Berlatsky on Manhood and Masculinity

Noah Berlatsky (@nberlat), via Twitter, 4 May 2018.

There are actual problems men face. They do not include the tyranny of women forcing them to sleep on the couch.
     Male suicide rates are terrifyingly high. Men experience workplace injury and death at high rates. Men make up the bulk of the prison population.
     Violence against men tends to target marginalized men. it also tends to be inflicted by other men.
     Patriarchy is incredibly cruel to (some) men. This cruelty and violence is enforced by the kind of proscriptive gender roles that incels, Matt Walsh, Douthat, Jordan Peterson, et. al., consign and promulgate.
     All these assholes claiming they’re helping men are actively working to kill, imprison, and immiserate men, as a sideline to killing, oppressing, abusing and [denigrating]^α women.
     It is frustrating, to put it mildly, to see someone like Peterson touted as a solution for alienated men, when his ideas and policy proposals will result in more of those men dying and living in misery.
     The biggest human rights atrocity in the US today is the mass incarceration of marginalized men. But when pundits suck their thumbs about the crisis of men or how we need to help alienated men, nobody ever mentions the single most important issue. Why?
     After a misogynist terror attack, we could be having a discussion about the toll misogyny wreaks on women *and* men, and how patriarchy is a death cult that we need to destroy.
     Instead we’ve got people furrowing their brows and seriously talking about a lack of access to sex, as if this is men’s first, or 600th problem in this society.
     If you want to help men, a good first step would be to stop hating women, and to stop hating femininity.
     Until we do that, we’re all fucked.

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^α Original: “… sideline to killing, oppressing, abusing, and immigrating women.”

A Reminder: Funerals Are for the Living

“I am disgusted. A great and dear friend’s mom went to the funeral today. It was not closed casket. They cut her hair, suit on. How can they bury her as Geoff when she legally changed her name. So very sad. Jen you will be missed and people who know you know that you are at peace.”

―Stacy Dee Hudson

Sometimes it bears reminding that funerals are rituals performed for the sake of the living.

James Nichols reports:

In a depressing reminder of the times in which we live and how far we still have to go to reach equality for everyone in the LGBT community, a Twin Falls, Idaho, transgender woman was presented as male in an open-casket funeral service this week.

Jennifer Gable, 32, reportedly died suddenly of a brain aneurysm while working at Wells Fargo Bank on Oct. 9. At her funeral, Gable, who legally changed her name in 2007, was reportedly not referred to as Jennifer once.

Additionally, the late Gable’s family cut her hair short and presented her wearing a suit and her obituary reportedly skipped the decade of her life she spent transitioning to live authentically as Jennifer.

There is no question, even from afar, that the proposition of refusing one’s own child’s identity in order to present them after death as something and someone other than who they really were is cruel beyond measure. It is selfish and hateful and ultimately stupid.

But it is also, such as things are, what funerals are for.

Not hatred and stupid, selfish cruelty per se, but the dead are either with God and thus otherwise preoccupied, suffering eternal punishment and thus otherwise preoccupied, or simply dead in a fucking box in the ground, in which case how their families abuse them at the memorial service just flat doesn’t matter to them.

Funerals and memorials are for the living.

That Jennifer Gable’s family apparently chose to celebrate their own desperate hatred? That is what it is. Call it what you want. But it is what they chose to celebrate, and such rituals and ceremonies are not for the dead. They are for the living.

In which case the best advice is to simply remember your friends for who they were, so that at least someone in this world still loves them.

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Nichols, James. “Jennifer Gable, Transgender Woman, Presented As Man At Her Funeral”. The Huffington Post. 24 November 2014.

Corpse Trafficking

‘Tis a grim headline, to be certain: “11 People Arrested for Supplying Dead Unmarried Men with Dead Brides”. To the other, there is always a little more to a story than we might glean from such a brief statement. Charles Mudede does, in fact, offer some fine insight into the custom of ghost brides—

Though the practice is very old and maintained mostly by people who live in rural China, it is by no means barbaric. Indeed, because civilization only begins when the living live with their dead—meaning, when the living are settled rather than nomadic, we can see in the ghost marriage something like the deep and wonderfully twisted roots of the modern urban consciousness.

The city is about a very close relationship between inhabitants who are made of matter and those made from the faintest stuff of memories—ghosts. Inhabited and uninhabited buildings, rooms, hallways, staircases are all haunted by those lost in the past of those buildings, rooms, hallways, and staircases. You can only remove ghosts by demolishing a building. This is why it is utterly ridiculous to fear ghosts in the forests. What is there to haunt? Trees? Moose? Mud? What nonsense. Humans are the haunted animal. Humans live in houses, apartments, castles, and the cities of their dead.

—except it is unclear that general perceptions of diverse death cults are so problematic insofar as it’s one thing for families to get together and marry a dead daughter to a dead son, as such, but quite another to go stealing corpses in order to facilitate the custom.

Which, in turn, raises a perverse question about human rights after death.

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Mudede, Charles. “11 People Arrested for Supplying Dead Unmarried Men with Dead Brides”. Slog. 31 October 2014.