Please Put the Stones Down

“At the same time that women writers were being reconsidered and reread, male writers were similarly subjected to a new feminist scrutiny. The continuing result—to put ten years of difficult analysis into a single sentence—has been nothing less than an acute attentiveness to the ways in which certain power relations—usually those in which males wield various forms of influence over females—are inscribed in the texts (both literary and critical) that we have inherited, not merely as subject matter, but as the unquestioned, often unacknowledged given of the culture.” – Kolodny (2148-2149).

Sometimes I am really frustrated with feminism. I cannot fully explain why, but what little explanation I have would likely anger staunch feminists. You see, I often find myself feeling poorly for mankind (and by that I do not mean “humankind,” but the portion of society that bears an XY chromosome). It’s not that I don’t recognize, and to an extent resent, that men have been the privileged gender, that they have—for far too long—wielded “various forms of influence over females” but—and here is where I am liable to be stoned by hordes of angry female types—can we really blame the male gender as a whole?

My problem with some feminist writings (not necessarily Kolodny, she merely got me thinking) is that they gloss over the fact that men are just as much a product of culture as women are. We all (men and women alike) inherit “the unquestioned, often unacknowledged given[s] of” our own culture, be they gender related, race related, etc. How can we place such weighty blame on men’s shoulders when—for centuries—these men had no chance to form any worldviews that weren’t gender biased. Right from the womb the entered into a world of vast gender inequality. Their fathers had been raised in that world, their mothers had been raised in that world—that was all they knew. I don’t think we can truly blame men for going along with this “given” any more than we can blame women.

I am sure that this all sounds horrible and absurd. Of course we must place blame. There’s no true merit in the “well they just didn’t know any better excuse.” I wouldn’t try and argue that sexism is right any more than I would try to argue that the South had the right idea with slavery. What I think I am trying to say is that we have to be fair in our assessment—to blame complacent women as much as we blame complacent men. Of course when you reexamine male writing in light of feminism you will find that their work is fraught with gender inequality. But we must also recognize that many times literature, “even in the hands of women writers,” often implied “the inferiority and necessary subordination of women” (2149).