> I want men to become feminists. I get why they don’t, though. Because almost every time I engage with feminist media, the thinking part of me has to convince the feeling part of me that I’m safe.
> This post is a long reflection on why that is, and what to do about it; on how to build a feminism that actually feels like it’s for men too, instead of just telling them so.
I get this desire. I really do. I don't share it though.
I want something that's either a little more, or a little different, and I'm not really sure which. I want a separate movement, that does its thing for men the way that feminism does its thing for women, and I want those two movements to be comfortably allied to each other. Obviously feminists can be their feminist selves while at times doing things that help me with my issues; I think if they can't, feminism has already failed. But I also don't think that feminism, the movement as a whole, can be itself while prioritizing my problems, or even putting those problems on the same level as the problems that women face. Because those problems, the ones that feminism exists to address, are real and serious and require dedicated work to fix. But they're also incomplete, as a list of problems facing humanity as a whole.
I want us to get to a place where we see that these aren't mutually exclusive. It's ok to pick particular problems and specialize in them - more than ok, it's our (nonexclusive, see also ants et al) superpower as a species; we've kind of started to understand that. I wish we could get a little further, and start to be ok with other people picking other problems to work on.
I totally get this perspective, I just see it as more of a semantic difference than a substantive disagreement. We both see two truths. We want to advocate both of them, to whichever portion of society doesn't see one or the other. Which we choose to amplify at which time will of course be context dependent, and yes, we can all specialize in the piece of the puzzle we see most clearly, or that our experiences best inform. But whether we mentally group them both under the same ideological label of "feminism" or separate them into distinct movements seems less important to me than the fact that both are true and ought to be amplified.
If feminism exists to empower women, men's struggles are external to it. If feminism exists to smash the patriarchy, men's struggles are part of it. But either way, men's struggles under patriarchy are real and deserve empathy, and media trivializing, mocking, or misrepresenting those struggles is problematic imo. And either way, we need to convince men currently hostile to feminism to be less hostile to it, which may be accelerated if we can show how it benefits them too. A singular movement for gender liberation - enabling both men and women to be more traditionally "feminine" without being stigmatized - seems like a more inclusive and uplifting vision to me than a separate movement, in part because the existing "men's rights" movements seem so toxically branded - but I'm open to suggestions on what else to call it. (r/MensLib is a decent community I've found for this).
On the one hand, this is fair. On the other hand, I am a pedant and a splitter! On the gripping hand, there's no real need to take over someone else's comment section to argue that my definitions are "the" best way to look at things, so I'll leave off with that.
I definitely agree that "men's rights", and almost all things associated with it, are incredibly toxic for reasons that are hard for me to discern. It is always good to hear about non-toxic zones for dealing with these sorts of problems; I just wish the signposting was better. It feels wrong to try to group what we could loosely call "men's lib" under the banner of feminism, though, because of the prioritization problem I was talking about. If feminism does make these things first-order priorities, then it feels like it's lost the plot on being "the movement that helps women". But if it doesn't, then overcoming sexism is a second order priority when the main victims are men. To me the natural solution is to build up an allied movement that does the "men's lib" stuff, and say that the two together are necessary to fully overcome sexism.
The ADL and the NAACP can coexist without major problems, so why can't we do something similar in this arena?
(And to be clear, I agree that we almost certainly agree on things with material impacts, but ADHD and/or The Thing has created in me an instinct to treat all feedback from others as necessarily *requiring* some sort of response, which I need to affirmatively overcome in order to let a conversation actually end.)
I really enjoyed this article, particularly the part where you rewrite America Ferrera’s speech for men. However, I disagree with you about how “The Patriarchy”. You seem to believe that the patriarchy is this bullying culture produced solely by men being around each other. But I think it is actually produced by men’s interactions with women. Isn’t the evolutionary goal of toughening up and beating your rivals ultimately to have greater success with women?
Studies show women prefer men with higher testosterone. But high T men are more likely to be aggressive, less likely to be sympathetic, and worse at maintaining friendships (low trust). Paradoxically, T decreases precipitously when men are in stable relationships with women. In fact we have data from china that shows that as the gender imbalance caused a mass increase of single men, crime increased, friendships floundered and men became more neurotic. Some even admitted to robbing stores just so they could have enough money to find a wife. I worry that as the marriage rate plummets in the US we will start seeing these same “toxic masculinity” trends only worsen, as men are forced to compete ever harder and men act like permanently T addled teenagers.
In short, Machismo is not produced by “the patriarchy” alone, but from the biological and social conditions of being single. Which I don’t think the barbie movie is helping.
The origins of patriarchy are complex and hotly debated. They likely have something to do with the sexual division of labor thousands of years ago, when men really did need to be strong and capable of violence to survive, and their power over women was much more bluntly, overtly physical than it is today. States emerged reflecting these power dynamics, which gave rise to social constructs and customs surrounding men and women's proper or natural roles. These were passed down over the centuries, and constantly amended in different contexts and cultures for wide-ranging reasons.
So I think you oversimplify to reduce the whole point of traditional male gender roles as having greater success with women. Remember that for much of human history, women had very little say over who they mated with in the first place; it wasn't their affections men had to woo, but other men we had to ward off. Remember this - I'll come back to it later.
I'm not well versed on the science of testosterone and female attraction. I suspect those findings may be pretty nuanced, as attraction is variable and multifaceted; and testosterone is not patriarchy, in any case. But I do agree that men are more likely to demonstrate toxic masculinity when they feel insecure about their ability to attract women (that's partially what Barbie was about). So intuitively, sure: any conditions making men’s competition for women tougher (like the one-child policy in China you described) could prompt more men to lash out in those ways, other things being equal. That’s part of why I argued, in this post, that mocking or intensifying those insecurities is counterproductive as a feminist strategy.
Still, I think it’s important to distinguish the Chinese situation from what’s driving falling marriage rates in the West today, since of course we had no one-child policy here. Again, there are many factors at play. But part of what’s driving the fall is that women’s economic liberation has flipped that ancient dynamic I said I’d come back to, so women can finally be more selective about what they value in a marriage partner. Women are increasingly vocal and explicit about what that is, in ways that have little to do with testosterone, and even less to do with the muscle-headed, patriarchal ideal of a man.
To fix falling marriage (or at least partnership) rates, I think we need to help men and women find relationships that work for both of them on their own terms. This may require a greater degree of sacrifice and reciprocal compromise than men have historically had to make (although also a greater degree than some radical feminists will achieve by centering women’s preferences in everything).
Have you just tapped into why certain demographic(s) are rabidly attacking our V.P. with memes that promulgate the old stereotype that only women who sleep with the bosses get ahead? Hmm?
> I want men to become feminists. I get why they don’t, though. Because almost every time I engage with feminist media, the thinking part of me has to convince the feeling part of me that I’m safe.
> This post is a long reflection on why that is, and what to do about it; on how to build a feminism that actually feels like it’s for men too, instead of just telling them so.
I get this desire. I really do. I don't share it though.
I want something that's either a little more, or a little different, and I'm not really sure which. I want a separate movement, that does its thing for men the way that feminism does its thing for women, and I want those two movements to be comfortably allied to each other. Obviously feminists can be their feminist selves while at times doing things that help me with my issues; I think if they can't, feminism has already failed. But I also don't think that feminism, the movement as a whole, can be itself while prioritizing my problems, or even putting those problems on the same level as the problems that women face. Because those problems, the ones that feminism exists to address, are real and serious and require dedicated work to fix. But they're also incomplete, as a list of problems facing humanity as a whole.
I want us to get to a place where we see that these aren't mutually exclusive. It's ok to pick particular problems and specialize in them - more than ok, it's our (nonexclusive, see also ants et al) superpower as a species; we've kind of started to understand that. I wish we could get a little further, and start to be ok with other people picking other problems to work on.
I totally get this perspective, I just see it as more of a semantic difference than a substantive disagreement. We both see two truths. We want to advocate both of them, to whichever portion of society doesn't see one or the other. Which we choose to amplify at which time will of course be context dependent, and yes, we can all specialize in the piece of the puzzle we see most clearly, or that our experiences best inform. But whether we mentally group them both under the same ideological label of "feminism" or separate them into distinct movements seems less important to me than the fact that both are true and ought to be amplified.
If feminism exists to empower women, men's struggles are external to it. If feminism exists to smash the patriarchy, men's struggles are part of it. But either way, men's struggles under patriarchy are real and deserve empathy, and media trivializing, mocking, or misrepresenting those struggles is problematic imo. And either way, we need to convince men currently hostile to feminism to be less hostile to it, which may be accelerated if we can show how it benefits them too. A singular movement for gender liberation - enabling both men and women to be more traditionally "feminine" without being stigmatized - seems like a more inclusive and uplifting vision to me than a separate movement, in part because the existing "men's rights" movements seem so toxically branded - but I'm open to suggestions on what else to call it. (r/MensLib is a decent community I've found for this).
On the one hand, this is fair. On the other hand, I am a pedant and a splitter! On the gripping hand, there's no real need to take over someone else's comment section to argue that my definitions are "the" best way to look at things, so I'll leave off with that.
I definitely agree that "men's rights", and almost all things associated with it, are incredibly toxic for reasons that are hard for me to discern. It is always good to hear about non-toxic zones for dealing with these sorts of problems; I just wish the signposting was better. It feels wrong to try to group what we could loosely call "men's lib" under the banner of feminism, though, because of the prioritization problem I was talking about. If feminism does make these things first-order priorities, then it feels like it's lost the plot on being "the movement that helps women". But if it doesn't, then overcoming sexism is a second order priority when the main victims are men. To me the natural solution is to build up an allied movement that does the "men's lib" stuff, and say that the two together are necessary to fully overcome sexism.
The ADL and the NAACP can coexist without major problems, so why can't we do something similar in this arena?
(And to be clear, I agree that we almost certainly agree on things with material impacts, but ADHD and/or The Thing has created in me an instinct to treat all feedback from others as necessarily *requiring* some sort of response, which I need to affirmatively overcome in order to let a conversation actually end.)
I really enjoyed this article, particularly the part where you rewrite America Ferrera’s speech for men. However, I disagree with you about how “The Patriarchy”. You seem to believe that the patriarchy is this bullying culture produced solely by men being around each other. But I think it is actually produced by men’s interactions with women. Isn’t the evolutionary goal of toughening up and beating your rivals ultimately to have greater success with women?
Studies show women prefer men with higher testosterone. But high T men are more likely to be aggressive, less likely to be sympathetic, and worse at maintaining friendships (low trust). Paradoxically, T decreases precipitously when men are in stable relationships with women. In fact we have data from china that shows that as the gender imbalance caused a mass increase of single men, crime increased, friendships floundered and men became more neurotic. Some even admitted to robbing stores just so they could have enough money to find a wife. I worry that as the marriage rate plummets in the US we will start seeing these same “toxic masculinity” trends only worsen, as men are forced to compete ever harder and men act like permanently T addled teenagers.
In short, Machismo is not produced by “the patriarchy” alone, but from the biological and social conditions of being single. Which I don’t think the barbie movie is helping.
The origins of patriarchy are complex and hotly debated. They likely have something to do with the sexual division of labor thousands of years ago, when men really did need to be strong and capable of violence to survive, and their power over women was much more bluntly, overtly physical than it is today. States emerged reflecting these power dynamics, which gave rise to social constructs and customs surrounding men and women's proper or natural roles. These were passed down over the centuries, and constantly amended in different contexts and cultures for wide-ranging reasons.
So I think you oversimplify to reduce the whole point of traditional male gender roles as having greater success with women. Remember that for much of human history, women had very little say over who they mated with in the first place; it wasn't their affections men had to woo, but other men we had to ward off. Remember this - I'll come back to it later.
I'm not well versed on the science of testosterone and female attraction. I suspect those findings may be pretty nuanced, as attraction is variable and multifaceted; and testosterone is not patriarchy, in any case. But I do agree that men are more likely to demonstrate toxic masculinity when they feel insecure about their ability to attract women (that's partially what Barbie was about). So intuitively, sure: any conditions making men’s competition for women tougher (like the one-child policy in China you described) could prompt more men to lash out in those ways, other things being equal. That’s part of why I argued, in this post, that mocking or intensifying those insecurities is counterproductive as a feminist strategy.
Still, I think it’s important to distinguish the Chinese situation from what’s driving falling marriage rates in the West today, since of course we had no one-child policy here. Again, there are many factors at play. But part of what’s driving the fall is that women’s economic liberation has flipped that ancient dynamic I said I’d come back to, so women can finally be more selective about what they value in a marriage partner. Women are increasingly vocal and explicit about what that is, in ways that have little to do with testosterone, and even less to do with the muscle-headed, patriarchal ideal of a man.
To fix falling marriage (or at least partnership) rates, I think we need to help men and women find relationships that work for both of them on their own terms. This may require a greater degree of sacrifice and reciprocal compromise than men have historically had to make (although also a greater degree than some radical feminists will achieve by centering women’s preferences in everything).
Have you just tapped into why certain demographic(s) are rabidly attacking our V.P. with memes that promulgate the old stereotype that only women who sleep with the bosses get ahead? Hmm?