexual behavior. 5. Women—Crimes against—United States. 6. Pornography—Social aspects—United States. I. Title. HQ1075.5.U6S76 1999 305.3•0973—dc21 99–36409 ISBN 0-203-98082-4 Master e-book ISBN ISBN 1-84142-062-X (hbk) ISBN 1-84142-041-7 (pbk) iv For Andrea In memory of Jimmy CONTENTS Introduction to the Revised Edition ix Preface xxviii Part I: The Ethics of Male Sexual Identity Rapist Ethics 2 How Men Have (a) Sex 18 Sexual Objectification and Male 32 Supremacy Part II: The Politics of Male Sexual Identity Eroticism and Violence in the Father-Son 49 Relationship Disarmament and Masculinity 65 The Fetus as Penis: Men’s Self-interest 78 and Abortion Rights What Is “Good Sex” ? 88 Part III: Pornography and Male Supremacy The Forbidden Language of Sex 102 Pornography and Freedom 107 Confronting Pornography as a Civil- 120 Rights Issue vii Part IV: Activism and Moral Selfhood Feminist Activism and Male Sexual 156 Identity Other Men 166 Battery and the Will to Freedom 178 About the Essays 184 Notes 188 The world’s definitions are one thing and the life one actually lives is quite another. One cannot allow oneself, nor can one’s family, friends, or lovers—to say nothing of one’s children—to live according to the world’s definitions: one must find a way, perpetually, to be stronger and better than that. James Baldwin INTRODUCTION TO THE REVISED EDITION This book was forged in the heat of radical feminism, a current of political analysis and activism first sparked in the United States in the late 1960s and 1970s. That maverick social movement produced a historically new view of the relation of human sexuality to social justice. Radical feminism’s coruscating ideas about the connection between sexual violence and tyranny have since radiated far beyond U.S. borders, igniting change worldwide, and this book carries a torch set aflame in that fire. In 1995, delegates to the Beijing World Conference on Women ratified a platform declaring, in part, “The human rights of women include their right to have control over and decide freely and responsibly on matters relating to their sexuality, including sexual and reproductive health, free of coercion, discrimination, and violence.” Those words alone were a measure of how far radical feminist ideas had swept the globe. Branding these pages, seared into them, is the philosophical legacy that brought forth those words: a moral and intellectual conviction stemming from grassroots resistance to eroticized woman hate. This book contributed to that insurrection, by translating radical feminist ideas into a worldview and a moral identity that could be claimed and embodied unabashedly by people born with a penis. Must that anatomical trait betoken a sexual identity impervious to empathy and resistant to accountability, a sex-class identity in lockstep with rapists, pimps, pornographers, and batterers—the goons and gestapo of male supremacy? This book argues unequivocally: “No.” And x against the recent flood of antifeminist “men’s movements” — ancient cults of masculinity in modern guise—this book does not sell out women’s lives to do so; it does not make excuses for men’s abuse and domination of others; it does not seek to redeem or resuscitate patriarchy; it does not settle for social change strategies that would replicate gender injustice. My title, Refusing to Be a Man, has both inspired and infuriated. Once, as I sat under hot studio lights near the end of a U.S. television talk show (later syndicated internationally) about the topic of men and pornography, the host, a man famously liberal, sputteringly challenged me to explain what it meant. “I mean disavowing the privilege that comes with having been born with some kind of extension of your urethra between your legs,” I offered. “I mean the same thing as I would mean by ‘refusing to be a white• in a racist society.” I had expected that in the United States, with its particular history of struggle against white supremacy, my reply would ring a bell with this man. Apparently it did not; he seemed dumbfounded and changed the subject. As I look back on the first publication of this book, it appears to me like a signpost by the road, a scrawl on the wall, a trail marker in the woods. As passers-by pause, perhaps stopped by the title, perhaps reading some pages, they have seemed to gravitate toward one direction or, angered and defensive, determinedly go in its opposite. Few are unfazed. Something here polarizes: It points a possible path of approach for some, and signals to others that here lies terrain that must be fled. Radical politics do that. Significant egalitarian social change does not arise from the liberal middle, the noncommittal, the mean between extremes. Substantive change happens when the center has to migrate, because it has been tugged and pushed by political action that challenges complacency, stirs up the sediment of received bias, and exposes contradictions that embed the status quo. This has been especially true of radical feminism’s demystifying of male-supremacist ideologies of gender essentialism. As of the late twentieth century, the once certain notion that there exists in human nature a fixed male xi sexual identity— metaphysically grounded in creation, built into human bodies, perhaps transcendentally ordained—has begun a slow blurring into oblivion. Yet many people, still clinging to the illusion that manhood materially exists, defend it with all their might and rage. Perhaps at some level they already know that in the absence of force and anger, the male sex as a class is a chimera. Perhaps they already intuit that without systemic male dominance, no one can believably be a man. The rate at which women are raped in the United States is higher than in any other country that keeps track—four times higher than in Germany, thirteen times higher than in Great Britain, and twenty times higher than in Japan. It is therefore no credit to the American political Left that progressive politics here have tended to ignore radical feminism’s analysis of how male supremacy is made flesh—including through rape, battery, prostitution, and pornography, to say nothing of everyday insults, deceptions, betrayals. The American political Left has generally accommodated more liberal versions of feminism, but not radical feminism’s central message that there is something deeply problematic in men’s personal use and abuse of women—something that could explain and help us understand that which all systems of exploitation and oppression have in common. It is a sad fact that as I write today, a decade after Refusing to Be a Man was first published in the U.S., the American liberal Left has almost unanimously embraced the sex industry—defending pornographers and systems of prostitution—unlike, for instance, significant segments of the political Left in Europe. To the extent that the American political Left has rejected radical feminism’s deep inquiry into the nexus of eroticism, male sexual identity, sexual possession, and injustice, it has increasingly come to resemble the American political Right: a politics that is consonant with male sexual purchase and ownership of women’s bodies.