"Make me a sandwich."
"Huh?"
"That's the new bro thing, dad."
"At school?"
"Yeah. And elsewhere. It's the new put down."
"Like, 'make me a sandwich' is a dismissal? Why? Is it because..."
"...girls make sandwiches for boys, Dad. It's a 'women belong in the kitchen' and 'bitches make sandwiches' thing, Dad."
"But it's said by dudes to other dudes?"
"Yeah, Dad."
So, yeah. Let's be clear. These are fifteen, sixteen, seventeen and eighteen year old boys. Future grown ass men. Future boyfriends, husbands, bosses, rapists and abusers. And just like last year, and the year before, and all the way going back to the first Sumerian priest-landowner's decision to mark a symbol for cattle in clay and trade out his daughter for the right to own more cattle in the future...it's the same as it ever was. And the way boys reinforce their place in the hierarchy is by treating their presumed inferiors...
...as women.
No surprise in that, of course. But it is nonetheless amusing to read, witness and watch men, dudes, broheemers and anti-feminists deny the pervasiveness of a nearly ubiquitous idea, that "woman" defines "inferior," and in doing so, sets the value for "governable."
Crow's Eye: Maintaining a commitment to Pointless Acrimony™ and Hate Filled Invective™! Also available in corvid mischief and traditional sly dog's mistrust.
54 comments:
"Shut up bitch! Go fix me a turkey pot pie!" - John Bender, The Breakfast Club (1985)
The more things change...
How do you combat this in your own children?
It's utterly depressing.
You write like a girl.
Bill,
The distilled message of "eighties movies" is that it's cool to challenge authority as long as you are (a) white, or (b) not a red, gay, a woman or a black person from the city; it is also essential, according to the underlying ethic, to reinforce the system with your act of rebellion.
BBBB,
I don't know. As wary as I personally am of disease/infection analogies, there's something to be said for viewing the matter prophylactically.
Justin,
Welcome back.
Maybe you should have raised your children better. My boys would never think of saying that to me.
That is a new one for me. I am still dealing with "pussy."
"My boys would never think of saying that to me."
She kidnapped herself, man!
"My boys would never think of saying that to me."
I'm looking forward to Arka's manual on raising children to be posted entirely in a fucking comment thread.
Drop some knowledge, yo!
i don't know about sandwiches, but i do make a mean carrot cake.
is it about being a woman, or is it about being a caretaker?
my husband has said that to me, as a joke, but it's only funny cause it's mostly true. is there anything wrong with that? only when there is no appreciation from the 'sandwich receiver'. does your son appreciate when food is prepared for his consumption by his mother? same appreciation if food is prepared by his father? cousin? aunt? uncle?.. at the end of the day, appreciation for what is provided should be the ultimate goal, not who does what job or what sexual organ they were attached to while consuming/preparing.
Prove your cred by insulting men! That proves--proves, I tell you!--that you don't secretly harbor sexist attitudes. That's how I know Mr. Crow is on the side of women: because he so vigorously and constantly reminds us.
Oh, I forgotta say...lol @ Bill!
Arka,
Is English your first language?
Yep Arka, his penis-bashing negates his Y chromosome and shows how sincere he is about helpin out da ladies.
It fascinates, Anon, that you equate criticism of certain learned male behaviors with the bashing of penises.
gamefaced,
Appreciation is not the point. Actually, it does not enter into the equation at all.
It is about the dismissal of a 'lesser' person to perform a task that is stereotypically done by women. The inference being that whatever task the two individuals are doing, one of them is not fit to perform. Therefore, the other dismisses them to perform a menial "woman's work" type task.
Arka,
While I like putting words in people's mouths as much as the next guy, I have a question. Regarding "Mr. Crow is on the side of women"...what exactly is wrong with that position?
By the way, I like my penis waaaaay too much to bash it.
mantis - all you've done in your comment is explain why such a statement is offensive. i understand the why. i was speaking more about how to parent when confronted with stereotypes as simple minded as "a women should be making a sandwich for her man, that is all she is good for'. children should be taught how to judge stereotypes authentically and also how to redirect their own thought processes in order to rise above them. a parent could easily say " no! bad boy! don't do that ever! wrong! " (as high arka said, her children wouldn't dare think such a thing) or a parent can prompt their child to dig further for the reasons behind the stereotype and gauge their validity with their reality. hopefully the end result is to dismantle such stereotypes from their minds altogether.
d.mantis, if being "on the side" of Group A does not mean being "not on the side" of Group B, then there's nothing wrong with it. Mr. Crow has previously suggested using violence against men based on a history of past injustices, much the way most violent coercive behavior relies on past injustices. E.g., Eve's sin. Taking his latest in context, it's not much of a jump to be wary of what it means when he is on one group's side.
Mr. Crow's daughters should not be demeaned because of Eve's sin. My sons should not be demeaned because of western patriarchy. Recycled discrimination tastes just as foul as the original.
Jack, no; to what end?
Because it's obvious, that's why. You made a grammatical word order assumption that a native speaker of english would not make.
My son was not telling me to make a sandwich. He was telling me what he heard. You presumed that he was speaking in the imperative. None of the native english speakers who commented in this thread made that assumption.
The way in which you told your story, such that "make me a sandwich" appeared as the first spoken line from your son's character, had nothing to do with "grammar" or "word order assumption," but rather, everything to do with the order in which you typed it in.
Your son then went on to explain why he had said a rude thing--"because everybody else does it."
My sons would neither give the rude command to begin with, nor attempt to justify it by explaining that everyone else does it. Nor say "bitch" when speaking about something other than a female dog.
"That's the new bro thing, dad...girls make sandwiches for boys, Dad. It's a 'women belong in the kitchen' and 'bitches make sandwiches' thing, Dad."
"The new bro thing" sounds rather, er...Spartan. In the navy now. Maybe he was deliberately being ironic.
Or does it go one step further? Did they learn to come home and report "un-PC" occurrences because it gives Dad something to blog about?
One generation ahead of you, my mother wouldn't've put up with that crap, either. In this country or any other.
"It fascinates, Anon, that you equate criticism of certain learned male behaviors with the bashing of penises."
Ha ha ha!
"If a person does not wish to have his dick chopped off..." -- Jack Crow
"If you meet that man on the road, fucking castrate him." -- Jack Crow
Maybe you're just pedantically insisting it should have been PENIS-CHOPPING instead of PENIS-BASHING?
Arka,
I'm sorry you read it wrong, but it wasn't said as an imperative, and your unfamiliarity with colloquial english shows.
Anon,
You, of course, elide the context entirely. Do I think rape victims should castrate their rapists, if they want to? You bet. But, castration is testiculectemous, to coin an amusingly clumsy term. It is not a penilectomy. And my suggestion that rapists ought be castrated is limited to...rapists.
elide?
you use this word in conversation, do you?
what a pretentious piece of crap you are.
Jack, maybe something was said before that first line, like:
Son, walking in the door: "Hey, Dad, I'm home."
Jack, quickly closing copy of Penthouse (j/k): "How was school? Did you learn anything new?"
Son, by way of answering: "'Make me a sandwich.'"
This one simply doesn't understand how the conversation you provided in the initial post makes it 100% clear that the first sentence was not an imperative. In the interests of improving English, would you be willing to divulge what it was?
Hopefully, you will also limit your criticism of men to "American men" or "American men who go to my son's high school." Surely you must concede that not all men across the world's many cultures are being raised in the same way?
Context, Arka. And, no, the criticism is not limited to American men.
gamefaced,
Is it possible to revisit "judging stereotypes authentically"?
d.mantis,
That's the thing: the us or them assumption about women and men. I don't think criticism of pervasive learned male behaviors puts one on a woman-oriented team. I just think, as it seems you do, that it's in keeping with the larger critique of anarchism.
Anon,
I wouldn't die on a Bolivian hillside over the word "elide," but whatever gets you through the night is alright with me.
every stereotype contains an itty bitty truth. in this case, the truth is that in prior generations, the majority of women were homemakers and took pride in caring for their husband's stomachs. there isn't anything offensive about that remark, because it is true. this premise has been trumped up, distorted, and regurgitated by children - into something that is supposed to be funny - to children. we are talking about children - not "MEN".
to look at the stereotype authentically, strip any emotional reaction you have to it and look at it for exactly what it is. many times has my son come at me with some stupid joke based on a prejudice or stereotype and we sit and hash it out, most times he doesn't even understand why it is 'funny'. once he knows the why, and what itty bitty truth brought about the why, it loses it's funny. my son is only 10, so for me, the goal is still just teaching him to learn how to cut through the fluff and get to the gut of it. and it seems your son did that all on his own...
also, there is absolutely nothing that my son couldn't say to me, or would 'never think' to say to me. i am not attempting to raise a robot. i want my son to think for himself. if my son ever said, go make me a sandwich, in a dismissive way, i would know that he was vocalizing hostility towards me and going about it in the wrong manner. he'd make his own fucking sandwich and we'd have a nice long talk about what was getting at him. i don't think taking such thing personally or holding on to bitterness regarding shitty jokes amongst kids does anything more than give the stereotype more power.
gamefaced,
We must be talking past eachother. Thank you for your clarification of your point.
My clarification (and my focus) was on the dismissal of the task at hand and the unworthiness assumed in the larger context of women's place in society.
Nevertheless, I like your comment about stripping the stereotype out of its emotional impact.
This seems to be a begining for anarchists to construct a critique akin to Stein's "there is no there, there". It has always seemed to me that the cultural hierarchies that anarchists should rail against as much as the 'state', are simply false cathedrals built to marginalize and distract.
Arka,
"Surely you must concede that not all men across the world's many cultures are being raised in the same way?"
Surely you must concede that not all states across the world's many cultures are torturing, murdering and destroying humanity in the same way? Does this invalidate the critique of anarchism?
I'm talking macro, not micro.
"in this case, the truth is that in prior generations, the majority of women were homemakers and took pride in caring for their husband's stomachs."
No, that's not the truth, that's a man-made ahistorical myth like the one about happy hookers, and the bit about "pride" both a fallacy and a non-sequitur. The majority of all women in all of the European and post-colonial North American history to which you are alluding have always worked at something or other, outside of the home, for wages, although they were mostly excluded from trade unions and professional guilds.
"there isn't anything offensive about that remark, because it is true. this premise has been trumped up, distorted, and regurgitated by children - into something that is supposed to be funny - to children. we are talking about children - not "MEN".
Again, no. "Make me a sammich" or words to that effect is a meme devised and propagated by adult men, mostly on the interweb, mostly to feminize other men or remove women from important male conversations and spaces.
Feigned or real ignorance is not a reasonable defense for this brand of stupid apologia.
I don't know why it has to be explicitly stated, but treating women as a monolith and white, affluent women living in the latter half of the twentieth century and the first couple decades of the twenty-first as stand-ins for the rest of womankind (extrapolating from their privileged* experiences hard and fast generalizations that don't apply to the majority) makes you blinkered, not reasonable.
*being a "homemaker" (dressed up professionalism trying to hiding the oppression that necessitates) or a SAHM is not the privilege anti-Romney folk make it out to be, but it's not half bad, either. Working class women usually have to earn wages on top of "making" the home. Ignoring single women and homosexual women.
anonymous -
um, it is not a myth that women primarily - prepared the food that their husbands ate. doesn't matter if she worked two fucking jobs and is a happy hooker on the side, if she was a woman and had a family i put my money on: she was doing the cooking. you can't argue that. i don't quite understand why you're even trying? i am a homemaker. so is my husband. we both work toward keeping our home, laundry, dishes, floors all that (still, i do the majority of the cooking). i also work full time. my husband works full time. homemakers work both in and outside of the home, just like you said. what is your point?
so what if men use this term too? is ignorance something that you can control in other people? can we legislate stupid? do the masses of grown ass men sitting on the internet cracking sexist jokes matter to me in the slightest?
why don't you try reading my comments in relation to the fucking post, instead of interjecting your own assumptions and projecting.
d.mantis, what is "the critique of anarchism" to which you refer?
Mr. Crow generalizes about "men," and slurs this vast subset of population based, in this case, on an event in his private life.
In response to the subsequent discussion, this one posed the rhetorical question, "Are all men the same?" expressed with regard to their raising across different cultures.
This ploy is designed to help Mr. Crow (and/or supporters of bigotry) realize that generalizations do not apply to all individuals.
Your response was not to answer the question, but to ask if all states were the same. This rhetorical ploy seems designed to suggest that because all states are not, of course, the same, one can still criticize "states," and therefore, one can still criticize all "men" even though they are not all the same.
Is that what you're trying to get at? Or is it something else? I'll show you my answers to your rhetorical questions if you'll show me yours to mine.
I dunno, High Arka, I got the context on the very first read. I can't really see how you'd not, unless you're being deliberately contentious, stemming from a personal problem with an overarching theme you're projecting onto the narrator of the dialog in question.
As a matter of fact, I read the same from his ever-shifting pseudo-anonymous would-be arch-rival.
Might that be?
Jack: Interesting take on the Brat Pack era. Though I doubt John Hughes had anything in mind beyond a "we're f'd because you're f'd" look at the patriarchy with the emotional-candy in question.
The violent sentiments against men are not rare occurrences from Mr. Crow; they're the centerpiece of his whole show. If you prefer, they're the "overarching theme" of this blog. This is one guy who really, really wants to prove he's on the side of women. Which could be considered a personal problem.
Long ago, many someones like him came up with overarching themes about why men should be empowered to crush evil matriarchs. It wasn't then popular to question their generalizations or motives, as it is not now popular to question Mr. Crow's counterpoint. Nonetheless, I'm still here.
Infant torture becomes vaginal mutilation becomes female genital cutting. Respect the culture.
Infant torture becomes penile mutilation becomes circumcision. Respect the culture.
Jack's on a terrible path, and he feels very righteous for being there, because, like, "patriarchy." Let not the temporally popular set you down the same dark path. Turn aside and return to us all while you still have a chance.
Arka,
It is your position which is least generous towards men, since it assumes that a condemnation of learned behaviors is instead a condemnation of essential maleness.
You equate the criticism of behavior with the criticism of gender, and base this equation, it seems, upon a gender essentialism which refuses the distinction between conduct and the assumed essence.
davidly,
I think you're right about Hughes' work, in large part. But, the eighties movies cannot help themselves. Struggle as they might against the constraints imposed by the US/Soviet grand narrative, what still emerges over and over again is that a person must first be normal and normative in order to have the right to rebel. Which is unrealistic, like most things coming out of that formative falsely structured snapshot of a decade.
gamefaced,
I think we will have a hard time seeing eye-to-eye on the interpretation of past roles, but for what it's worth, I think even patently false culture stories are still not without lasting effect.
Arka,
I find the good/evil, light/dark dichotomy as boring and as fruitless as earlier attempts to Freudianize from afar.
davidly,
It's worth returning to the "overarching theme," isn't it?
I can't imagine having to be a feminist and do it all over again, again and again, because some blockhead reads "men shouldn't rape" as "men are evil and only women are ever right" and responds to the misreading instead of the original, refusing also to ever return to the original, insisting instead that only the lazy, piss-poor interpretation must be discussed; that if it is not discussed to the exclusion of all else, the person who offered the original and now ignored critique is not only psychologically defective, but is also arguing in bad faith.
where i am from, and from what i have read about the culture and gender roles in this area (shenandoah valley of virginia) from authors who grew up here, preparing food was something that women took pride in. they weren't cursing their existence as women or pining for a way out of their daily household duties. do you honestly believe that the majority of women, historically, have not done the cooking for their families? or do you believe the false is something to do with women taking pride in this work? please give me your reasons i should believe that the majority of women were instead in a perpetual state of distress, loathing the act of preparing food for their families. i'm asking honestly - because i don't quite get where this is coming from.
gamefaced,
The error is mine, and therefore the misunderstanding. The quote to which I referred, but which I did not specify, was this: "every stereotype contains an itty bitty truth."
I do not agree with it, and am not likely to concede agreement in the future. It is my counter-experience, in fact, that stereotypes more often than not exaggerate traits, behaviors and habits which do not exist, because they are mostly projections onto the foreign bodies of alien Others.
As to "women enjoyed cooking," I really haven't addressed the emotional component. Thinking it out now as I type, I guess I'd have to say that plenty of people learn to take pleasure in lives which are nonetheless still mostly characterized by obedience and compulsion. I don't think we should confuse a survival mechanism with approval for the larger despotism.
jack - of course a stereotype is projection and fluff. i absolutely agree. when i said itty bitty truth, it was in reference to teaching children to strip stereotypes down to that bit of truth. this truth could be historical origin. this truth could be cultural phenomenon. anyway, concession wasn't my aim. thanks for clarifying.
Your original assertion, gamefaced, was not that women cooked and enjoyed cooking (the latter is not fact, but speculation, and is beside the point), but that they practiced homemaking to the exclusion of any other work prior to women's "liberation." That's what homemaking means: you work at home, you don't collect wages, you clean up after and cater to your own immediate family. That's a patently false reading of history, but to reiterate it and pretend that it's true serves a precise political purpose.
"where i am from, and from what i have read about the culture and gender roles in this area (shenandoah valley of virginia) from authors who grew up here, preparing food was something that women took pride in."
Then you probably ought to read up more on the cultures of the so-called Shawnee and the Iroquois. That is, unless you're continuing to use white women as the basis for all comparison in a discussion about women's historical oppression.
Your preoccupation with happiness as you define it in the face of hardship reminds me of historical revisionists who long to convince the world at large that American slaves were most content when they were on the farms. Were you somehow able to prove that it were so, an impossible task, whose agenda do you believe you are advancing in advocating inequality?
actually, my original assertion was just that women, historically speaking, fed their families and took pride in that. YOU decided that i was speaking of practicing homemaking at the exclusion of any other work. YOU put that on ME. you are taking a narrow simple minded definition of homemaking and deciding that is how everyone must define it. you can't refute that in the past homemaking was primarily the woman's responsibility DESPITE what other responsibilities she held. this is STILL FUCKING TRUE.
another thing YOU are putting on ME is a "preoccupation" with happiness. the same way you're insisting that women as a whole were not cooking and did not value their contributions to their family's survival. i never said, "all white women were blissfully happy when cooking their husbands meals"
also, where does this white bullshit come from? did i say white? did i say i've never read about the indians in this area. did i ever say that i'm a DESCENDANT of the native americans from this area?
and now we're talking about slavery? it's like all you know how to do is speak in generalizations. you're attempting real hard to prove me an idiot. keep fucking trying. from your comments it appears you just want an excuse to hoist yourself up on a soapbox and start spewing shit everyone already knows.
and fuck everyone's agenda, including yours.
High Arka,
I did not intend to be cryptic in any way.
critique of anarchism = simply the argument leveled against the state or any hierarchy meant to dominate and rule and the calling into question of its legitimacy.
Perhaps that was a bad analogy anyway. Let me propose a different one. (to dig up and continue beating the dead horse) George Zimmerman honestly believes he is not racist as do many people. However, we operate in a social context that elicites reactions that are racist. It is a learned behavior that is internalized and institutionalized in the form of profiling, the drug wars, the welfare system, blah, blah, blah.
Assuming that there exists certain extremely well raised children (like your own) who are not personally racist, can we not critique our societies racism as a whole?
d.mantis, we certainly can, and perhaps even should critique society. Targeting a specific group, though, can have its own associated problems. For example, it's true that many black fathers are poor parents, even if they are, as a group, statistically better parents than, say, American white fathers. Mr. Crow could critique institutional policies of sexism without saying in so many words "men suck."
Given how bigotry works, when someone starts suggesting mandatory state sterilization (castration, in this case) for people possessing the wrong viewpoint, members of the subgroup being so threatened might feel understandably, well, threatened. And might want to defend themselves.
On a side note, I love watching men pompously lecturing women on how they're not feminist enough. It's the new, improved patriarchy.
gamefaced, whether you're right or wrong, it's an honor to watch you give a woman's perspective to a domineering male like Mr. Crow, who's telling you exactly how you should feel about the history of women in your culture and how you should feel about raising your children.
Because he's a man, after all. Your savior and protector. He has so much more education and social awareness than you do, it's his duty--and burden--to explain what feminism should mean to you.
d.mantis, our state's formal policy is no longer racism per se. The traditional image of racism--being rude or discriminatory because of race--applies to large numbers of yokels, but in a macro way--as you might say--it's really a class issue. Didn't you read all the articles when that rich black Harvard prof. was pulled over by the cops?
The shitty way that ethnic minorities get treated by the cops and social service agencies is, essentially, the way that white trash has always been getting treated by those government agents. Black presidents and Hispanic cops can and will fuck up the shit of the underclass, too.
If you're really interested in racism, the most traditional racism still being practiced by Americans is not inside America, but is delivered in the form of munitions implanted into the bodies of Africans (yes, including northern ones) still living in Africa, and southeast Asians still living in southeast Asia.
arka,
guess my first comment turned into more than i intended. i am the only parent to my son, there is no 'parenting' coming from the dad side. i can't ever be that side no matter how bad i want it or try. same goes the other way, i suspect.
jack and anyone else who questions my take on people taking pride in manual labor, specifically farm labor/life : joe bageant's 'rainbow pie'. speaks to the psychology behind finding grueling labor for the benefit of survival satisfying. enough to carry on. something about the fruit in the strength behind your own bones. don't discredit it. i'm not talking about slave labor - calm down. no one wants to be 'owned' by definition, another person.
but we are all owned by our primary needs. and when we fulfill them with our bodies, with our strengths, we find ourselves content. ever wonder why everyone hates their jobs pushing paper? stuffing boxes? driving around? because these jobs aren't satisfying our immediate, primary needs. meh, i'm rambling. but it is a very good book.
Yeah, Bageant is an asshole, but he's a very good writer.
Are we all enjoying pushing internet paper here? This one is.
was an asshole, he's dead.
a bonus yes, i love getting paid to write blogger comments. if i keep at it convincingly enough, i can save the world!
Arka,
You are practiced at projection.
Well, he always predicted it. And he cheerfully knew he was an asshole inasmuch as public went. Like Silber, though, he was also an asshole in private, which really sucked. /sigh
Mr. Crow, we share here another opportunity to discuss the issues that claim to have brought us here: if this one is projecting, (1) which viewpoints are the projection? (2) Which of those viewpoints are not also your viewpoints? (3) Which of those viewpoints are not also accurate?
Must every interesting discussion break down into a sad ad feminem? If this one really, truly sucks, dissect the words and demonstrate it. Respond to this one's accusations and show how they were put wrongly or do not apply. If you people can never learn how to use this thing to do more than posture, you're going to be stuck here forever.
Tone and concern trolling, along with spaghetti Latin. It is to have a sad, and on someone else's behalf.
You get the funniest trolls Jack. I think that's a badge of honor. You are obviously saying truths if you are getting on the nerves of these people. Makes me wish I had trolls... The only thing I ever get is emails by good Christians telling me how they are going rape my mother with a lead pipe and wishing me and my children eternal torture. From a Christian perspective that makes sense.
For the record, rapists should be castrated and that misogyny is an ancient evil that should be exorcised at all costs. Patriarchy is endemic and deeply embedded in many cultures. Hard work and intelligence is needed to combat its effects. And my kids are well aware of the folly (and danger) of being chauvinist or racist or classist or otherwise despicable. All any of us can do is talk to them and try to help them become empathetic and sensible people.
michael,
It's a hard term to come to grips with, this patriarchy. The -archy on the end, in common english usage, implies an identifiable thing when it fact it's not, it's much more slippery, for all that it's pervasive.
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