I just finished reading and commenting on The Good Men Project article Who Is In Your Rowboat? by Dale Thomas Vaughn. He’s reportedly vaunted as “a man of quality and one of the leaders of men of quality” by best-selling author and top feminist attorney Gloria Allred” which only reminds me why I have such a problem with most ‘feminists’ too.
Here’s the premise, a common meme: “Imagine you have a life rowboat with room for about 6 other guys – You need 6 guys who you can count on. Who is in your rowboat?”
I don’t have a problem with his basic premise, that it is important to identify the strong, brave, ethical, empathetic, wise people in your life and dispense with the flakes, bloodsuckers, users and unengaged. I agree with that, and the older I get, the more brutal I am with the scalpel.
But underlying his article is a strong, exclusionary and, to my mind, misleading message: if you’re a man, a REAL man, the 6 others in your life boat need to be men. Why just guys? What is wrong with a mixed gender rowboat? What about a rowboat with a trans person aboard? Why on earth would any intelligent person place their trust on people based on gender?
The myth of the ‘band of brothers’ is very old and powerful. It transcends culture, too. All Viking guys together! All vestal virgin sistas together! Boo-ya. I’d like to have a go at taking the knife of critique to this.
Historically speaking, it is men who destroy, betray, and undermine men, not women. Generally speaking, it wasn’t women who decided to go to war, drafted you or sent you there. Generally, women didn’t enslave you, or construct economic systems that have ensured your permanent poverty. On a personal basis, yes, your mother might have let you down. Your girlfriend might have cheated on you, but count the number of times you’ve been fucked over by your own gender and I will bet the opposite sex comes out looking pretty good.
It’s the same for women. It’s not, generally speaking, men who make you feel physically inadequate or exclude you from a sport’s team, or took you to some doctor in Cairo and let them slice off your clitoris. It’s other women.
I’m not saying that people don’t find support in the company of their own gender. Nor am I denying the reality of inter-gender nastiness. What I’m saying is that, in the grand scheme of things, the ones who fuck you over… they’re not any specific gender. They were just rotten people. Their gender is irrelevant.
One of the reasons I think these gender ‘gurus’ (male or female) focus so much on celebrating the ‘being with your own kind’ crap is because they haven’t gotten past the myth that sexual attraction makes people unreliable. We’re back to the idea that, if your dick is hard or your pussy’s wet, you no longer exercise good judgement.
The Greeks had no issue with this. In fact, one of the reasons for the celebration of homosexual love in Ancient Greece involved the fact that, if you went into battle with your lover, you were more likely to be heroic. You wouldn’t want your lover to see you in the grips of cowardice.
So, I’d like to unpack this: why on earth would I want to fuck anyone I considered unreliable, flaky, weak, stupid or unprincipled? And if I like this person enough to let them fuck me, why wouldn’t I trust them to have my back in a fight?
My lifeboat is has a mix of gender, sexual orientation, ethnicity and philosophies. There are people in my lifeboat I want to fuck and some I don’t. That doesn’t make it a weak lifeboat. It means I have the resource of a larger range of life-experiences, a wealth of wisdom, I have the counsel of people who see the world with different eyes, whose values have been forged in other furnaces, and some hankie pankie, too. It’s not a sisterhood, or a brotherhood. It’s the very best I can find.
I researched this in the OED some years ago during a debate with my daughters. Technically, the word “guy” is not gender specific. My favorite definition is “a grotesquely dressed person.”
That might be, but I’m quite sure that is not how the author meant it, nor how it’s normally read.
If we’re filling up a rowboat, I’m pretty sure I want to recruit from the local college crew teams. If it’s going to be a long time at sea, the social dynamics are probably better with a roughly even split of men and women, but taking body strength tendencies into account, both the men and women should probably be in strength-matched pairs, so a 4/2 split. If it’s going to be a really long time, I want to get some people who are good at celestial navigation and fishing in the mix.
I’m not actually missing the point of either essay—Mr. Vaughn is just strongly constructing the questions to get to a certain kind of answer. The language: “rowboat”, “allies”, “in the trenches”, “victories”, “step up to the plate”, “cut them loose”. Not only are you asked which guys belong in your boat, the only kind of socializing mentioned is the very male-coded drinking of beer. The people I would want helping me row a boat, fight a war, or play sports are not necessairly the people I would want to share a house with, or talk about my problems.
Your idea that fear of sexual attraction drives a lot of this advice is interesting. I don’t know whether that’s the biggest driver, but I certainly agree that attraction doesn’t create untrustworthyness. The actual experience of fucking might not be the most rational, temperate part of your day, but if anything sex seems to make relationships more reliable rather than less.
“Historically speaking, it is men who destroy, betray, and undermine men, not women. Generally speaking, it wasn’t women who decided to go to war, drafted you or sent you there. Generally, women didn’t enslave you, or construct economic systems that have ensured your permanent poverty”
RG, please… Samson and Delilah… Cleopatra, Julius Caesar and Mark Anthony for the first point and how about Margaret Thatcher for the second. (and the first if you include the Falklands war).
Harry
Why do you think those are the iconic stories? A tale of a man brought low by a woman? Not because they’re the norm, but because they’re exceptions. Margaret Thatcher was your ONLY female prime minister. Please, did the others treat you so well?
I enjoy your cynical sense of humour when you say we were treated well by The Witch. But you’re correct, she was the only British PM, however her stunningly sucessfull forerunnner who created wars and systems of widespread indigenous poverty has to be Eliabeth 1st of England (the union was not created then so not Britain), the person who sanctioned the actions of the founders of the English, later British, East India company. The largest mercenary organisation the world has known and the creators of the Empire.
So fair comment that women might have been the exception to the rule, but when they did decide to create wars and misery they didn’t mess about and far outdid their male counterparts 🙂
You missed my point. I was not suggesting that Thatcher treated anyone well. I’m saying that Tony Blair treated you no better. Historically, women who have decided to create misery and war have not outdone their male counterparts. And the fact that you are so convinced they did speaks to your focus on the exceptions of history, not the rule.
Hitler, Stalin, Mao, Pol Pot… when I hit on a female leader who even comes close to being able to compete with these, you let me know.
Meanwhile, I am not suggesting that women make better leaders at all. I’m back to saying that gender is not a good way to assess who to trust. Period.
I am teasing a little, and I won’t go down the Bambi Blair road.
I am not convinced at all that women are better / worse than men, but history has shown that either can equal the other and in the future there will be more females in positions of power and so more opportunity for them to even up the records.
I was also thinking of Pol Pot earlier. Did you know that Thatcher was a supporter and proposed him to the UN council. Of course once his hobbies became public knowledge she had to cut him loose.
“I am not convinced at all that women are better / worse than men”
Argh. You are not reading what I’m writing. Did I say that women were better? No. In fact, I stated quite clearly that it was my opinion that gender was irrelevant to the better/worse discussion.
Good god.
That was a very badly worded comment by me, but in my defense you selected only a partial piece of my sentence so it appears out of context. (tsk, tsk. Journo ploy) What I was saying is that women or men can be equally disposed to creating war / poverty as suits their needs, it is just that men have been the dominant power in politics until now, but the pendulum is swinging.
I am sure that if Cristina Kirchner had the financial wherewithall she would be sending the troops to Stanley as we speak, just as Bambi, to please Bush, sent troops to the Middle east with no justification.
So, in a roundabout way we are saying the same thing; gender has no relevence, it is all about power. The male \ female argument is nulified.
But a fully justified “Argh” for the bit of text that you did select and also I have taken the point of discussion off on a tangent, but I enjoy it… 🙂
i agree with you, RG. i also like the term “gender gurus.” my rowboat will also include a mix of genders. thanks for this.
40 Park Road
Freemantle
I’d not heard of this Good Men movement before; it sounds suspiciously like that Iron John fad from back in the 90s, which is enough reason to avoid it. It’s a matter of the basic impulse to trust people who resemble oneself, according to which group identity you cleave to, and distrust those who do not. It’s an evolutionary curse, one that is sadly hard to overcome with the weapons of rational thinking and empathic acceptance of difference. I don’t know if the human species will ever transcend its need for categorisation of itself. It seems to me that notions of identity are the chief reason that our evolution as a species may well be at its end point. The need to protect identity on the individual and group level is the root of so many forms of aggression.
RG,
Do we get to choose who is in the lifeboat? Most accounts I’ve ever read or seen it ends up being a Hodge podgy mix in crisis from the unexpected disaster. I do not believe we know who we can truly count on or trust in a given situation, especially in a survival mode. I agree, gender has no bearing in this matter, unless your speaking of literal brute strength. Even then, after a few days at sea under harsh conditions a seemingly macho man might become a blubbering useless cry baby.
As far as oppressive leaders male/female…its the power that seemingly corrupts. I think your discussion with Mr. Smith went off point a bit.
No, we dont get to choose who ends up in the life boat. I believe the discussion point should be this; How ones personally deal with the unexpected various personalities that end up in the life boat with us, be them male or female. After all, didn’t the Nazis try to pick who was going to be in “the boat”, didn’t turn out to good for them, did it. I dont think it would ever turn out the way one would expect if we actual chose the occupants of the life boat.
~TFP