2023-05-21 07:16:50
WAs for me, I’m an old white cis male. Can’t help it, just put it here to make it clear who’s speaking. What I could do for, however, is ranting about positions that attack the elusive power of old white cis men and present a damaging record of the world order they uphold. After all, only those who trudge through life without feeling or thought have anything to complain about with this power.
The author Anne Waak has written down the effects of this. Her remarkably non-polemical book, Caring and Fighting, recounts, chapter after chapter, the effects of having a particular strain of masculinity (hard on others and oneself, unempathetic, a firm belief in being grandiose, etc.) on the measure of thought , feeling, doing business, fucking and living together is explained.
Waak does this with studies, evidence, statistics, no one could say that she has not tamed the anger she certainly feels about the conditions she has described into comprehensible and verifiable arguments. That makes her book a bit boring at times – because you already know most of it so well that you really don’t need to know it exactly anymore. But this is only due to the politeness of an author who has opted for enlightenment, arguments and good persuasion.
Everyone goes into their cage
Even described politely, the thing that Waak deals with remains unbearable: As soon as people are born, they are pushed into female and male cages. Teach the girls not to be pretty, not too opinionated, socially responsible and the boys not to cry, tenderness is weakness and math is great.
It all boils down to people with vulvas, boobs and so on eventually cleaning toilets, comforting children and not being rude in salary negotiations, while people with penises mansplain why women’s quotas are stupid and the terribly obvious perception that there is between men and women despise as self-pitying paranoia a hierarchy that cannot be justified by reason, morality or good manners.
That’s how it goes for life. Women earn less, take care of themselves more, men feel more important, go to the doctor less often (because they are not self-pitying), women stalk their own appearance, men comment on it, and as soon as a war breaks out, there is bound to be someone who will Can’t think of why masculinity is needed now, although it never occurred to him before that there’s a 99.99 percent chance that wars always break out with men.
As I said, this is just the summary, Waak puts it with more evidence and in more civilized language. But at no point in her book does this leave the slightest doubt about how incredibly stupid, exhausting, dull and all too often dangerous to health and life is the “gender injustice” we deal with.
What’s in it for cis men?
How do you end up in poverty in old age, being poorly paid for socially valuable jobs, having to be careful on the street, not being confronted with sexual assaults, having to be afraid if you are gay, lesbian, trans or otherwise does not fit into the cages of gender stereotypes? How much pain is caused, resources wasted or not even discovered because a world that managed to go to the moon still doesn’t make it in 2023 that people are okay with each other and not all kinds of genitals and sexual orientations derives imperatives?
The crazy thing is, and you can learn that from Anne Waak’s book: everyone suffers from gender injustice. The cis men too. What do they gain from the fact that they are not taught empathy, that partnership, the closeness to their own children or voluntary cleaning of toilets for their roommates is either ironically mocked or celebrated as heroism, that they are fed pornography in which sex is more like the rattling of a sewing machine and not like something beautiful that they know the buzzwords for bullshit meetings rather than the magic words for comforting children?
Not much. Just their silly power, which doesn’t save them from being abandoned at some point, even if it’s all too often just an inner resignation.
It is not really known whether the world would be much better off if it decided to abandon the current balance of power, but after thousands of years one could give it a try. Maybe, says Waak, the children for whom she wrote her book will make it one day: If we set an example for them, teach them, show them again and again and say that there are other ways of living together, then something might happen.
But then legions of men whose identity is threatened will probably rage again, saying that boys are no longer allowed to be boys, girls are no better either, there are also really great guys and nobody should get involved, you know all the sentences, after all it is order of things in jeopardy. Oh, if only she were finally…
Anne Wake: caring and fighting. Why gender equality in education and family makes us all freer. Goldmann Verlag, 256 pages, 18 euros.
#Gender #Justice #Mans #Power #Forsaken