Hardly. One need not “condescend” against the self-evidently ridiculous.
And the Masonic scenario is more like a bunch of boys huddled in a tree house with a big “NO GURLZ ALLOWD” sign crayoned on the door.
Grown men aren’t terrified of what a woman might see.
You said it. There are plenty of men-only establishments that I’ve been to, and it’s nice to get away from it all and just be with other men without the presence of women*.
Seriously, though (and I was just kidding there – I don’t want to find myself on some altar somewhere being sacrificed because I implied a homoerotic undertone to Freemasonry; it was just a joke)… Seriously, that’s the kind of angle that I think people should be taking whenever this debate comes up. In the kind of men-only establishments I’m talking about, women aren’t actively excluded, they just don’t tend to go there because there’s nothing there that would interest them.
When people just say “it’s this way because it’s been this way for hundreds of years” and “we took an oath” and “we can’t tell you what we do, but that’s just the way it is,” it just demeans Freemasonry and makes it sound like some kind of juvenile boys-only clubhouse, and I know that Masons take their oaths seriously and don’t see it as juvenile. Instead of saying “no women allowed,” put the burden onto women who do want to get into the organization and ask them why they want to be a part of it. Personally, I’m turned off at the idea of any organization discriminating based on sex, race, or any other predetermined trait, but on the practical level, who’s it harming, and what’s the big deal? If a woman wants to become a Freemason, she should have a more weighty reason than just to make a statement against sexual discrimination.
And I’ve got to say that I’m baffled by the whole “a place where men can be men” idea. What are men doing differently when they’re in the presence of women? Are they no longer “men?” I know that I remain a man pretty much 24/7, whether I’m hanging out with just the guys, with guys and women, women only, gays, straights, even when I’m alone with a boyfriend. It sounds like that’s the thing that’s hanging up a lot of people in this thread.
*Note my considerable restraint in not mentioning the “up each other’s asses” comment. I should be commended for that.
No kidding. Some of us don’t worship at the altar of Dr. Laura and her ilk. QED, I would say.
An organization that wanted men to “act like real men” would not encourage its members to say “We don’t give a rat’s ass what women think” or consider the very presence of a female to be “undue influence,” or swear that they’ll never let a woman know what they know.
Sorry, some of these are a bit out of order.
Wait a minute here. Women wanting to work out with other women because a man might make them uncomfortable is a valid reason to you, but the desire to maintain a long-standing tradition and uphold oaths taken, isn’t? Really?
No, it’s not. Masonry is an overtly spiritual organization. It is explicitly not a religious organization.
From my post above:
“Better in the sense of more moral, more ethical, more trustworthy, and more honorable.”
Asked and answered. Other than changing the ritual and those pesky oaths, none. However, not wanting to change the ritual or violate or oaths seems sufficient to us.
How is it not? How is being a descendant of a common ancestor?
Actually, the different version wouldn’t be Masonry to me.
Wow. I, for one, certainly apologize if I’ve given that impression. I certainly didn’t join because it was male-only. I’m not sure that I gave it any thought at all. I was attracted to Masonry for the non-religious spiritual aspect. The steadfastness and trustworthiness of Masons that I knew made me want to be a member. The charitable work is nice, but not primary for me. It’s often mentioned because it is the most visible part of what we do, not because it’s the primary thing we do.
Yeah, me too. While Masonry provides different things to different Masons, this is something I don’t see. I act no differently in Lodge (other than an adherence to some specific rules), then I do anywhere else.
Harmed in what manner? Many single-sex civic organizations were broken open because there was a demonstrable economic advantage to being a member. I fully support this. However, Masonry (under strict guidelines) does not provide an economic advantage to our members. Are people of lower IQ harmed when Mensa meets? Are non-chess players harmed when a chess club meets? And where on earth do you get the idea of treating women “worse” than men. Really.
That was the frat house comment. While Masonry is a fraternity, we do not engage in frat house antics.
By the way, women are more than welcome to participate in all the comings and goings that Masons are involved in and with, as the girlfriends, wives and family members often are. They can participate in all charitable events, the fund raisers and other civic functions. We have dinners before our meetings that women come to. We have public functions that women attend. We have picnics and outings that everyone is welcome to, be they Masons or not. I cook breakfast at my Lodge every Saturday morning, and everyone is welcome. The fellowship of Masons is not limited to Masons.
The only thing non-Masons are prohibited from doing is attending a tyled Masonic meeting.
Wow, no one has brought up the most basic and underlying reason why there are most gender discriminating group… Humans are Sexual beings ALWAYS and to have a group of both women and men togeather is to have Sexual tension. Making a single gendered group removes that tension… I know that in my life if it is the guys and I there are manythings that are said and done that i would never say or do infront of a woman out of respect. I am not a mason so I am not sure what goes on in the group but I know it is probably like Boy Scouts for older men where men are taught respect, civility, etc. along with having a place where you can meet other men hang out and talk about guy things without the worry of a woman present.
And I think that is probably the heart of the matter right there. I don’t think you guys who are either defending sexism or saying it’s no big deal get how women feel about it. As a kid, I remember my mom not being allowed to go into a bar to get my dad out when it was time to go home. I’m 38 years old. Equal rights for women is very new.
Ask any woman you know if she has experienced sexism, and I would bet that every single one has. It might not be something that men think about, because you were raised and lived every day of your lives as basically the “first and foremost” gender - women are very aware of how fragile our equal rights can be, and how most women on the earth don’t have anywhere near the equality that us North American women enjoy.
You really don’t see that sexism harms women? You think that women enjoy it? I’m not talking specifically about Masons here, but sexism in general.
Sexism sure does harm women. But after having a guidance counselor try to push me away from math, science and auto shop and towards home ec in high school ( I’m 41, so this hapened in '78 or '79), having a boss during college who refused to promote me ( although he paid me as much as he paid the supervisors) because " the guys won’t listen to a girl", and spending the last ten years working in a male-dominated law enforcement agency where I had to be twice as good and work twice as hard to get the respect men automatically got by walking in the door , it’s extremely difficult for me to see the existence of male only, social organizations which do not provide any sort of business advantage as harmful to me. We’re not talking about the local Republican or Democratic club excluding women, and we’re not talking about a business excluding women as customers. We’re talking about a voluntary organization that provides no economic benefit to its members.
I don’t know what happens at a Masonic meeting , but I do know precisely what happens at the meetings of the women- only social organization I belong to. We talk, drink, have two parties a year, hold penny socials, a baby shower for teenage mothers, have raffles, raise some money to provide a partial high school scholarship for a girl graduating from the parish school (our male counterpart provides one for a boy) and run an occasional bus trip. We do not sit around taking about how we hate men, and I doubt the men sit around at their meetings talking about how they hate women. I don’t really see much difference between hanging out with five or ten women, throwing a females-only party, and belonging to a social organization which only accepts women. If one is sexist, then so are the others.
How would my organization change if male members were permitted? For openers , some women wouldn't join- they wouldn't want to join a mixed sex organization without their husbands, and have mainly joined the current organization to have somewhere to go one night a month without their husbands. The events would most likely change- certain events seem to be more likely to attract women and I guess others would attract men. For example, my church has had penny socials open to everyone- but really the only people who attended were women and kids. The conversations at the tables would most likely change somewhat just by males being present- there are plenty of topics I'll discuss with female friends that I won't discuss with male friends. Certain behavior would change- some women would drink less, plenty would dance only with their SO at the parties- and if he didn't want to dance, she wouldn't get to either, and the conversations would be less crude.I think people have explained why adequately enough. Women like infamousmom are precisely the reason there are man only social clubs. Her attitude smacks of “your club for men is stupid and ridiculous and I won’t allow men to have fun!!”
Look, I don’t know about you but when most guys go to a social activity with their girlfriend or wife, they have to be on their best (or at least acceptible) behavior. They have to make sure the SO is entertained. Every guy knows the “wait until we get home you bastard” face. We all have made the “please guys…not in front of HER” face.
FYI, it’s not hypothetical. There are Curves fitness centers all over NYC:
http://www.curvesinternational.com/
We aren’t terrified. We just want some piece and quiet.
I have no dog in this fight, as I’m a man who wouldn’t qualify for the Masons even if I wanted to join, which I don’t. But I was stunned to see Miller’s response to “haven’t you ever done a ‘boy’s night out’?”
Is this a whoosh? I’ve never met a person who didn’t understand the intrinsic value of these social events. You really don’t get it? If not, ask any woman in your life about girls’ night out. I’m fairly sure she’ll at least be familiar with the concept and purpose, if not an outright fan of them.
Any woman who would begrudge the Masons being men-only should realize that they are hypocrites anytime they have a girls’ night out.
WTF does Dr. Laura have to do with this?
At any rate, I’d rather be a woman who had a busy life of her own and no need to have my man’s balls in a vicegrip 24 hours of the day. I’m not so desperate for his approval that I want his world to revolve around me, and I’d rather not be a harpy that screams and whines “discrimination” any time a man wants to hang out with his friends.
In other words, regarding this situation I prefer to take a feminist viewpoint 
Let the menfolk have their club. I’m not so insecure that I need a man’s attention all the time to feel validated as a woman.
I feel that this comes down to something that once came up in a thread about transgenderism – some people simply do not have a strong sense of gender identity. In fact, I don’t think that this is entirely uncommon. And to people like us, having a men-only club makes about as much sense as having a blonde-only club. To me, it’s not so much that such an organization would is bad, it just seems like such an arbitrary distinction, especially if it seems wholly unrelated to everything else the club is about. If such a blonde-only club existed and did charitable works and bettered its members, I wouldn’t disapprove of it, but I might suggest to its members that allowing people with other hair colors would help to further its aims. And if one of those members explained to me that keeping the club blonde-only was one of the central aims, on par with furthering spirituality, etc., that statement would meet with my… well, total lack of empathy, if not incomprehension per se.
That men and women should be seen so much as fundamentally different classes of people – even to the extent of being referred to with different pronouns! – does not seem intuitive to me. And why should grouping people together with regards to sex be any more acceptable than similarly distinguishing between people on the basis of race? That seems to be the (largely unspoken) consensus among a large number of people, such that racism is acceptable in ways that sexism is not. As an example that I think illustrates to some extent how deeply ingrained this distinction is, even single-occupancy restrooms are often “Men’s” and “Women’s”. To me, that seems roughly as silly as having “White” and “Colored” drinking fountains. Yes, a large collection of traits may correlate well with sex, but an individual person is so much more than a random member of a very large group (membership in which is not even voluntary!).
While perhaps most pronounced in the case of gender, the same basic meme can be seen with regard to lots of other things as well. When people refer to “men”, or “black people”, or “Americans”, etc. as if they were some undifferentiated mass of people … well, I’m not even sure I understand the mentality behind it. When generalizations are made that clearly do not apply to all members of the group under discussion (e.g. “Men are more aggressive than women” vs. “Birds have feathers”), what are they to be taken to mean? Perhaps the qualifier “most” is simply implied, and I’m seeing something that’s not really there, but I often get the impression that people don’t quite seem to acknowledge that they are talking about large groups that are diverse to the point that pretty much the only absolute commonalties are the ones true by definition (e.g. “Homosexuals are attracted to members of their own sex”).
Good grief, that covers an awful lot of stuff, doesn’t it? Some things above might really warrant a separate thread (or two!) of their own. I hope I haven’t hijacked this discussion too badly, but I think a lot of this stuff gets to a lot of the difficulties people are having in understanding each other here…
This might be true of me - I’ve never really considered it. It comes as a complete shock to me every time I run into something sexist, because it’s just so completely illogical and unexpected to me.
Sure, blame it on the women, it’s all their fault. It’s such a drag trying to be civilized just because the ladies are present, isn’t it?
When you misspell an essential word in that particular fashion, I think your real intention comes through loud and clear. 
There are plenty of clubs out there that exclude people for seemingly silly reasons. I read about a tall people club that requires females to be at least 6 foot and males to be 6’3" or 6’4". I have no idea why anyone would be intersested in such a club but apparantly some are.
Uh, men and women are different. One group lactates, gives birth, and of course we have different sexual organs. (Viva la difference) It seems perfectly intuitive to make such distictions when it comes to language. In fact, is there any language that doesn’t make any distiction based on sex?
There are a lot of groups based on race that we don’t think of as bad. There clubs based on being Greek, Slavic, Irish, Italian, or having other backgrounds. All of these clubs are pretty much made up of white people by default.
Marc
She’s the modern version of Marabel Morgan and Phyllis Schlafly, the “submit to your husband and be secondary to everyone else” guru of the present day.
Nobody’s mentioning balls in vise grips other than you, which makes one wonder what you really feel about the men in your life.
The point being made here is that the misogynistic attitude ossified into the Masonic ritual doesn’t stop at the clubhouse door; the Masonic representatives in this thread have made their feelings about women abundantly clear. Now, is it just that misogynists gravitate toward the Masons, or is it the Masons that bring out the misogynist in the man?
In any case, despite the “It’ll never happen” blither, there are Masonic orders, practicing the full Masonic rite, that do admit women and always have. The fact that the Grand High PoobaLooba of Masonic WhumptyDiddle doesn’t officially recognize this doesn’t make one whit of difference, and the perceptive among us have taken note that the world has not yet come to an end as a result.
Have you even listened to her?
Also, if you feel so strongly about the Masons accepting women, then I assume that you also feel strongly about abolishing all women only clubs as well, right?
I shouldn’t have said abolish, I should have said, do you feel strongly about forcing all women’s clubs to accept men?
Well…yes.
But men and women are fundamentally different. It’s not like race where the differences are cultural and aethetic. There are biological differences. Mental and emotional differences. That holds true for 90% of the men and women out there.
In a free society, unless it is a business, government or educational institution, social organizations should be free to accept whoever they want.
Back in my fraternity days, our National headquarters was big on pushing through a “diversity” initiative. Screw that. I am not going to specifically target minorities or whoever just because people are uncomfortible with the “rich white kid frat guy” stereotype. The same rush (recruitment) program goes out to the entire school for everyone. If the guys in the house like you, you’re in. If not, oh well. Then again, with 8% total minority population, my college wasn’t that diverese to begin with.
Bingo: the idea of being in a boy’s club is just weird and icky to me. My maleness has very little to do with how I see myself, is about as relevant as the fact that I’ve got freckles.
I’ve done activities that are all-male: when I get together with folks for marathon computer-game sessions, there’s rarely a woman in sight. But I see that as a disadvantage, not an advantage, of such evenings: mixed-gender groups make me more comfortable. Hell, at my bachelor’s party, there were four guys and two women, my closest friends all (excluding, of course, my fiancee).
Daniel