Sunday, November 29, 2009

What I Hate and Love about Men


[image is from here]

It is always a strange thing to me that privileged white heterosexual men seem to think that one can only have one set of feelings about them--that one either loves them or one hates them. Is this what individual WHM feel about themselves, I wonder? Is this what they feel about people who are not them?

Life has never been so simple, in my experience. (Maybe that is because I'm gay, or maybe because this gay man, like all others, is fully human.) Nor, especially, has the matter of loving men and receiving love from men been simple. Relating to men for me is virtually never a matter of "hate or love". It's a matter of what is honest and what is not, what is exploitive and what is not, what is respectful and what is not, what is caring and what is not, what is harmful and what is not, what is oppressive and what is not. I don't know why white heterosexual men cannot get that.

To read the post which goes into this issue in far more detail, click on the following quote: I love men's humanity, and I hate men's inhumanity. -- Julian Real

4 comments:

  1. Thanks Hermes!

    I think it's fixed now.

    Sometimes with HTML coding,

    είναι όλα τα ελληνικά σε με!

    ReplyDelete
  2. Why are you limiting this set of men to white-heterosexual?

    Perhaps because it would be politically incorrect to rightly suggest that men of other ethnic persuasions might traditionally have even more difficulty identifying a spectrum of feelings?

    It's not white or heterosexual that defines this innate difficulty, it's "men". That said, I think you're wrong. I am a man. A bisexual, ethnic man incidentally.

    Yeeeeesh. So tired of the cliche generalizations.

    ReplyDelete
  3. Hi Allen,

    Why are you limiting this set of men to white-heterosexual?

    This discussion has already been had here, asked and answered. So please read a bit more here before making statements like that. The political parameters and arguments in this blog exist within the posts, not within just one post.

    And, why shouldn't one blog of all the blogs out there (that pretend WHM are not a specific political force) focus on what WHM do? And, also, there are plenty of posts here about men of color's sexism and misogyny towards WOC, and there's stuff on this blog about gay men, of color and white, and boys who have been perceived as gay and took their own lives.

    So it's not as limited as you may think from reading one post.

    Perhaps because it would be politically incorrect to rightly suggest that men of other ethnic persuasions might traditionally have even more difficulty identifying a spectrum of feelings?

    No. I don't buy into any liberal-ass bullshit about being PC. It would be very politically correct of any white person to disproportionately focus on the human rights crimes of men of color. And plenty of white blogs and mass media do it. So what I'm doing here is, according to dominant society, according to the laws and customs of white male supremacy, is, in fact, VERY politically incorrect.

    It's not white or heterosexual that defines this innate difficulty, it's "men". That said, I think you're wrong. I am a man. A bisexual, ethnic man incidentally.

    I don't agree there even is an "innate" difficulty. So we part company there. And at this point in history there's no manhood that whites know about that isn't raced. Have you read Yurugu by Marimba Ani? WHITE men have shaped so much of what is termed "civilisation" that we can not longer, even when speaking of societies in the "East" pretend that is not the case. Religious fundamentalism in any faith tradition is a reaction, in part, to white heterosexual male supremacy, its social, cultural, and economic systems. (Including anti-queer, racist, misogynistic fundamentalist white Christianity.)

    Have you tracked how in many places, certainly in all white-dominated and white-colonised ones, men of color's behavior has been impacted by the colonisation, by white men's standards of masculinity, and by white men teaching men of color how to do things such as, say, scalp people? (It was a British thing, not an Indigenous North American men's concept or practice. White men had to teach other men from other regions of the world how to do it, generally using the heads of men and women of color to demonstrate the practice.)

    Yeeeeesh. So tired of the cliche generalizations.

    This blog doesn't exist to suit men's needs or to meet men's expectations. Even bisexual men who may or may not be white. You telling me you're ethnic doesn't tell me what color you are, or whether or not you pass as white. White Italian men are "ethnic" in the U.S. So are Jewish white men.

    But if you're of color, this blog isn't designed to take care of you or even be especially welcoming of you, or any man. It is designed to be welcoming of women of color, and to critique white men, especially white het men, as a demographic, in part because WHM NEVER identify themselves as such.

    In the eurowhite, gentile/Christian-dominated places like the U.S., UK, and major cities and white-dominant regions in Australia for example, you and I will both be identified, grouped, classified, and demographised as both "ethnic" and queer. WHM get to think they're all just a bunch of individuals, with no common political agenda. Wrong. I'm here to point out exactly what that political agenda is, and how it is WHM keep control and oppress everyone else.

    You are welcome to post more comments, but if you're just here to complain about what this blog isn't, please don't let the door hit you on the way out.

    ReplyDelete