Marginal Notes

Refuseniks and Anti-Imperialist Solidarity

Today, July 2nd, is a National Day of Action to Stop the Deportation of War Resister Corey Glass.

Canada's War Resisters Support Campaign asks you to call Diane Finley, Minister of Citizenship and Immigration Canada:

U.S. Iraq War resister Corey Glass is still facing deportation on July 10th, despite the Parliament of Canada having voted in favour of a motion to let Corey and other U.S. war resisters stay.

The federal government and the Minister of Citizenship and Immigration must respect the will of Parliament and implement the motion which calls on the government to “immediately implement a program to allow conscientious objectors and their immediate family members […] to apply for permanent resident status and remain in Canada; and … the government should immediately cease any removal or deportation actions … against such individuals.”

On July 2nd, the War Resisters Support Campaign is calling on all supporters to call Minister Diane Finley and ask her to:

• STOP deportation proceedings against Corey Glass and all U.S. Iraq war resisters; and
• IMPLEMENT the motion adopted by Canada’s Parliament to allow U.S. Iraq war resisters to apply for permanent resident status.

Here are the numbers to call:
Minister of Citizenship and Immigration Diane Finley
613.996.4974

MP Diane Finley’s constituency office (Simcoe):
519.426.3400

Or email her at:
minister@cic.gc.ca
or
finled1@parl.gc.ca

Corey Glass is among the refuseniks across the world who are resisting Imperialist wars.

Payday is an international and multiracial network of men which works with the Global Women’s Strike. From their website:

We have groups in London, the Philippines and in Philadelphia. We work with other men in other countries, including Chile, Canada, Guyana, India, Ireland, Italy,Kenya, Spain, Uganda and Venezuela.

We are from many walks of life, waged and unwaged, urban and rural, fathers,carers, immigrants, gay, bisexual and straight, of different races, ages, members of community organizations and trade unions. Like the rest of the Strike, we are independent of political parties.

We organise on the basis of the Strike’s central demand: that society must Invest in Caring, not Killing -- that money spent on military budgets must go instead to communities, which means first of all to women, who are internationally the primary carers.

All our organising is done in close consultation with women from the Strike to ensure that we do not ignore or contradict women’s and children needs.We have benefited from the leadership provided by the Strike, whose starting point is the worker who does (most of) the caring, and are encouraged to know that the revolution in Venezuela has also been spearheaded by women, which is acknowledged by President Chávez.(We are happy to know he has said publicly that he wants to join the Strike.) Finding ways to work with women and children, and other men is, we believe, our biggest challenge as well as our only chance for survival.

Over the years we have been involved in many campaigns and initiatives, namely: in defence of welfare, anti-deportation, anti-war, support for waged workers on strike (the Fire Brigades Union was the latest), pay equity disputes,and many anti-racist initiatives, including No School Apartheid: protesting the segregation of the children of asylum seekers, mainly Third World children of colour.

Our main initiative in the last few years has been Refusing to Kill: gathering support around the world for men (and increasingly women) who refuse to torture, maim, rape and kill for the military. Until an end for any need for them, armies must be used to defend and support communities -- as in Venezuela -- not for aggression.

We have initiated international campaigns in support of refuseniks in Israel,Turkey and the US; and highlighted the key role that women play in supporting conscientious objectors, “deserters”, draft evaders and whistleblowers.

In 2004 we supported Alex Izett, Scottish veteran from the First Gulf War in 1991, who went on hunger strike demanding the recognition of Gulf War Syndrome, which has killed or disabled thousands of soldiers and members of their families. His protest won the Independent Inquiry in London and official recognition that the Syndrome exists. We have been networking with organisations in the US, in France and Italy on this issue.

In the United States, we have been part of an anti-racist self-help campaign to inform students and parents of their right to Opt Out – to refuse to allow schools to give military recruiters access to students’ home phone numbers and addresses .Young people in Black, Latino, and other low-income are targeted by military recruiters, despite broad and increasing to US wars,especially in communities of colour.

 
Links:

War Resisters Support Campaign

The Payday Network

Resources:

'Canada in Afghanistan: Peacekeeper or Warmonger?' by Ian Sinclair via New Socialist

UPDATE: Canadian Federal Court ruled that the immigration board erred “by concluding that refugee protection for military deserters and evaders is only available where the conduct objected to amounts to a war crime, a crime against peace or a crime against humanity." Officially condoned military misconduct could still support a refugee claim, even if it falls short of a war crime.

The Myth of the Supermom

MomsRising, an organization advocating for family-friendly legislation, helps debunk the myth of the supermom in a short film titled The Bev Betters Show:

Ain't No Other Man?

In an article titled The High Cost of Manliness, Robert Jenson argues that rigid constructs of masculinity are damaging to both men and women.  I find it so refreshing to see someone challenging arguments from biology!  Yes - men and women are different!  Me xx, you xy.  But, my god, the social sciences literature routinely shows that within group differences are much more significant than between group differences.  And, while we keep reproducing gender differences in our constant discourse of boys versus girls, we continue to marginalize ourselves into rigid categories.  

While I rarely post the full text of articles on this site, I have decided to give full space to this one man's voice (my emphasis, however!):

It's hard to be a man; hard to live up to the demands that come with the dominant conception of masculinity, of the tough guy.

So, guys, I have an idea -- maybe it's time we stop trying. Maybe this masculinity thing is a bad deal, not just for women but for us.

We need to get rid of the whole idea of masculinity. It's time to abandon the claim that there are certain psychological or social traits that inherently come with being biologically male. If we can get past that, we have a chance to create a better world for men and women.

That dominant conception of masculinity in U.S. culture is easily summarized: Men are assumed to be naturally competitive and aggressive, and being a real man is therefore marked by the struggle for control, conquest and domination. A man looks at the world, sees what he wants and takes it. Men who don't measure up are wimps, sissies, fags, girls. The worst insult one man can hurl at another -- whether it's boys on the playground or CEOs in the boardroom -- is the accusation that a man is like a woman. Although the culture acknowledges that men can in some situations have traits traditionally associated with women (caring, compassion, tenderness), in the end it is men's strength-expressed-as-toughness that defines us and must trump any female-like softness. Those aspects of masculinity must prevail for a man to be a "real man."

That's not to suggest, of course, that every man adopts that view of masculinity. But it is endorsed in key institutions and activities -- most notably in business, the military and athletics -- and is reinforced through the mass media. It is particularly expressed in the way men -- straight and gay alike -- talk about sexuality and act sexually. And our culture's male heroes reflect those characteristics: They most often are men who take charge rather than seek consensus, seize power rather than look for ways to share it and are willing to be violent to achieve their goals.

That view of masculinity is dangerous for women. It leads men to seek to control "their" women and define their own pleasure in that control, which leads to epidemic levels of rape and battery. But this view of masculinity is toxic for men as well.

If masculinity is defined as conquest, it means that men will always struggle with each other for dominance. In a system premised on hierarchy and power, there can be only one king of the hill. Every other man must in some way be subordinated to the king, and the king has to always be nervous about who is coming up that hill to get him. A friend who once worked on Wall Street -- one of the preeminent sites of masculine competition -- described coming to work as like walking into a knife fight when all the good spots along the wall were taken. Masculinity like this is life lived as endless competition and threat.

No one man created this system, and perhaps none of us, if given a choice, would choose it. But we live our lives in that system, and it deforms men, narrowing our emotional range and depth. It keeps us from the rich connections with others -- not just with women and children, but other men -- that make life meaningful but require vulnerability.

This doesn't mean that the negative consequences of this toxic masculinity are equally dangerous for men and women. As feminists have long pointed out, there's a big difference between women dealing with the possibility of being raped, beaten and killed by the men in their lives, and men not being able to cry. But we can see that the short-term material gains that men get are not adequate compensation for what we men give up in the long haul -- which is to surrender part of our humanity to the project of dominance.

Of course there are obvious physical differences between men and women -- average body size, hormones, reproductive organs. There may be other differences rooted in our biology that we don't yet understand. Yet it's also true that men and women are more similar than we are different, and that given the pernicious effects of centuries of patriarchy and its relentless devaluing of things female, we should be skeptical of the perceived differences.

What we know is simple: In any human population, there is wide individual variation. While there's no doubt that a large part of our behavior is rooted in our DNA, there's also no doubt that our genetic endowment is highly influenced by culture. Beyond that, it's difficult to say much with any certainty. It's true that only women can bear children and breastfeed. That fact likely has some bearing on aspects of men's and women's personalities. But we don't know much about what the effect is, and given the limits of our tools to understand human behavior, it's possible we may never know much.

At the moment, the culture seems obsessed with gender differences, in the context of a recurring intellectual fad (called "evolutionary psychology" this time around, and "sociobiology" in a previous incarnation) that wants to explain all complex behaviors as simple evolutionary adaptations -- if a pattern of human behavior exists, it must be because it's adaptive in some ways. In the long run, that's true by definition. But in the short-term it's hardly a convincing argument to say, "Look at how men and women behave so differently; it must be because men and women are fundamentally different" when a political system has been creating differences between men and women.

From there, the argument that we need to scrap masculinity is fairly simple. To illustrate it, remember back to right after 9/11. A number of commentators argued that criticisms of masculinity should be rethought. Cannot we now see -- recognizing that male firefighters raced into burning buildings, risking and sometimes sacrificing their lives to save others -- that masculinity can encompass a kind of strength that is rooted in caring and sacrifice? Of course men often exhibit such strength, just as do women. So, the obvious question arises: What makes these distinctly masculine characteristics? Are they not simply human characteristics?

We identify masculine tendencies toward competition, domination and violence because we see patterns of differential behavior; men are more prone to such behavior in our culture. We can go on to observe and analyze the ways in which men are socialized to behave in those ways, toward the goal of changing those destructive behaviors. That analysis is different than saying that admirable human qualities present in both men and women are somehow primarily the domain of one gender. To assign them to a gender is misguided and demeaning to the gender that is then assumed not to possess them to the same degree. Once we start saying "strength and courage are masculine traits," it leads to the conclusion that woman are not as strong or courageous.

Of course, if we are going to jettison masculinity, we have to scrap femininity along with it. We have to stop trying to define what men and women are going to be in the world based on extrapolations from physical sex differences. That doesn't mean we ignore those differences when they matter, but we have to stop assuming they matter everywhere.

I don't think the planet can long survive if the current conception of masculinity endures. We face political and ecological challenges that can't be met with this old model of what it means to be a man. At the more intimate level, the stakes are just as high. For those of us who are biologically male, we have a simple choice: We men can settle for being men, or we can strive to be human beings.

Links:

The High Cost of Manliness by Robert Jenson, via Alternet

Also, see The Strength Campaign at Men Can Stop Rape for literature, posters, and contacts about men organizing to transform masculinity.

Women's Equality: Who Cares Anyway?

I discovered an interesting article just recently, via Breebop. In A Working Girl Can Win, Meghan O'Rourke discusses the views of Linda Hirshman, put forth in her book titled Get to Work: A Manifesto for Women of the World. O'Rourke argues that in spite of her "overblown" rhetoric, Hirshman presents a solid argument that those of us who are committed to gender equality - who don't believe that a women's place is in the home - have to think twice about how our choices regarding work and child care shape the collective good. 

O'Rourke provides the crux of Hirshman's argument:

Affluent and well-educated men rarely leave the workforce (and when they do, it's usually to return to school or start a business); a portion of affluent and well-educated women do opt out and when they do, it's almost exclusively to raise children). When these women choose to devote their skills to childcare rather than to the workplace, they are "perpetuating a mostly male ruling class"—precisely the type unlikely to help make the case for more flexible work arrangements that would allow more women back into the workforce. The result is disempowering for less-well-off women, who have fewer public female role models, and for the opt-outers themselves, who find it hard to re-enter the work place and, if divorced, may have to depend on their husbands for support. None of this, Hirshman points out, dovetails with the aims of feminism.

The attitude that a woman's place is in the home persists.  Just recently, I was out with a group of economically high-powered women.  One remarked that she had decided to accept that her partner doesn't do his fair share of the housework, because she will "eventually be doing it anyway" once they have kids and she stays home! To an extent, I support individual women in making choices that best suit them.  At the same time, have we come far enough that we are really free to "choose"?  If I don't want to bear a greater burden of the care for the home and children, will my choice be respected?

Let me leave you with an excerpt I came across today from the Philosophy of Manufactures, written by Andrew Ure in 1835 (as cited in Folbre, 1994):

Factory females have in general much lower wages than males, and they have been pitied on this account with perhaps an injudicious sympathy, since the low price of labour here tends to make household duties their most profitable as well as agreeable occupation, and prevents them being tempted by the mill to abandon the care of their offspring at home.

We should not forget that child care arrangements have always been tied to broader economic and political ideology. And, therefore, the choices of individual women, and their partners, as to how to negotiate the demands of work and family do have political ramifications.

Links:

A Working Girl Can Win: The Case Against Staying at Home with the Kids by Meghan O'Rourke of Slate, found at Breebop

Resources:

Who Pays for the Kids: Gender and Structures of Constraint by Nancy Folbre