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Prisoners of Gender
Posted by Pharmakon on 2023-November-5 00:07:42, Sunday
The problem is that, if not pushed into manhood, boys and young men will find eschewing difficult and dangerous manhood tasks congenial, as Gilmore (1990) found in several exceptional cultures, where manhood was not needed or valued. In Tahiti, for example, there was no concept of manhood when Europeans first arrived in the 1770s. Men and women had exactly the same roles, boys were never tested in their masculinity, and the men were generally effeminate in demeanor and quite content in their status. Tahiti was a paradise, with no natural enemies because of isolation; food could be picked from trees and fish snatched from shallow waters. Gilmore (1990) argued that these exceptional cases show that manhood is socially constructed, not an obligate endpoint. As he noted, manhood ideologies are adaptations to particular social and physical environments. The correlation between the harshness of environment and the degree that manhood is stressed in different cultures “could not be more clear, concrete, or compelling,” he emphasized (p. 224). Girls are different from boys. Duh. But to conclude from that, as some of our posters do (see thread linked below), that MAP or youthlove activism is hopeless because it seeks to promote the sexual agency of both genders is not just to recognize difference, but to essentialize it. And this is not only a mistake, as the passage quoted above suggests, but a mistake that threatens to divide and demoralize our fragile movement. The argument, explicitly presented as masculinist in the cited post (“the masculinists,” the poster writes, “will have to recuperate pederasty”), is enticing. Girls get pregnant, so girl love is inherently abusive unless consummated in the context of marriage. Boys don’t, so boylove is consequence-free and lacks the “baggage” associated with girl love. When girl love is presented as sharing the “simplicity” of boylove, it “is proved to be inadequate, it drags boylove advocacy down with it.” But the syllogism depends on a false assumption: that the dynamics of gender were fixed deep in human evolutionary history and are immune to the influence of changing circumstances. As the Tahitian example cited by Bruce Rind shows, this is not so. Most human social practices, unlike the instinctual behaviors upon which many other animals depend, are strategies socially developed and culturally sustained to cope with changing conditions. This doesn’t mean the impulse toward “womb-protection” cited in this brilliantly argued post has disappeared. But it has been undermined by a multitude of fundamental changes in our social practices, most importantly the relocation of economically productive activity – on which the survival of our species primarily depends – from the household, in the preindustrial age, to the factory, shop, or office today. Contemporary capitalism treats the male and female worker as fungible. That has fundamentally changed the dynamic of today’s gender relations (as the poster himself observes when he speaks of “40 years of tyrannical feminism”). To treat “womb-protection” as instinctual makes us Prisoners of Gender. Nor is this poster content with arguing that, because of the “baggage” associated with girl love, boylove activism should go its own way (though after all the founding organization of our activism in the US, NAMBLA, focused explicitly on man-boy relationships). He concedes that to demand sexual agency for boys while denying it to girls is self-evidently out of the question, even though under the historical models he essentializes – child marriage for girls and pederasty for boys – exactly this was the established practice. To recuperate child marriage, our poster agrees, is a hopeless cause. On this point he is undoubtedly correct. As he writes, "child marriage will never reemerge as a viable life quest in the West, at least in our lifetimes." (Whether he thinks it might, under some circumstances, be desirable is not entirely clear.) But he holds out hope that mentorship pederasty can be recuperated by “war-radicalized men” when “[a]s the world inches toward global conflict masculine ideals become necessary again.” This is consistent with Rind’s thesis on pederasty in the text cited above: that boys must be “pushed into manhood” by pederasty when social conditions necessitate “difficult and dangerous manhood tasks.” Perhaps this will happen. I see no reason to expect or hope for it – it sounds quite unpleasant – and most important, no way to plan for it. As our poster concedes, it precludes, rather than directing, our activism. If it does happen, we will deal with it and hope for the best. Meanwhile, I suggest that the masculinist perspective does nothing but divide and demoralize us. We should prepare instead for circumstances to change less radically, for child marriage and mentorship pederasty to remain relics of past ages, and seek to build our movement around promoting sexual agency for both male and female youth. We need not and must not accept being prisoners of the gender conceptions of the past, least of all “womb-protectionism.” That is nothing more than a recipe for demoralization and defeat. hugzu ;-p  |
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