Cogito Ergo Doom

Hugo Schwyzer: Why I Resigned From The Good Men Project

This has to have been a difficult decision for him, because I know his heart was behind the idea of dialogue, but I applaud his strength in doing this.

On my own, I sort of flipped out on Twitter when I read Tom Matlack’s response to Amanda Marcotte’s response to an earlier response he had to something so far back I’ve already lost mental track. But in the article, Tom started off by complaining “So it’s much more difficult to take the level of personal attack, and frankly organized piling on, by so-called feminists.” …which, really? Calling progressive women who are attempting to explain how you’re missing the point “so-called feminists” is very disturbing.

However, it gets better! It does! (sorry, I’ve stolen Sady Doyle’s style here.) His penultimate paragraph in this article reads, in its entirety, “To my mind we have lost that thread more than we should. I don’t want to fight with those who call themselves feminists and then throw hand grenades at me. They have proven that they really aren’t interested in what I am interested in: men’s stories and goodness.”

So, you see, the reason they call themselves feminists but aren’t *really* feminists is because they aren’t interested in what Tom is interested in: MEN’S stories and goodness. Just so we’re clear.

(Edit: I don’t intend to gloss over the fact that Tom’s response implies that he’s being treated with some sort of violence. His imagery in this regard is also appalling, but it’s not the point I intended to argue while writing this.)

I posted my reaction to The Good Men Project nearly a week ago, and it hasn’t really improved. Hugo Schwyzer was a bit of a saving grace to that site, a shred of cred as it were. But overall I still found it difficult to digest; even when an article doesn’t seem thoroughly skeevy, at least one comment will. In this very article to which I make reference, Tom mentions that his CEO is a woman and he doesn’t want to lose her. (This is a common argument of his, by the way. It reminds me of a magazine cartoon I saw years ago, in which an executive tells a woman “We’re not a sexist company at all. We hire lots of dames.”) But in response to this mention, a male commenter said “I don’t know why you’d even talk about “losing” Lisa; she’s beautiful. You’re so lucky to have her.”.

This is a possessive mentality, and it’s skeevy. It makes her sound like property. And this sort of thing honeycombs through the whole site. Which is one of many reasons it puts me off, and one reason I feel that one or two good-intentioned persons who “get it” are still not really enough to pull the site out of its festering morass of privilege-denying privilege. When your founder and his commenters are telling women “shut up and listen to us, we understand feminism better than you”? You’re doing it crushingly wrong.