This recurring feature, curated by Pilgrim Soul, directs Harpy readers to important feminist thoughts and concepts as spoken by some of her favourite feminists on and off the web. The appraisal of the value of these snippets is, of course, entirely Pilgrim Soul’s, and does not necessarily reflect the views of other Harpies. Feel free to discuss in the comments here.
In our anniversary thread, a reader asked for Harpy thoughts on raising feminist sons. I think I speak for us all when I say that it would feel rather odd to opine on that myself, since the experience of raising sons in this culture is not one any of us have had. We might have brothers, we might have thought about it. But this is the kind of thing it’s very hard to talk about as an abstract experience.
Never fear, however. There is always, somewhere, some feminist who has set out their thoughts on any issue you might be curious about. And in this case, that feminist is Audre Lorde. In her essay, “Man Child: A Black Lesbian Feminist’s Response,” available in the excellent Sister Outsider collection, which addresses her experiences raising her son, Jonathan, she offers the following anecdote about her reaction to his being bullied at school:
My fury at my own long-ago impotence, and my present pain at his suffering, made me start to forget all that I knew about violence and fear, and blaming the victim, I started to hiss at the weeping child. “The next time you come in here crying…,” and I suddenly caught myself in horror.
This is the way we allow the destruction of our sons to begin — in the name of protection and to ease our own pain. My son got beaten up? I was about to demand that he buy that first lesson in the corruption of power, that might makes right. I could hear myself beginning to perpetuate the age-old distortions about what strength and bravery really are.
And no, Jonathan didn’t have to fight if he didn’t want to, but somewhere he did have to feel better about not fighting. An old horror rolled over me of being the fat kid who ran away, terrified of getting her glasses broken.
About that time a very wise woman said to me, “Have you ever told Jonathan that once you used to be afraid, too?”
The idea seemed far-out to me at the time, but the next time he came in crying and sweaty from having run away again, I could see that he felt shamed at having failed me, or some image he and I had created in his head of mother/woman. This image of woman being able to handle it all was bolstered by the fact that he lived in a household with three strong women, his lesbian parents and his forthright older sister. At home, for Jonathan, power was clearly female.
And because our society teaches us to think in an either/or mode — kill or be killed, dominate or be dominated — this meant that he must either surpass or be lacking. [...]
I sat down on the hallway steps and took Jonathan on my lap and wiped his tears. “Did I ever tell you about how I used to be afraid when I was your age?” [...]
It is as hard for our children to believe that we are not omnipotent as it is for us to know it, as parents. But that knowledge is necessary as the first step in the reassessment of power as something other than might, age, privilege, or the lack of fear. It is an important step for a boy, whose societal destruction begins when he is forced to believe that he can only be strong if he doesn’t feel, or if he wins.
I do see a lot of parents I know encouraging children to fight bullies – even as they raise them to be progressives – and the kill-or-be-killed ethos does seem to be wrapped up in a lot of parental mores and so-called “helicopter parenting.” But is it possible to raise children differently? Feel free to discuss in the comments.
Wow. This really is food for thought. The fact that I’m about to write a comment this long is probably a sign that I should get my own blog or something, so if this ends up being too much/too off-topic, feel free to delete it, but:
I went to a magnet elementary school. The teachers there were quite good and the principle was amazing, and the students were taught French, so a lot of parents from my (affluent, white, Jewish) neighborhood sent their children to this school that was a half-hour bus ride away into a poor, black neighborhood. However, we weren’t the only demographic served by the school — it was very racially and economically mixed, and as there were no “scholars” classes that young, we were all together (later it became clear how much your income affected how smart the school district thought you were).
I’ve always been outspoken and I was pretty awkward when I was little, so while I wasn’t ever targeted by one particular bully, I did get some bully-type behavior from a lot of different people. Most of these kids were black, or poorer than I was, or both. I was taught very clearly at home that it was never okay to hit someone, no matter what, and that I should appeal to authority if things got violent — well, tattling doesn’t get you very far, as sound as those principles are. But at the same time, I wasn’t prepared to hit anyone, especially since I knew that I was physically weaker and had seen one of the girls that was mean to me literally break another girl’s ribs over a stuffed animal.
So when I was threatened, I did something that I thought was perfectly sound at the time: I told the kid who was threatening me that if they hit me, my parents would sue their parents and they’d lose their house and all of their possessions. And they left me alone.
I look back on that now and think about all the other times that the kids in my classes expressed insecurity over how poor they were compared to my friends and I, and how later we were given much more leniency than they were in matters of discipline and I am staggered by the amount of racially-charged classism that I was able to employ, to my clear benefit, when I was younger than 10. It makes me uncomfortable and ashamed and I don’t know where it came from because I’ve never seen my parents act that way, ever.
I guess the point I’m trying to make with this overly-long story is how young we are when we start acting in ways that perpetuate oppressions, and how important it is to be having these conversations. I don’t know how I knew that saying what I did would work, but it worked very well indeed, and at the time I didn’t understand that I was essentially using a huge power structure to back me up against the threat of a child. “Dominate or be dominated”.
My stepdaughter is 5, and has a bully in her class. He’s the type who quietly goes around tripping people and knocking over their towers and spilling paint on their masterpieces, but he’s very sneaky and often doesn’t get caught. She’s a happy-go-lucky kid who can brush it off to a point, but after several of these incidences she strikes back. I have to admit that when her teacher told me about how she had gotten this kid down on the floor and choked him until he cried and asked her to stop, I felt just a tiny bit of pride. I think mostly because she’s a girl and there are so many messages in our culture telling her to passively take his abuse and keep a smile on her face. And at our daycare they inevitably do handle it differently when it’s a boy acting out as opposed to a girl. His behavior is often dismissed as boys being boys, but her outburst is met with shock and horror. So we’ve been talking with her a lot about other ways you can stand up for yourself and resolve conflicts, but I’ve told the teachers that if they can’t pay attention to him and prevent him from assaulting her 4-5 times a day until she finally takes action in the late afternoon to defend herself, then we’re not going to be especially hard on her about it. Someone needs to defend her, and if no one else will do it, I want her to be capable of it (although I’d prefer it if she’s leave off choking people).
I suspect I would feel differently about this if she were a boy, and if the nature of the bullying was different.
I have to think about this MUCH much more because I am not a parent and it made me sit silently thinking for like an hour without much insight, but I thought I would just register my perhaps fucked up first instinct that I would teach a child to fight in self defense, and also teach her or him that it is never ok to instigate violence. I don’t want my child to think that not being strong physically is a problem, but on the other hand I don’t want them to be hurt, and I don’t believe that non-violence requires me to force my child to submit to assaults with no defense. I also think that if I had a girl child I would want her to be strong enough to fend off attacks, so why wouldn’t I want that for a boy child? On the other hand….blech, patriarchy, violence, domination, etc.
I’m totally with you on that, J.D. It’s a very conflicting topic.
Part of the difficulty of raising feminist boys is the reality that, those of the oppressor class who go against the class are usually punished by the class for doing so. This is true in the battle against every “ism.” Take racism for example. I think about all of the brave women and men of all different backgrounds stood up over the years and said NO MORE. I think of the jeopardy they put themselves and their families in, the risk of social and sometimes familial ostracism they faced. Standing up to oppression in any form requires sacrifice; it’s hard; there are usually negative repercussions. Applying this to the current topic, it’s one thing to stand up as an adult against sexism. It’s quite another to, in essence, ask your child to stand up and fight, and face the consequences that come along with that. And really, that’s what we’re doing when we talk about raising feminist boys. We’re asking them to eschew a form of oppression deeply rooted into our society. We’re asking them to reject a cultural definition of masculinity that they will be bombarded with from all other angles. And we’re doing this in a world where too many people still minimize the scope of the problem (see the “boys will be boys” response that Rachel gets when she complains about the bully targeting her daughter). I’m afraid that I’m not articulating this well, but I guess my point is that, one of the biggest obstacles that I see in raising feminist sons is the reality that your child will likely suffer to some degree for it. Because, by definition, a feminist boy will never live up to current standards of masculinity and he will be punished by society for this. I imagine that’s a hard pill for a parent to swallow, no matter how necessary and right the fight is.
Look, as a parent, you fail if you don’t equip your child to go out in the world and take care of his/her physical safety. We taught our kids to speak up if they were being threatened, go to authority, tell us, but not to retaliate with violence. In real life, though, sometimes authority doesn’t listen or doesn’t help (as Rachel says) and parents aren’t always around. So you do what you have to, whether it’s running away, using a more powerful threat or knocking the bully on his or her backside. Sure, keeping the violence to a minimum is optimal for a lot of reasons. But a kid who learns to be a helpless victim at an early age is doomed to have a terrible life.
Lorde’s piece is not satisfying to me because she didn’t really give her son the tools to protect himself. Yeah, yeah, it’s nice to hear that grownups were kids once and had the same problems, but tomorrow that bully is going to be in your face and eventually he’ll catch you no matter how fast you run. So the way she presents it, she responded in a way that would assuage her guilt rather than in a way that would truly give her son some helpful options.
We wanted our kids to be self-confident and sure of themselves, because those kids are less likely to be victimized and because they’re more likely to stand up for themselves and others. As I understand it, that strategy seems to have worked. Of course, it helped that our son grew to be 6′ in high school. But we never would have discouraged our daughter from defending herself physically if she felt that was the only way to protect herself.
@tallgirl: No, I can’t say that it was ever a concern for us. Perhaps that’s partly because we’re Jewish, so we come from a culture of speaking up for yourself and others similarly situated. Our son identifies himself as feminist and I don’t think it’s been a problem socially for him at all. The women he knows appreciate his empathy and his guy friends either agree or just shrug it off as one of his eccentricities. (We hope that he’s had a civilizing effect on them over time. Sigh.)
@mischief: I’m glad that it hasn’t been much of an issue for your son. There’s some hope! Unfortunately, I’ve seen some of my friends’ kids struggle to deal with social repercussions for behaving in ways that are not gender-conforming. Most of my friends are also vocal, but their support – while enormously helpful and important – doesn’t totally negate the sometimes subtle, sometimes not so subtle shaming from other kids, teachers, uncles, whoever. And it’s hard for them to watch their children deal with that.
@tallgirl: Of course, and no one wants to see their kids getting hurt. The environment, both familial and social, makes a huge difference. We live in a very liberal section of our city, and our kids went to public schools that were extremely diverse, so all kinds of beliefs and behaviors were part of their world growing up. It’s easier to engage in “risky” behavior when the norm is pretty fluid.
Tallgirl, that is a very good point. It is literally easier to raise feminist girls than feminist boys because, at least in some important ways, feminism serves a girl, gives her benefits she can feel. But for a boy to be feminist lowers his position socially and makes him more vulnerable (more like a girl), so it’s harder to ask him to do something that’s not immediately at least in his interest; you’re asking him to be heroic and that is a lot to ask from a kid. On the other hand, if we don’t raise heroic kids than we won’t have the change in society we all want to see. My instinct is that the boy child would have to experience at least some benefits from feminism, like an ability to explore art or dance or theater (but then what if he is naturally butch or athletic? You don’t want to discourage strength and physicality either). I guess the emphasis should just be on teaching fairness, that one should not seek to dominate and to be aware when you have a strength or privilege over another person that makes it easy for you to dominate without even meaning to. But I don’t think that has to mean not teaching the child to fight; it is just about the right usage of the fight. If my kid uses her or his physical strength to stop a fight or hold someone back, or uses his privilege to take down a bully verbally, then I am happy about it. I don’t know I am so confused.
Important, too, for us to remember: Lorde is talking about raising a son as a person of color. Not that her insights can’t be also valuable to white feminists raising white boys. But white feminism has a history of stripping the race out of black women’s writing and appropriating it for our own, and I’d like to try to keep from doing that here.
Cheryl, I considered the issue when I crafted this post. But I’m not sure that this is stripping race from her writing in this instance, nor do I think it’s an act of appropriation to say she has insight that is useful.
I don’t want this thread to wander off on a tangent, but one of the faults of the modern iteration of the movement, it seems to me, is that in the rush to centralize the experiences of women of color, it seems like white feminists only cite them as authorities on “race issues” within feminism. When we aren’t talking about race and feminism, women of color get downplayed, aren’t used so much: bell hooks, it seems to me, has suffered particularly in this regard. She is an excellent theorist of sisterhood in her own right, and of love, but that is never spoken of by young white feminists; instead they’ll simply cite her as someone who opened their eyes to racism and then go along their merry way using white theorists to discuss and illuminate other topics.
So when I wrote this post, I presented the writing as I did here because Lorde is a feminist authority on mothering, point final (as my French Canadian grandmother would say). Not that her race is irrelevant; it isn’t. It’s always there. But I resist saying that she is “talking about raising a son as a person of color” as if that ought to affect people’s reaction to her writing. It doesn’t limit her applicability in any way.
I’m not criticizing looking to Lorde for her wisdom on parenting. I reiterate that I do believe her insights can be valuable to white feminists raising white boys. It’s the erasing of the racial context that I object to. It’s important to me that her race be mentioned. I don’t think that her work can be decontextualized like that.
I don’t have a copy of Sister Outsider on-hand, but I don’t believe that race is completely absent from the piece. It is, however, completely absent from the bits you excerpted. Women of color have been complaining about having their words whitewashed for a long time, and they’re rightfully angry.
No, it isn’t absent from the piece by any means, just mostly from this particular passage. Your point is taken, but I had the choice of either excerpting this way or excerpting something much longer, and thus going beyond fair use of her work to simply regurgitating her entire essay. It’s a balance, and an imperfect one. But as I said, it also had something to do with the portion I chose to highlight. I certainly wasn’t attempting to whitewash. But I also don’t want to put into this passage something that wasn’t there, you see?
Then I think that my initial comment was exactly on the mark: it’s important that we remember, and mention. Perhaps simply quoting the title of the essay was sufficient, though I personally think it isn’t, quite. *Especially* when we’re talking about Lorde, whose “the master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house” is, IME, one of the essays most commonly mis-appropriated by white feminists.
Skin-color privilege is absolutely a significant factor when it comes to teaching boys about power. Parents of white boys I’ve spoken with about this have a different task finding the right tone to strike with their sons than parents of black boys. Because the roles that society is trying to train little white boys into are very different than the roles that society is trying to train little black boys into.
The messages that society gives to the future fair-haired scions of the patriarchy are way simpler than the ones everybody else gets.
I want this to be the last comment on this tangent – further ones will likely be deleted – but Cheryl, while I take your point, I’m still not entirely in agreement. Not least because, had I posted a passage about mothering by a white feminist, I doubt you would have admonished me to mention her race. Her race was indeed mentioned in the title. And I do not think it is irrelevant, of course, but what I think is that now a discussion about her insights about mothering has been derailed.
No one is claiming that it isn’t a different thing to raise white boys than it is to raise black boys. However, there are points of commonality, and this seems to be one of them. We can either acknowledge those points of commonality, or we can try and distinguish them in the abstract like you have here without regard to what Lorde is actually saying in this passage. (If someone has an actual experience to speak to, that would be great, but I don’t like the idea either of a bunch of white women sitting around pontificating on the issue of raising black children. It’s about as ridiculous as my pontificating on raising male children at all.) She does happen, in this essay, to be talking more about gender roles generally, and in this passage specifically omitted the mentions herself. It strikes me as appropriation for my own agenda were I to reframe the passage as being about race.
I also think we think very differently about appropriation. It is not, in my view, appropriation to introduce a Black woman’s work into a conversation. I tend to feel like we need to centralize Black women’s writing as tools for dismantling all power hierarchies, and that so long as we do not claim authorship for ourselves of those ideas, it isn’t appropriation. It may be misunderstanding, sure.
Perhaps I’m a bit more of a believer in universalism than you are; I don’t know. But I do think we will be better off in a world where we all focus on what we can learn from each other rather than list off caveats in every discussion. Everyone is limited by the contours of their experience; this is a given. But I tire of only being told by other white feminists that I am to be interested in these caveats only in the writing of Black women.
I’d like to bring the discussion back to the original point by responding to J.D. Regent. The classic definition of feminism is “the belief that women are people”. It doesn’t have anything to do with your child’s talents or proclivities or the benefits or costs caused by practicing it. Feminism is a counter to a kind of bigotry, just as we fight racism, homophobia, xenophobia, religious prejudice and the whole noxious list. What we as parents have to do is rear our children to respect all groups as much as those to which they belong, and to treat individuals the way they’d like to be treated.
In the case of feminism, this means that boys need to understand that girls have autonomy and agency just as they do. Learning that from the beginning would prevent boys from seeing females as not-boys or as adjuncts or property of boys. I don’t know that it would require anything else of them-they would be free to go about their butched-up lives if they want to; they would just go about them with more respect for female gender.
Does this make sense? I hope I don’t sound like I’m lecturing-the ‘net does have that deficit. But I just want to say that teaching feminism to your kids is no different than teaching contempt for bigotry of any other kind. Yeah, if you belong to the privileged group, it may work against your immediate self-interest, but really, what decent person wants that kind of benefit?
@Rachel: Thanks. I never thought about the implications of raising a boy to be prepared to defend himself physically v. raising a girl that way. My instinct would be to discourage children from physically fighting back, in the interest of nonviolence etc, but maybe that’s more of a disservice to a girl.
After reading this thread this morning, I got an email from the campus police at the grad school I’m about to start:
“R.A.D. For Men” basic self-defense program for MEN.”
(the allcaps made me skeptical, but I read on):
“The class is open to men 14 years of age and older. DADS: what a great opportunity to attend with your son(s)
This program is designed to: “Provide responsible information and tactical options of self defense for men who find themselves in confrontational situations”
The program’s primary focus is the realistic development of basic self defense options for men, before and during situations of imminent or actual assault.
Resisting Aggression with Defense.
Resisting Aggression is a choice. You are responsible for how you respond to any event in your life. Your decisions contribute to your past, present and future. Only you can make the choice to transform your life by committing to resist aggression. By investing your time and effort into this program, you will be presented with options to resist aggression. You will be asked to raise your awareness of aggressive behavior, to recognize how aggressive behavior impacts your life, to take steps to avoid aggressive behavior, and to look at how you can be part of reducing aggression and violence. Unfortunately, in a small number of incidents, physical confrontation may be unavoidable. Our program also provides participants with realistic strategies for men forced into physical confrontation. Resisting Aggression with Defense is designed to empower men to make different decisions when confronted with aggressive behavior. This is the first step towards reducing aggression and violence for ourselves and the ones we love.”
–
Haven’t seen an offering framed this way before. The campus has a pretty awesome women’s studies/DV awareness program, so that may have some influence here. I’ll be really curious and hopeful to see if this is a regular offering.
@ShinyObjects: Wow, I’m impressed. That sounds like EXACTLY the right approach to take with boys with regard to aggression and violence.
@Spark: Yeah, I think teaching a child of either gender to hit someone who’s bothering him/her is problematic. That said, girls and boys should absolutely know how and when to fight back–girls, especially. Martial arts training is good for this.
Thanks for replying, mischief. What you say makes sense, I was just responding to what I thought I was reading in Lorde that she wanted him to be comfortable with being not-in-power? Weak even? But maybe I was misreading her.
ShinyObjects, that does sound great. And Becky, my mind definitely went to martial arts. I’d love for my (hypothetical) kids to take an interest.
[...] I have been considering, off and on, a discussion I had with commenter Cheryl Trooskin-Zoller on this post since I had it, about my whitewashing of Audre Lorde a little while back. (Note I do not use [...]