So, as those of you who follow my Google Reader feed (which, why are you doing that to yourself?) are no doubt aware, I follow Jezebel, which is Gawker’s feminist blog. Or something like that; I suspect they would take issue with that as a label, but that’s the one I’m sticking with.

They have this recurring feature which they call “Crap Email From A Dude.” In it, they reproduce an email from a dude to a girl, where the guy is doing or saying something they feel is sexist. Sometimes, maybe even frequently, the ones they post are legitimately crap emails. I think I’ve even shared one or two on Google Reader before, because I like to chronicle humanity at its lowest, though I try (probably unsuccessfully) to do so without malice. But this latest one… this latest one really bothered me, and it wasn’t because I sympathized with the writer of the email.Their original post is found here. It is a lengthy read, and I definitely skimmed some parts of the email they quoted. It is an interesting read, if somewhat bothersome, so I’m not going to give it more than a half-hearted endorsement.

The characters in this story are a man named Steve, a man named Rob (who, I should note, is not me, despite sharing my name and some of my characteristics), and a woman named Mara. Steve and Mara are having a casual sexual relationship, and she feels she has made it clear she is not looking for a relationship (she is evidently in a long-distance open relationship). After venting about this situation to Rob, he writes her a lengthy email. More on that in a minute. First, here is what Jezebel has to say with Mara’s emails. (I will note that they do not reproduce the emails she sends out; they only show the incoming emails. While I don’t suspect malice on their part, I feel they should include the full conversation in the intereste of full disclosure, especially if, as they say, her response was “curt.”)

After Mara responded to Steve with a sweet but curt reply containing the word “presumptuous,” she complained about the situation to Rob, who said something along the lines of “we wouldn’t have to send emails like that if women weren’t so bent on marrying us all the time,” etc., which gave Mara a bit of the “twisted thrill in killing the enemy” sentiment Rob referenced in his missive about gender differences etc.

Mara now wonders whether she should move out. Our inclination is no, that actually the fact of taking a moment to think about this stuff counts in Rob’s favor, and that spelling and grammar and logic do not need to be the strong suits of one’s roommate if their names are on the lease of a nice enough apartment, and Mara says they have an awesome roof.

Now. Rob’s email takes up the bulk of their post on the matter. First of all, in what I read, he made a grand total of one spelling error, which was typographical. His grammar was not poor, nor was his spelling. Even his logic was not terrible. If anything, his problem was not a lack of logic, but a lack of real-world application of said logic. I could write pages about his arguments (which I won’t), which range from gender theory to theory of government. It is not a bad argument. It is wrong, but it is not bad. It’s just not feminist. He adopts a standpoint that is easily interpreted as sexist, but I don’t believe that it is, at its heart. Maybe this is because I just don’t get it as a man, but I think what he’s saying is that there are gender differences and gender expectations and that sometimes you have to operate based on stereotypes, and maybe that gender can have a useful role in society.

And their stance towards Steve’s email similarly grates. I’ve had one too many situations where people who, despite expressing to me rather directly that they are not interested in a relationship, nevertheless became clingy, needy, and otherwise acting rather like they wanted to be in a relationship. Maybe I just have a bad sample, but it’s the sort of thing I want to prevent happening in the future. It shouldn’t be offensive if someone is trying to take precautions to prevent this sort of thing, especially since it’s not usually the guy who ends up getting hurt.

All that out of the way, I can get to the real point I was hoping to get at here: I think this little featurette is incredibly sexist towards men.

I’m not going to pretend that sexism is a problem that men face with anything remotely resembling regularity. It’s not a societal problem. It’s not something that we need men’s rights organizations for. But it’s something that I think feminists, if they are really serious about what they’re doing, need to take a long and careful look at.

You see, when I read this feature, I always get the vague feeling that this is trying to suggest not just that these particular men are horrible sexists that are everything that is wrong with society today, but that all men are. That every time a man sends out a “crap email” he isn’t just doing so because he feels strongly about something, that it isn’t well-intentioned, but that it’s evidence of some endemic sexism that runs deep within society that makes this man’s personal thoughts worthy of uploading to the internet for everyone to see to be publicly analyzed by the editors and mocked by the commenters? He’s not a public figure of any variety. He’s the roommate of someone who reads the blog, who meant well and simply wanted to have a discussion about the topic.

And this is true of all of the ones I’ve read, as far as I can tell. Sure, there’s probably no law against it. I don’t believe copyright or privacy laws protect against this sort of thing. Certainly even if copyright law does cover emails, the best you can do is sue for a takedown, and you might be able to force the violator to pay for your legal fees if it goes to court. Maybe. These people are not trying to be public. They are sending an email, sometimes in good faith, sometimes in bad faith, with the full expectation that it will be private. Sometimes they say some terrible things, things that I can only expect are in the heat of the moment, or in a cold, simmering fury.

They are having their trust violated, not only by the woman who is sending the emails in to Jezebel, but by the editors at Jezebel, who don’t seem to have any concern for the privacy of these men. And it’s never qualified. There is never any attempt to say that this is in any way exceptional. It sounds like they expect this to be utterly mundane. Perhaps I am just misreading. But where is the “thoughtful emails from a dude” section? Where are the discussions about people who are normal? Where are the attempts to qualify that not all men are monsters, and that it is, indeed, even probable that this particular man is probably not a monster, that he is a human, as are we all, who makes human mistakes, has human perceptions, and that sometimes people who don’t flawlessly agree with your worldview can still have reasoned and intelligent opinions and not be imbecilic wastes of human flesh?

(In the defense of the commenters on Jezebel, several of the ones who appear to have read the lengthy email through appear to not think it is that bad of an email. As one wrote, “Aside from the fact that he is painfully , unnecessarily, verbose, I think he makes some interesting points and is at least trying to communicate something. I don’t really think it’s that crappy of an e-mail…”)

Oh, and here is a reward for getting to the end of this post, or just skimming to the end: I do not expect to be featured on Jezebel. The title is a joke, as is my life.