Every month in the suburb where I work there is a group which meets where various business owners get together and have a chat. In theory it is supposed to work like an informal referral thing where people refer customers to others in the group on a purely informal basis. Or at least that's what it used to be.
At one point someone had the idea of having someone present a short lecture every month and by doing that we could all learn something about our respective occupations. Except that over time, this gradually became a platform for several women to bring lectures about feminist issues. There's nothing implicitly wrong with that but over the course of the past two years, that's kind of all this thing has become. Gradually the men stopped showing up and at the last meeting, I was the only one left. I have no idea where they are, if anywhere.
My job in this situation is to be sent to this group by my boss, leave some business cards on the table along with the others and collect any new business cards which might turn up. Occasionally there are also free sandwiches; which I also must admit at this point is still a nice thing. I think that the implicit contract in exchange for me collecting possible business leads, is attending lectures.
I have come to the conclusion that nobody in the room would ever be particularly interested in anything that I might have said in these meetings (notwithstanding that because I really have nothing to say; I don't say anything) and that masculinity is itself the root cause of the world's problems; which to be fair is backed up by several thousands of years of evidence, wars, commerce, legal systems, practically all of the media, and also practically all of the governance in the history of the world.
It was interesting that what was originally a meeting space for the various businesses in the area is now a de facto feminist space; which I suppose is fine if that's what you want to do but I am increasingly faced with the uneasy suspicion that my presence itself is problematic. I suspect that the men who have stopped coming, stopped because this doesn't really serve the purpose of being a business meeting group for them anymore.
That in itself is an onion of many layers because I was told that "men could show up and they should show up but they better shut up." So I did. I am good at shutting up. My entire working life has been with people who command higher incomes and command more power than I do. A good servant puts up and shuts up as much as possible. There's nothing so unnerving as a servant who's not serving.
I don't really know what they expect me to do at this point because after sitting quietly, am I then expected to go out and tell the men that weren't there of what was said? I already don't really like the attitude of the vast majority of business people in Mosman because I think that they are needlessly cruel to both their staff and with each other; so I don't know which business men exactly would listen to me and then come to a feminist meeting. That seems to be like a similar argument to wanting to tell racists not to be racist and expecting the people who have put up with the effects of racism to pull themselves into the air by their own bootstraps.
I find this attitude repeated across a whole bunch of issues where it is almost like people who are being oppressed by a system are expected to create their own freedom and opportunities. It is pretty obvious that society hurts women in a number of ways, but I'm also going to put forward that that same society also hurts men. It's just that we have decided that we don't care about that. Also, I should point out that I am not a men's rights activist. We have all the rights.
I think that there is an assumption that all men are either stupid and/or evil (which to be fair I think is true but for different reasons) and therefore trying to have any kind of empathy for men is simply a waste of time.
Something that piqued my attention in this meeting was when someone interrupted the lecture and said something to the effect of "We need to talk about how power structures benefit men."
After having spent the last quarter of the twentieth century dismantling both the institutions and the mechanics of the state, we have also dismantled people's expectations of what the state is capable of doing. Increasingly, we're moving towards a more individual sort of society and that places more of a burden upon the individual to look after themselves.
I also note that as a gender, men are generally losing their jobs at a fas lolter rate than women. If you look at those jobs which traditionally employed more men than women such as manufacturing and mining and those jobs are either being sent to other countries or at greater threat of automation, then you have to ask what that does to someone's sense of identity. I bet that if you ask men generally how they define their identity, then you'll usually find that it revolves around their job and more importantly their ability to keep dollars rolling into a bank account.
When asked specifically how I personally benefited from the power structures of society, I conceded that I benefit mostly from an implicit right to be left alone in my person and a disproportionate rate of authority might be accrued to me if I were to say anything. When it came to asking me about how much money I made, because at this point I knew that I became the acceptable token enemy, I openly admitted that I made less money than anyone else in the room; to which the reply was 'good' as though I was paying penance for some horrible crime.
I am coming to the opinion that I really do not want to be at these business meetings any more and that if I stop going, then these local business meetings will be exclusively attended by women. If that was always the intent, then fair play to them because they have won the space. If they expect to change the attitude of the men in Mosman, I wonder how effective they will be when there are no men in the group. Moreover I suspect that if I choose to not bother to show up and shut up, that I will not be particularly missed, if even noticed at all.
From that perspective, if you want to answer the question of how power structures benefit me personally. then being told to show up and shut up by a different set of people, looks for all intents and purposes identical.
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