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Can a Male Disagree With a Feminist Without Being Sexist?

By Jesse Singal - Jul 24th, 2008 at 10:41 pm

This post will probably come off as a rant and make me seem pretty egotistical. But, since I’ve generally been good about not dipping too deeply into the first person in my blogging, I’m going to indulge myself nonetheless.

Earlier this week, a mini-debate sprouted up over an article by Courtney Martin in The American Prospect . In the piece, Martin summarized some of her reasons for not getting married: gay folks are excluded from marriage, it is a sexist institution, and in the past it has been explicitly racist. I disagreed with her reasoning , arguing that it doesn’t make sense to blame all the sexist, paternalistic crap on marriage itself rather than our culture, and that a given couple, should they choose to get married, could hypothetically do so while avoiding the considerable baggage that comes with getting hitched. It should be noted here that I didn’t say Martin should get married (arguing against her specific reasons for not getting married is not the same as arguing that she should get married), and in fact ended the post by acknowledging that “there are solid arguments against getting married,” but that I didn’t find Martin’s compelling.

Dylan Matthews of the Prospect rebutted my argument , I rebutted his rebuttal , and Jamie Kirchick over at The New Republic chimed in to agree with me (though he also veered straight toward Crazyville with his assessment that “these arguments against [marriage] should be viewed for what they are: marginal attempts by far left feminist and ‘queer’ activists to upend a vital social institution,” which sounds like it came straight from Michael Savage or someone of that ilk).

I had no problem with any of this, of course, and I was happy to be part of a debate that had spread to a couple of big blogs. But then Amanda Marcotte entered the fray and things started to get a bit bizarre.

Marcotte is an accomplished feminist blogger who posts over at Pandagon , and who wrote a well-received book that was released earlier this year. She’s intelligent and a cutting, witty writer.

So I was a bit shocked by her response to my post. First, a comment that read:

There’s something surreal—always—about a man trying to bully a woman into getting married like a good girl, which basically proves Courtney’s point.

My only explanation for this is that Marcotte didn’t read my post, because the idea that I was “trying to bully” Martin into getting married is nonsense. (It’s shocking, I know, but Courtney Martin’s status as a single woman doesn’t concern me.) This is also pretty loaded language to use–obviously the notion of a man “bullying” a woman into doing something is pretty inflammatory, given it’s something that happens everywhere on a regular basis.

Then Marcotte wrote her own post on the debate over Martin’s piece, this time saying:

Jesse Singal tries to argue her into getting married , thereby neatly proving the point that good, old-fashioned heterosexual marriage still functions largely as a way to pressure women into getting in line.

Marcotte’s take on my post bothered me for obvious reasons, so I sent her an email asking her to “either point[] out to me exactly where I ‘bullied’ Martin into getting married, correct[] your misrepresentation of what I wrote (because — and again, this is with all due respect and acknowledgment of your abilities as a writer and a thinker — that’s what it was), or let me respond somehow[.]”

I got a reply from her earlier today which read in its entirety:

Sorry, I wasn’t trying to upset you. Just draw attention to the fact that a man trying to argue a woman into accepting that marriage isn’t sexist—in a society where male indicators of health and well-being go up after marriage, but women’s go down—kind of proves that marriage is in fact sexist. Maybe it’s time to examine why it’s important to you, and why it flusters you if a woman rejects it.

This was one of the more obnoxious, infuriating emails I’ve received. It’s not fun to have someone who doesn’t know you advise you in a sneering, condescending way to “examine” two opinions you don’t in fact hold.

But what pisses me off the most about this, and what finally, after paragraphs upon paragraphs of pointless whining, brings me to a maybe-relevant point, is Marcotte’s focus on my gender.

I know it’s Platonic and quaintly pre-postmodern of me, but I happen to believe that properly assembled words on a page have inherent meaning, regardless of the reader or writer. Either my argument holds or it doesn’t. Whether or not I have a penis doesn’t factor in. I think my argument is solid, and I’d be happy to debate whether this is the case. But instead, I was scolded and indicted as an evil misogynist by a blogger with thousands of readers who barely bothered to address the substance of what I wrote.

(I don’t want to get too deep into this, but if I’m going to claim Marcotte’s rebuttal was little more than a glancing blow I should at least explain why: She focused almost entirely on the considerable external cultural pressures that attempt to mold married couples into a traditional version of “Mr.” and “Mrs.” But, since I’m arguing that we shouldn’t be blaming the institution of marriage itself for all the crap that’s grown up around it and that therefore marriage itself isn’t inherently sexist, this is a non-response. My whole point is that I think progressive couples can overcome the nonsense, so that’s where the nexus of the argument should be–not on something Marcotte and I completely agree on, which is that marriage brings with it a plethora of sexist and patriarchal cultural expectations.)

So, for the record, because I value arguments qua arguments, and because I truly don’t give a damn if anyone thinks the fact that I’m a male preemptively defuses my reasoning: My whole point here is that a marriage is simply a legal agreement. That agreement, and the betrothed themselves, are the only inherent parts to it, the only required ingredients. If a couple wants to sign the requisite paperwork and not even tell anyone they’re married , they have every right to do so. In this case, the couple would be able to reap the numerous state-sponsored benefits of marriage, but nobody would pressure them to act like husband and wife because no one would know. Surely, somewhere, there’s a couple that could pull this off if they wanted to? Or does someone want to argue that the mere knowledge of the existence of those signed forms would cause such a couple to slip inexorably toward a 1950s conception of marriage.

Haven’t I just given an example of a marriage that wouldn’t automatically be sexist? I’m thoroughly uninterested in Marcotte’s opinion (not to imply she’s still concerned with this debate; I’m sure she’s moved on), but I’m curious as to what others think.

Tags: Amanda Marcotte, Courtney Martin, feminism, gay marriage, gender equality, LGBT