Reply #19: The role of men in feminism, as I see it, and ...........

[OldLeftieLawyer]

.......... as I've experienced in my long life, is the same as the role of women.

I am no one's "victim," and I never was, from the moment of my birth. I am here to do the best I can, and the ones who can't keep up - regardless of gender - will fall by the wayside. There are some with whom I couldn't keep up, and I got left behind while they made tracks.

But, in every transaction, I learned. I got something I hadn't had before, and, for better or worse, I made it work for me. If someone thinks porn is demeaning to women, I'm going to be sure to give that person a wide berth, because I know that their beliefs are far different from mine, and I believe the issue is more complicated than that. That sort of "professional victimization" only leads to useless debates that are meaningless in their lack of content and demoralizing in their incipient and misplaced anger.

You know, I've been shortchanged by our society in a hell of a lot of ways, not all of them having to do with my uterus. I could rage on about it, but what would that accomplish? Too much of what has been mislabeled "feminism" is simply a vehicle for angry women to punish men for things over which those men have no control. It's sort of how I feel about reparations for African Americans - it's a goofy idea.

As far as I'm concerned, those who isolate feminism and want it to be treated as a separate issue are asking to be marginalized and isolated. They're pulling out what are essential parts of a social necessity and mishandling them. Today, feminism is just as vital a matter as any other civil right, and, in the same way we teach our children and our students, we must live the models that we want the coming generations to emulate. Rage and blame and anger will not accomplish any of that, I believe.

As for the notion that Clarence Thomas on the Court meant that he would support Affirmative Action - well, you must understand first that the simple notion of Affirmative Action meant that no one member of any minority who benefitted from that program (I am one of them) would ever be beholden. In fact, Thomas took an oath to uphold the law, and when no good Affirmative Action or equal protection cases came before the Court, he voted as he saw appropriate. No, I don't like his votes on most cases, but to try to put him in some sort of box and then be surprised because he didn't vote like the token some might assume him to be is to stereotype and to discriminate and to show more about bias than I'm sure anyone ever suspected about themselves.

Feminism is simply humanism, and we are all in this together. I will join hands with a man or a woman, a homosexual or a heterosexual, a transexual or a transvestite, a nun or a rabbi, a felon and a celibate, if it will advance us towards the goal of equal treatment for all.

It begins with the individual. There can be no blame, there can be no punishment, there can be no recriminations. There can only be a going forward, hand in hand.