John Stolenberg - Refusing to be a Man: Essays on Sex and Justice

Since its original publication in 1989, Refusing to Be a Man has been acclaimed as a classic and widely cited in gender studies literature. In thirteen eloquent essays, Stoltenberg articulates the first fully argued liberation theory for men that will also liberate women. He argues that male sexual identity is entirely a political and ethical construction whose advantages grow out of injustice. His thesis is, however, ultimately one of hope that precisely because masculinity is so constructed, it is possible to refuse it, to act against it, and to change. A new introduction by the author discusses the roots of his work in the American civil rights and radical feminist movements and distinguishes it from the anti-feminist philosophies underlying the recent tide of reactionary mens movements.

John Stoltenberg is the radical feminist author of The Endof Manhood: Parables on Sex and Selfhood (rev. edn, London and New York: UCL Press, 2000) and What MakesPornography Sexy ? (Minneapolis, Minnesota: Milkweed Editions, 1994). He is cofounder of Men Against Pornography.

Revised Edition

London

First published 1989 by Breitenbush Books, Inc.

Revised edition published 2000 in the UK and the USA by UCL Press

11 New Fetter Lane, London EC4P 4EE

The name of University College London (UCL) is a registered trade mark used by UCL Press with the consent of the owner.

UCL Press is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group This edition published in the Taylor & Francis e-Library, 2005.

1989, 2000 John Stoltenberg

The right of John Stoltenberg to be identified as the Author of this Work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs, and Patents Act 1988

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers.

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data Stoltenberg, John.

Refusing to be a man: essays on sex and justice/John Stoltenberg. Rev. ed.

p. cm.

Includes bibliographical references.

1. Sex role United States. 2. Masculinity United States 3. Sexism United States. 4. Men United States Sexual behavior. 5. Women Crimes against United States. 6. Pornography Social aspects United States. I. Title.

HQ1075.5.U6S76 1999

305.30973 dc21 9936409

ISBN 0-203-98082-4 Master e-book ISBN

ISBN 1-84142-062-X (hbk)

ISBN 1-84142-041-7 (pbk)

For Andrea

In memory of Jimmy

The worlds definitions are one thing and the life one actually lives is quite another. One cannot allow oneself, nor can ones family, friends, or lovers to say nothing of ones children to live according to the worlds definitions: one must find a way, perpetually, to be stronger and better than that.

James Baldwin

This book was forged in the heat of radical feminism, a current of political analysis and activism first sparked in the United States in the late 1960s and 1970s. That maverick social movement produced a historically new view of the relation of human sexuality to social justice. Radical feminisms coruscating ideas about the connection between sexual violence and tyranny have since radiated far beyond U.S. borders, igniting change worldwide, and this book carries a torch set aflame in that fire. In 1995, delegates to the Beijing World Conference on Women ratified a platform declaring, in part, The human rights of women include their right to have control over and decide freely and responsibly on matters relating to their sexuality, including sexual and reproductive health, free of coercion, discrimination, and violence. Those words alone were a measure of how far radical feminist ideas had swept the globe.

Branding these pages, seared into them, is the philosophical legacy that brought forth those words: a moral and intellectual conviction stemming from grassroots resistance to eroticized woman hate. This book contributed to that insurrection, by translating radical feminist ideas into a worldview and a moral identity that could be claimed and embodied unabashedly by people born with a penis. Must that anatomical trait betoken a sexual identity impervious to empathy and resistant to accountability, a sex-class identity in lockstep with rapists, pimps, pornographers, and batterers the goons and gestapo of male supremacy? This book argues unequivocally: No. And against the recent flood of antifeminist mens movements ancient cults of masculinity in modern guise this book does not sell out womens lives to do so; it does not make excuses for mens abuse and domination of others; it does not seek to redeem or resuscitate patriarchy; it does not settle for social change strategies that would replicate gender injustice.

My title, Refusing to Be a Man, has both inspired and infuriated. Once, as I sat under hot studio lights near the end of a U.S. television talk show (later syndicated internationally) about the topic of men and pornography, the host, a man famously liberal, sputteringly challenged me to explain what it meant. I mean disavowing the privilege that comes with having been born with some kind of extension of your urethra between your legs, I offered. I mean the same thing as I would mean by refusing to be a white in a racist society. I had expected that in the United States, with its particular history of struggle against white supremacy, my reply would ring a bell with this man. Apparently it did not; he seemed dumbfounded and changed the subject.

As I look back on the first publication of this book, it appears to me like a signpost by the road, a scrawl on the wall, a trail marker in the woods. As passers-by pause, perhaps stopped by the title, perhaps reading some pages, they have seemed to gravitate toward one direction or, angered and defensive, determinedly go in its opposite. Few are unfazed.

Something here polarizes: It points a possible path of approach for some, and signals to others that here lies terrain that must be fled.

Radical politics do that. Significant egalitarian social change does not arise from the liberal middle, the noncommittal, the mean between extremes. Substantive change happens when the center has to migrate, because it has been tugged and pushed by political action that challenges complacency, stirs up the sediment of received bias, and exposes contradictions that embed the status quo. This has been especially true of radical feminisms demystifying of male-supremacist ideologies of gender essentialism. As of the late twentieth century, the once certain notion that there exists in human nature a fixed male sexual identity metaphysically grounded in creation, built into human bodies, perhaps transcendentally ordained has begun a slow blurring into oblivion. Yet many people, still clinging to the illusion that manhood materially exists, defend it with all their might and rage. Perhaps at some level they already know that in the absence of force and anger, the male sex as a class is a chimera. Perhaps they already intuit that without systemic male dominance, no one can believably be a man.

The rate at which women are raped in the United States is higher than in any other country that keeps track four times higher than in Germany, thirteen times higher than in Great Britain, and twenty times higher than in Japan. It is therefore no credit to the American political Left that progressive politics here have tended to ignore radical feminisms analysis of how male supremacy is made flesh including through rape, battery, prostitution, and pornography, to say nothing of everyday insults, deceptions, betrayals. The American political Left has generally accommodated more liberal versions of feminism, but not radical feminisms central message that there is something deeply problematic in mens personal use and abuse of women something that could explain and help us understand that which all systems of exploitation and oppression have in common. It is a sad fact that as I write today, a decade after