Of Buttons

Do you have any words that just push your buttons? I do. I ran into one the other day while casually browsing the internet. Imagine that, finding something on the internet that pushes someone else’s buttons. But the think about this word (I’ll tell it to you in a second) is that it shouldn’t push my buttons. That is to say, I wouldn’t expect it to. Because while yes, it is a hot button word, it is one that I had long ago considered, one that I have talked over with learned scholars, my wife and friends. It is something that I thought I put to be a long time ago. I guess that is the thing about pushing peoples buttons, they wouldn’t be so easy to push if people knew they were there, right. I mean, if you know you have a sore button, you sew it up, right? You steel yourself against it. You prepare by forming phrases like “I don’t want to talk about that right now” or “Can we change the subject?” The task of hiding away a button from the wiles of the internet is even easier, no? I mean, all you do is click the “Home” button, or the “Back” button, and the offensive material is gone, voila. Not that a button has to be offensive, but that it stirs up something within, some old thought or old feeling that you thought you had put to bed long ago. My word, yesterday, was feminism.

I can tell you where I found it. That way if you go and look you will see that it wasn’t from some ultra-radical feminist website that wants to castrate men and do away with pantyhose. It was a blog site called “blue milk.” A fairly sweet, intelligent site that offers insights in life and parenting and relationships. I clicked on the “About” button and my eye read “My feminism is richer for understanding your feminism.” And it was like someone had thrown a bucket of cold water on me. I was done. I wasn’t going to read any more. I navigated away and didn’t look back, but the damage was done. The proverbial button was pushed.

Buttons have different powers over us. Some make us afraid, some make us angry, this one left me feeling confused. “Wait” I said to myself “What is feminism again?” I quickly typed the word into the search engine and went to the wikipedia page. I read the usual jargon about it being “a political, cultural or economic movement aimed at establishing equal rights and legal protection for women.” And then went to the outline in search of greater meat. I eyed the “pro-porn/anti-porn” headings, but then spied a subject line the spoke right to my dis-ease: “male reaction.”

“The relationship between men and feminism has been complex.”

“No s**t.” I thought. I read the paragraphs over and then switched of the browser and walked away. “There is no way I am touching this” I told myself. I felt too inadequate to jump into the middle of a decades, even centuries long debate on the rights and differences between the sexes. Even if I could, my people pleasing center wouldn’t allow it. “Who would I offend, and why?”

I wouldn’t characterize my behavior as defensive, as much as self preservation. I wanted to look away from the topic, because the reality of the situation was, that while I have thought about various topics under the heading “feminism” I have never really thought about feminism in terms of “my feminism.”

Blue Milk said, “My feminism is richer for understanding your feminism.” But that begs the question doesn’t it? “What is my feminism? “ I thought. “Hell, what is my masculinism? Is there a masculinism? Is her Masculinism stronger from understanding my Masculinism?” That last one sounded defensive. I threw it out. It turns out there isn’t a “masculinism” but there is a “masculism.” But masculism sounds so un-masculine that I immediately didn’t want any part of it.

My wife wrote her undergraduate thesis on feminism, specifically women and the porn trade, not the sex workers, but women who ran their own pornography related sites, women who were “empowered” by this line of… work. So I did what any self-respecting man who is doubting his trust in the feminist mystique would do. I didn’t say a word to her. At least I didn’t until I sat down to write my experience of it and she happened to be passing by and I casually said “I had the weirdest experience the other day…” and she knew instinctively what I was talking about.

“It’s threatening.”

She went on to talk about a conversation she had recently had with another friend about the statistic that whites are becoming a minority. “What would that mean to me if I suddenly became the minority and they were the majority?”

It isn’t about racism. It isn’t about sexism or any -ism at all for that matter, though anyone can easily make it into an argument if they want. It is about unfounded fears rising to the surface and threatening our sense of security.

I have a friend who likes to say that fear is False Events Appearing Real. That’s my experience. Listen to what I said earlier: “a ultra-radical feminist website that wants to castrate men and do away with pantyhose.” Stereotypes. They bubble to the surface and push buttons. Not that they are real, or even that I believe them, but that at one point in my youth I might not have known the difference and so being uneducated, or unschooled or sheltered, I had fears. Fears about women. Fears about Homosexuals. Fears about people of other races. Fears that I grew up and got smart and threw out because, well, because the stereotypes were a lie. A lie created by people just like me who probably felt threatened just like me and that were about people who, while not just like me, are more like me than I know, which is why I fight racism and sexism and –isms of every character when I see them, and why when a button is pushed, as they sometimes are, I can use that fear as an opportunity to remind myself that, for me, the –isms aren’t about men and women, black and white, straight and gay. For me the –ism is about difference, and I don’t believe in difference. I reject them. Not that I don’t support the -ism and the desire to treat people equally and with dignity and respect, but that I believe people to be equal and so I don’t adhere to the –ism.

I don’t have a feminism, and having someone say "your feminism makes my feminism stronger" bugs me. Why? Because I am threatened? Maybe, but I think it is because I think I don't want there to be an -ism, and I want the worlds hates and fears to already be resolved. But that is not realistic. Why? Let me ask it another way: Can there be a world without -isms? I don't know. To me -isms are about difference. There may never be a world without -isms, but there can be a me without -isms, and part of my fighting the intolerance I see is to reject them, to reject difference and just be O.K.

I guess the question is, does talking about it perpetuate it? I mean, feminism isn't about difference, it is about making things more equal, or at least ideally. But then is it really about making things equal, or does talking about the -ism mean there will always be that difference. Like does saying "there has never been a black president" make it less likely that there ever will be because it hold out the difference at arms length and says "look at this." But then, there IS a black president... so what do I know?