L/A
“The personal is political,” Carol Hanisch wrote, in challenge to nuclear family values. This phrase has later broadened its applications to being used on topics regarding abortion, domestic abuse, spousal rape, and women’s sexual liberation.
“Revolution does not begin in the streets. Revolution begins in the head, and in the heart,” Laurie Penny wrote in Sexual Revolution, effectively encapsulating why the phrase “Men are trash” has been so successful. Women, all around the world, are becoming more conscious of the political nature of their personal experiences.
Women begin to frame their body-image issues as a byproduct of patriarchal and capitalist socialization of the commodification of the self for male-consumption. She learns to embrace her desires without feeling like she is “disgusting” or “overtly sexual”. She realizes that she does not owe men her body and emotional energy in exchange for security and protection.
“Men are trash” functions as exactly that: not an attack on all men, but as a tool for mental liberation. A woman decides that she would no longer be the person men label her as, because by devaluing the judgment of the audience, the performer decides the quality of their own performance.
But despite feminist awareness, men still contribute to our self-conception
As Hegel writes in the Phenomenology of Spirit, “Self-consciousness exists in itself and for itself, in that, and by the fact that it exists for another self-consciousness; that is to say, it is only by being acknowledged or ‘recognized’.” In other words, self-conception does not exist in a vacuum.
But the result of this is that people have a disproportionate amount of power over our self-worth. This leads people to want to objectify others — to negate their selfhood so that they would have no power to dictate others.
In The Politics of Recognition, Charles Taylor argues that recognition is a necessary condition for positive self-esteem. “Within these perspectives, misrecognition shows not just a lack of due respect. It can inflict a grievous wound, saddling its victims with a crippling self-hatred. Due recognition is not just a courtesy we owe people. It is a vital human need,” he asserts.
The idea of other people viewing us differently from the way we view ourselves is so jarring exactly because self-esteem is contingent on social recognition. The need for recognition is not a vanity play, but a prerequisite of being able to function normally in society.
The patriarchy is hell — but so is the craving for social acceptance
Sartre’s famous saying, “Hell is other people!” was popularized by his play, No Exit. In his play, three characters go to hell. To their surprise, hell is just an empty room. There are no Catherine wheels, brazen bulls, or torture racks. But in fact, hell is other people. The three characters — Joseph, Inez, and Estelle — all need validation from one another and deny another person’s validation.
Inez sees Joseph as a coward for betraying the political resistance group he was a part of before he died, but begs for Estelle’s attention due to her affections towards her. Estelle thinks Inez is overbearing but begs for Joseph’s love. Joseph begs for Inez’s validation that he is not a coward, while mistreating Estelle and using her for sex.
The point Sartre is trying to illustrate is that we derive our self-conception via the lens of others. In the play, Inez constantly tries to look at herself from Estelle’s eyes — literally. Estelle thinks that Inez is admiring her beautiful eyes, but in reality she is fixated by her distorted reflection on her pupils.
Do you see me the way I view myself? Is a question everyone secretly asks during the rawest, intimate moments.
As much as we try to deny it — and I certainly have, having spent my preteen years worshiping Germaine Greer’s The Female Eunuch and Valerie Solanas’ SCUM Manifesto (SCUM standing for ‘Society for Cutting Up Men’) — there exists a “pick me girl” within every heterosexual woman. Some women just recognize and isolate this instinct, while others are not yet aware of how social constructions contribute to their desires.
Nonetheless, desires are still desires. And the only way to get rid of a desire is to indulge in it. Just like how Joseph begs for Inez’s validation while disregarding Estelle’s — because he has already discredited her under the assumption that she is just promiscuous — we also beg for validation, which could not be fulfilled because we have already discredited the person we desired it from.
Are we using #NotAllMen politically or personally?
“Though we adore men individually, we agree that as a group they are rather stupid,” Mrs. Banks for Mary Poppins astutely noted. It baffles me how I, myself, can hate men so much yet crave for their affection. Right before writing this essay, I was just reading romance novels written by women, for women.
The popularity of romance novels is a testament to how reality falls short of expectations. It’s a craving for something real, amidst a “real” world inundated with woman-hating pornography, perfunctory romantic gestures, reluctant submission, painful diets, and fake orgasms.
I don’t know whether the fact that fictional characters can have more depth than the men who tried to romance me says more about the author’s capabilities or the bleak state of the love economy dictated by swipe-rights and heavily edited thirst traps.
Indeed, as a group, men are trash. But there is a thin line between the personal and political, and more often than not they blur into one another, and we can’t tell which is which. Or maybe they are both fundamentally inseparable concepts, regardless of the application. Or perhaps they are one and the same, with the latter constituting personal grudges and desires applied to the science of organizing society as a whole.
But as a person who has internalized “men are trash” for as long as I can remember, it is genuinely difficult to remember that there are good men out there, no matter how statistically improbable they are.
After enough responses against “not all men” Tweets, it does take genuine effort to recall that there is a distinction between, “Not all men; I feel offended at #MenAreTrash and therefore I will not listen to your legitimate concerns about how the patriarchy affects your lives,” and “Not all men; this one is a good one.”
The semicolon makes a difference.
Men are not trash — the concept of masculinity is
Another reason why we shouldn’t use #MenAreTrash, is that it is a cop out. Too often, I hear men excuse their bad behavior as something biologically determined. “Men are by nature sexual creatures,” he says, “so it makes sense that it is the woman’s responsibility to regulate the way she dresses.”
Arguments of this nature appeal to biological determinism. The idea is that men are biologically determined to be of a certain sort, and therefore it removes all accountability to improve their behavior. Sociobiology also states that societal norms are a result of biological factors instead of arbitrary social constructs — but how true is this?
I find it amusing how misogynists readily self-flagellate, essentially agreeing with the idea that men are animals with a propensity towards dominance, violence, and sexual perversion. In such contexts, they will wholeheartedly agree that men are trash. According to them, biology dictates that they cannot change their fundamentally rotten nature.
It was such a commonly touted argument that I believed it for a long time. I was convinced that I would abstain from marriage because the conclusion of this argument would be that all men are secretly horrible; some just hide it better than others.
It’s also the easiest thing to believe, just to fall into hopeless nihilism: Nothing can ever change and all we could do is learn how to accept the way things are. Accepting this belief, I would no longer have to exert effort trying to change the way my male peers think, which was indeed an exhausting and tedious effort.
But as Laurie Penny wrote in Sexual Revolution, “When men do shitty things to women, they don’t do it because that’s the way men are, but because that’s the way men feel, and men have been permitted very few ways to manage their emotions that are non-violent.”
She adds, “If the behaviors commonly understood as masculine were really so natural, they would not have to be enforced with violence.” In other words, men would not have to grow up being told to ‘man up’, to have to ‘get’ girls, or to ‘stop being a sissy’.
Modern masculinity is a wreck. It assumes that violence and dominance are imperative in male sexuality, and therefore must be a substantial part of male identity. It teaches young boys that to get girls they need to be the type of man that can bully a girl into submission — so that she will open her legs for his ‘access’, as if sexuality is a resource to plunder.
It’s Social Darwinism applied to the fundamental human craving for intimacy. It’s another way of saying, be a man — a certain type of man — or else no one will choose you. Anyone growing up with this imperative will reasonably throw away instincts more biologically entrenched than dominance and violence, that is: empathy, compassion, love, and sincerity.
As Laurie Penny perspicaciously noted,
“The personal is not only political. It is also historical, economic, and material.”
“The personal is political,” Carol Hanisch wrote, in challenge to nuclear family values. This phrase has later broadened its applications to being used on topics regarding abortion, domestic abuse, spousal rape, and women’s sexual liberation.
“Revolution does not begin in the streets. Revolution begins in the head, and in the heart,” Laurie Penny wrote in Sexual Revolution, effectively encapsulating why the phrase “Men are trash” has been so successful. Women, all around the world, are becoming more conscious of the political nature of their personal experiences.
Women begin to frame their body-image issues as a byproduct of patriarchal and capitalist socialization of the commodification of the self for male-consumption. She learns to embrace her desires without feeling like she is “disgusting” or “overtly sexual”. She realizes that she does not owe men her body and emotional energy in exchange for security and protection.
“Men are trash” functions as exactly that: not an attack on all men, but as a tool for mental liberation. A woman decides that she would no longer be the person men label her as, because by devaluing the judgment of the audience, the performer decides the quality of their own performance.
But despite feminist awareness, men still contribute to our self-conception
As Hegel writes in the Phenomenology of Spirit, “Self-consciousness exists in itself and for itself, in that, and by the fact that it exists for another self-consciousness; that is to say, it is only by being acknowledged or ‘recognized’.” In other words, self-conception does not exist in a vacuum.
But the result of this is that people have a disproportionate amount of power over our self-worth. This leads people to want to objectify others — to negate their selfhood so that they would have no power to dictate others.
In The Politics of Recognition, Charles Taylor argues that recognition is a necessary condition for positive self-esteem. “Within these perspectives, misrecognition shows not just a lack of due respect. It can inflict a grievous wound, saddling its victims with a crippling self-hatred. Due recognition is not just a courtesy we owe people. It is a vital human need,” he asserts.
The idea of other people viewing us differently from the way we view ourselves is so jarring exactly because self-esteem is contingent on social recognition. The need for recognition is not a vanity play, but a prerequisite of being able to function normally in society.
The patriarchy is hell — but so is the craving for social acceptance
Sartre’s famous saying, “Hell is other people!” was popularized by his play, No Exit. In his play, three characters go to hell. To their surprise, hell is just an empty room. There are no Catherine wheels, brazen bulls, or torture racks. But in fact, hell is other people. The three characters — Joseph, Inez, and Estelle — all need validation from one another and deny another person’s validation.
Inez sees Joseph as a coward for betraying the political resistance group he was a part of before he died, but begs for Estelle’s attention due to her affections towards her. Estelle thinks Inez is overbearing but begs for Joseph’s love. Joseph begs for Inez’s validation that he is not a coward, while mistreating Estelle and using her for sex.
The point Sartre is trying to illustrate is that we derive our self-conception via the lens of others. In the play, Inez constantly tries to look at herself from Estelle’s eyes — literally. Estelle thinks that Inez is admiring her beautiful eyes, but in reality she is fixated by her distorted reflection on her pupils.
Do you see me the way I view myself? Is a question everyone secretly asks during the rawest, intimate moments.
As much as we try to deny it — and I certainly have, having spent my preteen years worshiping Germaine Greer’s The Female Eunuch and Valerie Solanas’ SCUM Manifesto (SCUM standing for ‘Society for Cutting Up Men’) — there exists a “pick me girl” within every heterosexual woman. Some women just recognize and isolate this instinct, while others are not yet aware of how social constructions contribute to their desires.
Nonetheless, desires are still desires. And the only way to get rid of a desire is to indulge in it. Just like how Joseph begs for Inez’s validation while disregarding Estelle’s — because he has already discredited her under the assumption that she is just promiscuous — we also beg for validation, which could not be fulfilled because we have already discredited the person we desired it from.
Are we using #NotAllMen politically or personally?
“Though we adore men individually, we agree that as a group they are rather stupid,” Mrs. Banks for Mary Poppins astutely noted. It baffles me how I, myself, can hate men so much yet crave for their affection. Right before writing this essay, I was just reading romance novels written by women, for women.
The popularity of romance novels is a testament to how reality falls short of expectations. It’s a craving for something real, amidst a “real” world inundated with woman-hating pornography, perfunctory romantic gestures, reluctant submission, painful diets, and fake orgasms.
I don’t know whether the fact that fictional characters can have more depth than the men who tried to romance me says more about the author’s capabilities or the bleak state of the love economy dictated by swipe-rights and heavily edited thirst traps.
Indeed, as a group, men are trash. But there is a thin line between the personal and political, and more often than not they blur into one another, and we can’t tell which is which. Or maybe they are both fundamentally inseparable concepts, regardless of the application. Or perhaps they are one and the same, with the latter constituting personal grudges and desires applied to the science of organizing society as a whole.
But as a person who has internalized “men are trash” for as long as I can remember, it is genuinely difficult to remember that there are good men out there, no matter how statistically improbable they are.
After enough responses against “not all men” Tweets, it does take genuine effort to recall that there is a distinction between, “Not all men; I feel offended at #MenAreTrash and therefore I will not listen to your legitimate concerns about how the patriarchy affects your lives,” and “Not all men; this one is a good one.”
The semicolon makes a difference.
Men are not trash — the concept of masculinity is
Another reason why we shouldn’t use #MenAreTrash, is that it is a cop out. Too often, I hear men excuse their bad behavior as something biologically determined. “Men are by nature sexual creatures,” he says, “so it makes sense that it is the woman’s responsibility to regulate the way she dresses.”
Arguments of this nature appeal to biological determinism. The idea is that men are biologically determined to be of a certain sort, and therefore it removes all accountability to improve their behavior. Sociobiology also states that societal norms are a result of biological factors instead of arbitrary social constructs — but how true is this?
I find it amusing how misogynists readily self-flagellate, essentially agreeing with the idea that men are animals with a propensity towards dominance, violence, and sexual perversion. In such contexts, they will wholeheartedly agree that men are trash. According to them, biology dictates that they cannot change their fundamentally rotten nature.
It was such a commonly touted argument that I believed it for a long time. I was convinced that I would abstain from marriage because the conclusion of this argument would be that all men are secretly horrible; some just hide it better than others.
It’s also the easiest thing to believe, just to fall into hopeless nihilism: Nothing can ever change and all we could do is learn how to accept the way things are. Accepting this belief, I would no longer have to exert effort trying to change the way my male peers think, which was indeed an exhausting and tedious effort.
But as Laurie Penny wrote in Sexual Revolution, “When men do shitty things to women, they don’t do it because that’s the way men are, but because that’s the way men feel, and men have been permitted very few ways to manage their emotions that are non-violent.”
She adds, “If the behaviors commonly understood as masculine were really so natural, they would not have to be enforced with violence.” In other words, men would not have to grow up being told to ‘man up’, to have to ‘get’ girls, or to ‘stop being a sissy’.
Modern masculinity is a wreck. It assumes that violence and dominance are imperative in male sexuality, and therefore must be a substantial part of male identity. It teaches young boys that to get girls they need to be the type of man that can bully a girl into submission — so that she will open her legs for his ‘access’, as if sexuality is a resource to plunder.
It’s Social Darwinism applied to the fundamental human craving for intimacy. It’s another way of saying, be a man — a certain type of man — or else no one will choose you. Anyone growing up with this imperative will reasonably throw away instincts more biologically entrenched than dominance and violence, that is: empathy, compassion, love, and sincerity.
As Laurie Penny perspicaciously noted,
“The personal is not only political. It is also historical, economic, and material.”
