(email exchange, Summer 96. Later got feeback on it from John Stoltenberg)

[dear x--] Your frank expression of confusion about the role that male-oriented writers play in my teaching was productive for me because I've been thinking about it for years, but not had many people to share my thoughts with. What I'd like to do is recount a little of the history behind my thinking, because it's central to who I am, what I do, and how I conceive of my relationship to Women's Studies. I've written it because I think it's best conveyed in a narrative instead of a coffee shop dialectic. As an undergraduate I was trained as a creative writer, and the best way for me to relate important things about myself is still by story telling.

The question I heard in your email message was, "how, given your familiarity with feminist discourse, can you teach someone like Frank Chin without ralphing? And what kind of effect does it have on your students, especially female students, to read him?"

If that was indeed the question, then the place to begin to answer it is with the work I did against male batterers by working with them. (If it wasn't the implicit question, I still think the answer will prove valuable.) Working with these men was probably the central learning experience of my years in Durham, and one of the most important things I learned was that repugnance was a luxury I couldn't always afford. Too much was at stake. If my energy in a counseling group was directed at telling those men why I thought they were miserable shits, I'd be endangering the women they went home to. And they certainly wouldn't rethink any of their fundamental assumptions. Our task was to confront the violence as something illegal and unacceptable, but just as importantly, to challenge the underlying attitudes that made violence against women possible in the first place. This latter task required finding points of engagement. As I developed as a counselor, I realized that my need to fixate on my repugnance at batterers (and men in general) was an obstacle to being effective. Putting my disgust into a holding pattern in the name of commitment threatened to make it more about me and advertising my legitimacy as a profeminist male ("see how different I am?") than about changing other men. In fact, what is a more typical hetero male dynamic than to think of the answer to women's suffering in terms humiliating evil men? How many Westerns and action films depend on a woman's victimization as an excuse for the main attraction, a narrative of insult-and-revenge between men? What I learned while working with batterers was that my outrage at their acts was different than women's outrage. It came from different sources and had different, sometimes deceptive effects.

These insights pushed me to reexamine my motives for doing profeminist work. There's a moment somewhere in Refusing to be a Man where John Stoltenberg discusses using feminism as a cover to express hostility toward other men. When I read that I realized that it was something I'd been doing. This more or less coincided with the second time I was asked to speak at a Take Back the Night march (1989 I think). The march was on my birthday, which coincides with the anniversary of Kristallnacht, making for a depressing mix of images in my mind. Earlier that night I'd met with male batterers in the court-mandated program they attended, and felt it had been a little touch-and-go whether one of the men might hit or stab me early in the session. The march was large for Duke. Although I later heard positive feedback about my speech, there was an undergraduate woman in the front row of marchers who spent the entire time looking and laughing at me. A week or two before this, I had learned that some of the women in my department were making fun of me behind my back because of my engagement with feminism and women's studies, which they considered to be a theoretically backward program. Many of these same women were involved with self-absorbed, homophobic jerks, and in at least one case, a physically abusive male. Finally, a former girlfriend who was a rape survivor, something that prompted my original involvement in this work, had recently broken off contact with me and everyone else--both male and female--involved with the Women's Studies Program without explanation. None of us have heard from her since.

All of this provoked an existential crisis of sorts. After the march disbanded, I curled up in a statuary nook and sat watching the full moon for a couple of hours. I felt what my home town's evangelical storm troopers called "tubed out"--as empty as a crumpled tube of toothpaste. It was a lonely moment. I could think of several reasons, from radical to reactionary, why a young woman might laugh at my speech. I thought my former girlfriend's withdrawal from Duke people in Women's Studies probably had more to do with putting her pain behind her. The attitudes of the women in the Department, though disappointing, were hardly unfamiliar, and kind compared to most of the men's opinion of me. So the question I asked myself that night wasn't so much "Why bother?" as "Who am I doing this for? Why do I need to do this work even if non-feminists make fun of me and feminists seem perpetually skeptical, never fully convinced that I understand or have a right to talk about these issues?"

The answer that came, the only honest answer possible, was that I was doing the work for me--my interests, my need to create a space where different kinds of masculinity were nurtured, my hopes for changing other men.

It was an answer that entailed a shift from an identity politics (the attempt to be a feminist male, part of a "men's auxiliary" to the women's movement) to a coalition-oriented paradigm. Instead of thinking of my hopes following in the wake of feminist ones, I began to think of myself as someone with interests and goals that overlapped with feminist ones. I've built on that foundation, and I've found that it has several advantages:

1> When I'm explicit about my self-interest, feminists tend to trust me more. And after all the men they've encountered who are altruistic poseurs and Johnny-come-latelies (often to try and take over the field), I don't blame them for being skeptical when a man breezily labels himself as a feminist.

2> It made some of my connections to gay male endeavors, and as it emerged, queer theory and culture, explicit. It also helped me realize that one of the attractions of pro-feminism for me and other men at the time was that it provided a forum for us to reimagine male identities while providing a relative safety net from being gay-baited. The logical step for me to take then, was to start thinking more about homophobia and my connections to gay men and queer culture.

3> A coalition paradigm helps keep me from becoming invested in proving my purity as a "male feminist" (perhaps an impossible task) instead of focusing on how I can be most effective in promoting change. It also makes it clear that even though my goals overlap with many feminist ones, my motivations and methodologies for pursuing them may be different from some women's motivations and strategies.

4> I've come to understand that while being connected with women-oriented spaces are essential to who I am, I shouldn't expect feminists to "mother" me, which is unfair anyway. For me to thrive, I need the emotional support of other men, and especially anti-sexist gay men, who are working through similar issues about how to reconceptualize gender and identity.

When I bring this history and commitments to the classroom, it means that I don't feel I can afford to be what Eve calls a "good dog/ bad dog" critic, dismissing a writer like Chin or even someone as nauseating as Mailer or Hemingway out of hand. Instead I first need to own my repugnance as something that ultimately has to do about me and how the models of masculinity these writers celebrate once threatened to cripple my emotional life and aspirations, and still make me vulnerable to queer-baiting, ridicule, and the boredom of enduring many straight men's perpetual muscle-flexing, ego battles, and emotional illiteracy. Then I need to be clear about how these writers' conception of masculinity is of a piece with the misogyny they direct at women, especially assertive, butchy women like my partner Liz. When it comes to designing the course, I want to be sure that the writers appear at a point where women feel comfortable voicing their concerns and reactions (i.e., not a chilly climate for women) and have tools in hand to critique masculinity. If some of my female students feel intimidated or silenced by male writers at this point, then I've not been doing my job. But I also want a climate where the male students have some maneuvering room to view masculinity as something other than a package deal. Like my teaching philosophy says, "enhancing what a student takes out of a classroom begins with acknowledging what they bring into it." If I come across as a moralist setting up most men as bad and a few ones as good according to some half-hidden scorecard, younger students will dismiss me as just another adult telling them that they should translate their own experience into my politics and historical moment.

If SOU students are like Duke ones, one of the major problems I'll face is that they think they understand what certain code words mean: that "feminist" equals "separatism and hating men"; that "politically correct" means criticizing white people and focusing on others' victimization; that "Freudians" believe that everything comes down to (genital) sex and wanting to sleep with your parents; etc., etc. My task as an instructor isn't to launch a frontal assault on these attitudes by telling students how wrong they are, but to create a context where they can risk rethinking them. Part of this process is conveying information the students don't have, for example that there are several Feminisms, that the term "politically correct" arose on the left, etc. But my main strategy is to entice students with examples of what they can do when their received categories and definitions change. The best way I know to do that is to let them explore how feminism can hook into their self-interests, aspirations, and nascent identities. As one of my fellow counselors who worked with male batterers put it about successfully changing men's underlying assumptions: "it's like judo: you use the men's energy to move them some place they don't expect to end up."

 Warren Hedges, English Dept., Southern Oregon University, 7/96