NYT philosopher writer flaunts virtue by flagellating himself for sexism, but doesn’t do squat for gender equality

In the last few years a genre has arisen that doesn’t just call for social justice—those calls that have been around for a while—but in which a person (usually a man) flagellates himself for sexism, racism, or other sins, excoriating his behavior in an attempt to purge himself—and by extension the entire class to which he belongs. Yes, here we have an article by George Yancy, a black professor of philosophy at Emory University, who’s penned a long diatribe for the New York Times’s “The Stone” philosophy column. You can see it below, but if you have a Y chromosome, realize that you’re going to be indicted for sexism, no matter how much of a feminist you are.

Click on the screenshot to read the article:

Like a Cultural Revolution victim wearing a dunce cap and a sign, here Yancy confesses to numerous sexist crimes, including asking his wife to take his last name when he married her (she refused). While I wouldn’t do that, and many men don’t care about that either, he uses that example to put the first wound in his back. He argues that this, as well as his expectation that he be thanked for doing the household tasks that he should do (again, many many wouldn’t act this way) constituted not sexual assault, but something close to it: misogyny, and even “acts of violence”. Note the hyperbolic rhetoric (“act of violence”) and the familiar words of the woke, like “toxic masculinity”:

It is hard to admit we are sexist. I, for instance, would like to think that I possess genuine feminist bona fides, but who am I kidding? I am a failed and broken feminist. More pointedly, I am sexist. There are times when I fear for the “loss” of my own “entitlement” as a male. Toxic masculinity takes many forms. All forms continue to hurt and to violate women.

For example, before I got married, I insisted that my wife take my last name. After all, she was to become my wife. So, why not take my name, and become part of me? She refused. She wanted to keep her own last name, arguing that a woman taking her husband’s name was a patriarchal practice. I was not happy, especially as she had her father’s last name, which I argued contradicted her position against patriarchy. But as she argued, “This is my name and it is part of my identity.” I became stubborn and interpreted her decision as evidence of a lack of full commitment to me. Well, she brilliantly proposed that we both change our last names and take on a new name together showing our commitment to each other

Despite the charity, challenge and reasonableness of the offer, I dropped the ball. That day I learned something about me. I didn’t respect her autonomy, her legal standing and personhood. As pathetic as this may sound, I saw her as my property, to be defined by my name and according to my legal standing. (She kept her name.) While this was not sexual assault, my insistence was a violation of her independence. I had inherited a subtle, yet still violent, form of toxic masculinity. It still raises its ugly head — I should be thanked when I clean the house, cook, sacrifice my time. These are deep and troubling expectations that are shaped by male privilege, male power and toxic masculinity.

If you are a woman reading this, I have failed you. Through my silence and an uninterrogated collective misogyny, I have failed you. I have helped and continue to help perpetuate sexism. I know about how we hold onto forms of power that dehumanize you only to elevate our sense of masculinity. I recognize my silence as an act of violence. For this, I sincerely apologize.

Fine; he’s apologized. But he insists that the rest of us apologize, too, for we are all mini-Weinsteins, complicit in the Patriarchy and toxic masculinity. Indeed, we are all guilty of “soul murder” (his words), even for looking at a women’s bum! Sadly, the man knows nothing about evolution and sexuality.

To this end he quotes the uncapitalized feminist bell hooks, another sign of wokeness:

It’s true that many of us, including me, have not committed vile acts of rape, sexual assault and sexual abuse the likes of which Harvey Weinstein has been accused of. We have not, like Charlie Rose, been accused of sexual harassment by dozens of women who worked for us; and we are not, like Bill Cosby, being sent to prison for drugging and sexually assaulting a woman, in this case, Andrea Constand. Yet I argue that we are collectively complicit with a sexist mind-set and a poisonous masculinity rooted in the same toxic male culture from which these men emerged.

I’m issuing a clarion call against our claims of sexist “innocence.” I’m calling our “innocence” what it is — bullshit. As bell hooks writes in “The Will to Change: Men, Masculinity and Love,” men unconsciously “engage in patriarchal thinking, which condones rape even though they may never enact it. This is a patriarchal truism that most people in our society want to deny.” When women speak out about male violence, hooks writes, “folks are eager to stand up and make the point that most men are not violent. They refuse to acknowledge that masses of boys and men have been programmed from birth on to believe that at some point they must be violent, whether psychologically or physically, to prove that they are men.” We have learned it. In the language of Simone de Beauvoir, “One is not born, but rather becomes” masculine.

Well, that’s not entirely true. Differences in sexual behavior, in which men pursue and stare at women (the “soul murder” he mentions) are partly evolved: the result of differential mating strategies that were adaptive in our ancestors. It’s not all culture. But as I’ve said many times before, any evolved differences that now act to degrade modern society, demean women, or given women fewer opportunities or less freedom, need to be ditched. Biology, as we all know, is not destiny.

Yancy goes on to describe some of these degrading acts, like rubbing up against girls in school, citing Luce Irigaray (what does this add except to show off?) that this shows a “dominant phallic economy. He then segues into the Brett Kavanaugh/Christine Ford affair, which I’ve written about before. While I believed that Kavanaugh was unfit for a position on the Supreme Court—based on his behavior at the hearings as well as other reasons—Yancy is absolutely sure she was innocent, something that I can’t go so far as to say. All we have is our take on the hearings and a tentative judgment.

Yancy goes on to assert that “one in five women are raped at some point in their lives,” which of course is a statistic subject to contention. I hasten to add that all rape is reprehensible, and even one rape in 500 is too many, but he’s really playing fast and loose with the statistics here, all in an attempt to not only claim we live in a “rape culture,” but to add that all men are complicit in this.

We all recently lived through the public spectacle of the Brett Kavanaugh hearings. What is at stake transcends but also includes Christine Blasey Ford’s allegations that Kavanaugh sexually assaulted her when they were both in high school during the 1980s. The history of toxic and violent masculinity should have been enough for us to give full weight to the reasonableness and believability of Ford’s testimony. But we did not.

Full weight? We should have believed Ford not on the basis of the evidence but because of “the history of toxic and violent masculinity”? I don’t think so, for that’s past history, not evidence. And if you take that tactic, then “believe the female accuser” becomes all one needs for conviction.

Don’t get me wrong here: women have always gotten, and still largely get, a raw deal. They are harassed, catcalled, subject to biases, and diminished. I’ve seen it in my own classes, in which male graduate students talk over women, or take credit for their ideas. But don’t call me complicit in that, for I do the best I can to ensure that women students not only get the same respect (and opportunities) as men, but also to share their views as much as men. After constantly examining my own behavior vis-à-vis women, I don’t recognize in myself the kind of toxic misogynist that Yancy sees in himself. He and others may say I’m fooling myself, of course, but I’ve never asked any woman to change her name, rubbed up or groped any woman, or, I think, been guilty of the species of “toxic and violent masculinity” that Yancy sees in all men.  And I’m not just exculpating myself: many of my friends wouldn’t recognize themselves in Yancy’s caricature, either. Realize that when someone who is reflective hears an accusation like Yancy’s, he immediately (and correctly) thinks that Yancy is a self-serving extremist.

In the end, Yancy abases himself by apologizing to all women for his behavior. Fine, but, as I note below, what does he accomplish except flaunt his virtue? He ends by assuring all women he’s an Ally:

I know that if you are a woman, you don’t really need me as a man saying to you that you are not paranoid when it comes to male violence, sexual and otherwise. I speak not for you but with you. In my view, and in the view of many others, Kavanaugh failed himself, and you. And we have all played our part in that failure. I don’t want to fail women anymore.

Since the world is watching, we, as men, need to join in the dialogue in ways that we have failed to in the past. We need to admit our roles in the larger problem of male violence against women. We need to tell the truth about ourselves.

Well, I’m sorry, but the truth I see about myself is that I’m not Yancy, much less Harvey Weinstein. And the truth I see about Yancy is that he talks a good game, but his mea culpas do nothing to cure the problem of sexism.

As Grania pointed out when I discussed this article with her, Yancy’s behavior comes very close to the behavior of some religionists, who think that because they’ve been bad—in their case the Original Sin comes from Adam and Eve, in Yancy’s it comes from his Y chromosome—and because of that they need to humiliate themselves and punish themselves so they can be purified. Indeed, what we see in this Times article is, pure and simple, a humiliating attempt of moral purification.

Grania added that she, brought up Catholic but now a nonbeliever, can fully understand this mindset, but it would be harder for me, raised as a largely secular Jew, to comprehend the attitude that Hitchens characterized as “We are born sick and commanded to be well”. And it’s not just Catholicism or even Christianity. Here are the religious equivalents of what Yancy is doing (avert your eyes if you can’t stand the sight of blood):

And the ultimate humiliation and ritual of purification:

But these rituals of people making a show of their wokeness, humiliating and abasing themselves to confess their sins, has never done anything to improve themselves, humanity, or the world. It doesn’t lessen the amount of suffering on our planet. For the people who are causing problems for women in our society are not those who examine themselves and then confess their sins: they are the people who don’t have the introspection to examine themselves and then to change their behavior.  They are the entitled people, the Harvey Weinsteins and Bill Cosbys, as well as the men who grope women or make their lives miserable.

As Grania observed, “Instead of espousing conduct that is akin to a quasi-religious mea culpa that helps no-one and accomplishes nothing and is the #MeToo version of ‘Thoughts and prayers’, Yancy might consider coming up with practical suggestions for tackling / defusing actual misogynistic behaviour in the workplace, or indeed in broader society.”

Nothing less will do in today’s woke culture than for all men to grovel and confess in this way, and for all whites to admit that they are racists. And, to be sure, there is a point to examining your behavior with respect to other groups. Maybe some of us have behaved badly, or been guilty of sexism or racism. The unexamined life, as they say, is not worth living, but it’s also not good for society.

But, in the end, there’s something craven about Yancy’s show of contrition as well as his false indictment that all men must scour themselves and confess misogyny. It’s not impossible, in fact, that this kind of palaver heartens the Right by making the Left look ridiculous. For it surely does. It makes us look like the Soviet show trials of the Thirties, or the horrible degradations of China’s Cultural Revolution.

h/t: Grania

Lagniappe:

The Apex Of Fashionable Male Self-Loathing And Self-Flagellation: George Yancey NYT piece is cartoonish in its male-bashing excess. https://t.co/5NkaNtgnAH pic.twitter.com/aykAqyizR2

— Amy Alkon (@amyalkon) October 25, 2018