> 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 feel weird about men calling themselves feminists. I think we can be pro-feminist, but an identity-driven movement should belong to the identity. Liberals become the worst version of themselves when they start trying to advocate too hard for groups they don't belong to. Isn't it supposed to be bad if we start pushing a "white savior narrative"? I could easily see them one day attacking men for having a white knight narrative or something. And I don't think it's a coincidence that minorities started drifting away from Democrats at the same moment that Democrats were maximizing advocacy for minorities. I don't want to reinstate patriarchy or anything, I just think that if we are feminists then we are participating members in the movement, so we should be allowed to have opinions about it...aaaaand now we are being accused of mansplaining. No thanks.
I like competition, it encourages us to improve ourselves. But obviously if I don't win I will feel somewhat bad about it. If I become consumed by that feeling I could blame the competition itself for creating that feeling and leave, but then I give up the chance to have fun and improve myself. You can enjoy the competition and become healthier if you learn to accept that you won't always win and see every failure as a chance to improve. In the same way, it isn't the fault of society or the patriarchy that society places expectations on us. It's just an inevitable result of living in a community. The expectations may change, but we will always have some kind of hierarchy and like people more if they are beautiful or funny or rich or manly or feminine or what have you. I think it is a really bad idea to tell people that someone else is responsible for your feelings. In that world, your happiness will always depend on the whims of strangers. I think this overlaps with subjects Haidt brings up in The Coddling Of The American Mind, though it had nothing to do with gender. My wife says that watching ads for jeans makes her feel fat. I don't think we can ban jean advertisements and everything else like it, people just have to learn to deal with these feelings in a way that's healthy.
Men and women both crave things from each other that are not only unrealistic, they will make us less happy if we get what we think we want. Men keep wanting younger women (probably for obvious reproductive reasons), but studies show that the larger the age gap in a relationship, the more unhappy the marriage will be over time. Women want men with high testosterone but also hate being in relationships with them for obvious reasons. Our desires are so rooted in outdated biological constructs, I think it's a bit pointless to spend too much time worrying or self-flagellating ourselves about it. Men can't be perfect. Women can't be perfect. Maybe by accepting the flaws in our own gender (again, without despair) we can better accept the flaws in each other.
I also just think that every toxic trait can be virtuous in moderation. Men should be tough, so should women. Men and women should both try to restrain their feelings, otherwise we end up burdening our fellow humans which causes them pain. It only becomes toxic when we take it too far and mock every hint of weakness. But we will never live in a world where everyone agrees on the exact line between where virtue ends and toxicity begins.
Still, I liked reading your perspective. Very thought provoking.
(Sorry, I got a bit sidetracked haha) I don't have time to fully tackle all the topics in the rest of your comment, but I think I agree with you on competition, craving unrealistic things, the virtues of toughness and restraint, and accepting flaws in ourselves and one another while trying to improve. Thanks for a thoughtful contribution, and I'm glad you liked the piece!
Feminism is an ideology. I believe the ideology is true. People who wanted to abolish slavery were abolitionists; those who believe in socialism or libertarianism are socialists or libertarians. And people who believe in feminism are feminists - that's it! I don't need to broadcast it as the first thing about myself. But to NOT call myself a feminist, when asked, would be to lie about what I believe.
I also don't see it as advocating exclusively for groups I don't belong to, as this post tries to explain. Feminism defends femininity, where it is present in any gender. It has insights that stand to benefit men tremendously. Men should be feminist for selfish reasons, too.
But in addition to the ideology, feminism is also a social movement of living, breathing people. And your comments fearing accusations of mansplaining, or being a white knight/savior, for merely *having opinions about things affecting you* reflect a real problem with the movement's discursive tactics, to me. I think this problem has greatly damaged feminism's image and branding in politically counterproductive ways that set back the project of men and women's mutual liberation. It's not that mansplaining and white savioring do not exist; but they exist in very specific contexts that are probably less than half of the times they've been used to shut up men for gently pushing back (or even, gasp, opening up about their feelings) on percieved excesses of ideas that directly affect them. Rhetoric about not "centering" men's is constantly used to silence and then ridicule us, by the same people wondering why we are either afraid to associate with the feminist label in any way, or drifting into the only online spaces that allow us to participate and express our frustrations.
I'm a Democrat who criticizes the fuck out of other democrats. I'm a small-L libertarian who criticizes the fuck out of other libertarians. And I have very little patience for feminists who tell me I'm not allowed to criticize any feminists because it "isn't about me." Men should earn trust, reciprocate empathy and show they're engaging in good faith - but patriarchy's hurt *me* too much for me to feel like I need to earn a seat at the table to even open my mouth about it. It's absurd for women to imagine we need their permission to speak up, and if you're looking for reasons why the movement is failing that's a good place to start.
That's a good point about feminism, you could be right about that one. I do think the different waves of feminism make it difficult because there isn't a single belief that is associated with it. Abolitionists wanted to abolish slavery, that's simple. You expect to see white people in the abolitionist movement, but if the "leader" of the civil rights movement was a white man...that would be weird right? But I concede that you have a point here, there have to be words to express the difference between a person who thinks women should play an equal role in society and those who think the role of protector and leader can only be a male role. Feminism is the best word for it. Today though, it seems like the default is to mostly believe in equality. So a person needs to define themselves as a patriarch or chauvinist to express that they DON'T believe those things.
I'm not sure that it makes sense to blame "patriarchy" as the reason men belittle each other for insufficient manliness. Women can hold every position of power in your community and men would still treat each other that way. Maybe that sounds nitpicky, but I'm frustrated at a lot of these conversations where words start to be used in so many different types of ways that differ from their original meaning that we lose the ability to even communicate ideas with each other. "Literally" is no longer a word that separates facts from metaphors, it is now just a word that provides emphasis. Everyone throws around the word "socialist" but no one knows if that means someone who wants the government to own the means of production, the abolishment of private property, or if it just means you want a higher minimum wage and slightly more workers rights. If I can't understand your meaning by what words you write, we will never be able to have a productive conversation. Sorry, that's just my little rant, I really think that the fragmentation of language from ideas is part of what's causing so much political turmoil.
Do you have a list of ideas about how to establish a masculine identity that isn't toxic? Or do you think we should abandon the idea of manliness altogether? I struggle with that a bit because it seems like men and women should be striving for the same virtues. But then would we start setting the same expectations? Because that doesn't really make sense given the biological differences driving how we think and behave. And we seem to crave gender identities, so trying to eliminate them seems like a fools errand. I was raised in a way that I think was balanced between promoting manly virtues without becoming toxic, but I've never tried to compile it into written form.
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?
Say you join someone at a table next to a giant tub of loose Lego and ask her, "Hey, whatcha building?" and she says, "An Imperial Star Destroyer," and you say, "Oh my God, I love Star Wars! I want to help," and she says, "Please do."
So you start handing her gray pieces, and sure, she uses some of them. But she's also using a lot of black and beige and brown pieces, which is - huh - weird. And she's starting from a rectangular base, which doesn't seem like at all the right shape.
And you say, "Hey, if you want to build an Imperial Star Destroyer, you're going to need to use gray pieces and make it destroyer-shaped."
And she says, "Of course I'm building an Imperial Star Destroyer, isn't that what I said I was doing?" and keeps right on building what looks more and more like the Haunted Mansion.
There's nothing wrong with building the Haunted Mansion! But it's not an Imperial Star Destroyer.
When do you stop helpfully pushing gray pieces at her? When do you stop trying to explain that Star Destroyers aren't mansion-shaped? When do you just... look at what she's building and believe that?
I think I see your point. The feminism I want to build is not the same as what the feminists I'm talking to want to build, so I should give it a rest and understand their movement for what it is. And you're right that in practice, my little Substack is not going to change shit about the feminist movement writ large.
But I think there's a moral appeal in my post that's lost in an analogy to legos. There's nothing wrong with building a Haunted Mansion - but there *is* something wrong, or at least hypocritical, about weaponizing gendered stigmas in the name of abolishing them. About mocking, trivializing, or leveraging the insecurities patriarchy inflicts on men in the ostensible effort to abolish patriarchy. About a feminism that claims to be for equality between men and women, but is actually about whatever is best for women.
Appeals to empathy, equality, and liberation from outdated social pressures are what gave feminism the moral high ground to begin with. It's what distinguished punching up from punching down. To betray those principles is not a stylistic or semantic difference, like building a house instead of a starship. It's to undercut the legitimacy of the whole project.
I can't change the priorities of the existing feminist movement - that train has left the station. But I can appeal to the underlying values of the people who support feminism, to encourage them to extend those values and empathize with men too. I can explain, to the many people wondering why men drifted right and why they feel threatened by feminism, how the movement has contributed to that sense of threat, even as it crosses its arms and plugs its ears to that reality. I don't ultimately care whether we call it feminism or meninism or something else - whether it's a starship or a mansion - so long as the empathy we practice is consistent, rather than selective.
I think I agree with you on that. When feminism was just demanding equal rights and wages that was one thing. But when they start talking a lot about the patriarchy and toxic masculinity and how men interact with women, then it's not just something we can cheer from the sidelines about. They can't impose their vision on us, it has to be collaborative. I guess I just never specifically thought of those things as "feminist", but I see now how Barbie wraps all those things together.
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).
> 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 feel weird about men calling themselves feminists. I think we can be pro-feminist, but an identity-driven movement should belong to the identity. Liberals become the worst version of themselves when they start trying to advocate too hard for groups they don't belong to. Isn't it supposed to be bad if we start pushing a "white savior narrative"? I could easily see them one day attacking men for having a white knight narrative or something. And I don't think it's a coincidence that minorities started drifting away from Democrats at the same moment that Democrats were maximizing advocacy for minorities. I don't want to reinstate patriarchy or anything, I just think that if we are feminists then we are participating members in the movement, so we should be allowed to have opinions about it...aaaaand now we are being accused of mansplaining. No thanks.
I like competition, it encourages us to improve ourselves. But obviously if I don't win I will feel somewhat bad about it. If I become consumed by that feeling I could blame the competition itself for creating that feeling and leave, but then I give up the chance to have fun and improve myself. You can enjoy the competition and become healthier if you learn to accept that you won't always win and see every failure as a chance to improve. In the same way, it isn't the fault of society or the patriarchy that society places expectations on us. It's just an inevitable result of living in a community. The expectations may change, but we will always have some kind of hierarchy and like people more if they are beautiful or funny or rich or manly or feminine or what have you. I think it is a really bad idea to tell people that someone else is responsible for your feelings. In that world, your happiness will always depend on the whims of strangers. I think this overlaps with subjects Haidt brings up in The Coddling Of The American Mind, though it had nothing to do with gender. My wife says that watching ads for jeans makes her feel fat. I don't think we can ban jean advertisements and everything else like it, people just have to learn to deal with these feelings in a way that's healthy.
Men and women both crave things from each other that are not only unrealistic, they will make us less happy if we get what we think we want. Men keep wanting younger women (probably for obvious reproductive reasons), but studies show that the larger the age gap in a relationship, the more unhappy the marriage will be over time. Women want men with high testosterone but also hate being in relationships with them for obvious reasons. Our desires are so rooted in outdated biological constructs, I think it's a bit pointless to spend too much time worrying or self-flagellating ourselves about it. Men can't be perfect. Women can't be perfect. Maybe by accepting the flaws in our own gender (again, without despair) we can better accept the flaws in each other.
I also just think that every toxic trait can be virtuous in moderation. Men should be tough, so should women. Men and women should both try to restrain their feelings, otherwise we end up burdening our fellow humans which causes them pain. It only becomes toxic when we take it too far and mock every hint of weakness. But we will never live in a world where everyone agrees on the exact line between where virtue ends and toxicity begins.
Still, I liked reading your perspective. Very thought provoking.
(Sorry, I got a bit sidetracked haha) I don't have time to fully tackle all the topics in the rest of your comment, but I think I agree with you on competition, craving unrealistic things, the virtues of toughness and restraint, and accepting flaws in ourselves and one another while trying to improve. Thanks for a thoughtful contribution, and I'm glad you liked the piece!
Feminism is an ideology. I believe the ideology is true. People who wanted to abolish slavery were abolitionists; those who believe in socialism or libertarianism are socialists or libertarians. And people who believe in feminism are feminists - that's it! I don't need to broadcast it as the first thing about myself. But to NOT call myself a feminist, when asked, would be to lie about what I believe.
I also don't see it as advocating exclusively for groups I don't belong to, as this post tries to explain. Feminism defends femininity, where it is present in any gender. It has insights that stand to benefit men tremendously. Men should be feminist for selfish reasons, too.
But in addition to the ideology, feminism is also a social movement of living, breathing people. And your comments fearing accusations of mansplaining, or being a white knight/savior, for merely *having opinions about things affecting you* reflect a real problem with the movement's discursive tactics, to me. I think this problem has greatly damaged feminism's image and branding in politically counterproductive ways that set back the project of men and women's mutual liberation. It's not that mansplaining and white savioring do not exist; but they exist in very specific contexts that are probably less than half of the times they've been used to shut up men for gently pushing back (or even, gasp, opening up about their feelings) on percieved excesses of ideas that directly affect them. Rhetoric about not "centering" men's is constantly used to silence and then ridicule us, by the same people wondering why we are either afraid to associate with the feminist label in any way, or drifting into the only online spaces that allow us to participate and express our frustrations.
I'm a Democrat who criticizes the fuck out of other democrats. I'm a small-L libertarian who criticizes the fuck out of other libertarians. And I have very little patience for feminists who tell me I'm not allowed to criticize any feminists because it "isn't about me." Men should earn trust, reciprocate empathy and show they're engaging in good faith - but patriarchy's hurt *me* too much for me to feel like I need to earn a seat at the table to even open my mouth about it. It's absurd for women to imagine we need their permission to speak up, and if you're looking for reasons why the movement is failing that's a good place to start.
That's a good point about feminism, you could be right about that one. I do think the different waves of feminism make it difficult because there isn't a single belief that is associated with it. Abolitionists wanted to abolish slavery, that's simple. You expect to see white people in the abolitionist movement, but if the "leader" of the civil rights movement was a white man...that would be weird right? But I concede that you have a point here, there have to be words to express the difference between a person who thinks women should play an equal role in society and those who think the role of protector and leader can only be a male role. Feminism is the best word for it. Today though, it seems like the default is to mostly believe in equality. So a person needs to define themselves as a patriarch or chauvinist to express that they DON'T believe those things.
I'm not sure that it makes sense to blame "patriarchy" as the reason men belittle each other for insufficient manliness. Women can hold every position of power in your community and men would still treat each other that way. Maybe that sounds nitpicky, but I'm frustrated at a lot of these conversations where words start to be used in so many different types of ways that differ from their original meaning that we lose the ability to even communicate ideas with each other. "Literally" is no longer a word that separates facts from metaphors, it is now just a word that provides emphasis. Everyone throws around the word "socialist" but no one knows if that means someone who wants the government to own the means of production, the abolishment of private property, or if it just means you want a higher minimum wage and slightly more workers rights. If I can't understand your meaning by what words you write, we will never be able to have a productive conversation. Sorry, that's just my little rant, I really think that the fragmentation of language from ideas is part of what's causing so much political turmoil.
Do you have a list of ideas about how to establish a masculine identity that isn't toxic? Or do you think we should abandon the idea of manliness altogether? I struggle with that a bit because it seems like men and women should be striving for the same virtues. But then would we start setting the same expectations? Because that doesn't really make sense given the biological differences driving how we think and behave. And we seem to crave gender identities, so trying to eliminate them seems like a fools errand. I was raised in a way that I think was balanced between promoting manly virtues without becoming toxic, but I've never tried to compile it into written form.
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?
Say you join someone at a table next to a giant tub of loose Lego and ask her, "Hey, whatcha building?" and she says, "An Imperial Star Destroyer," and you say, "Oh my God, I love Star Wars! I want to help," and she says, "Please do."
So you start handing her gray pieces, and sure, she uses some of them. But she's also using a lot of black and beige and brown pieces, which is - huh - weird. And she's starting from a rectangular base, which doesn't seem like at all the right shape.
And you say, "Hey, if you want to build an Imperial Star Destroyer, you're going to need to use gray pieces and make it destroyer-shaped."
And she says, "Of course I'm building an Imperial Star Destroyer, isn't that what I said I was doing?" and keeps right on building what looks more and more like the Haunted Mansion.
There's nothing wrong with building the Haunted Mansion! But it's not an Imperial Star Destroyer.
When do you stop helpfully pushing gray pieces at her? When do you stop trying to explain that Star Destroyers aren't mansion-shaped? When do you just... look at what she's building and believe that?
I think I see your point. The feminism I want to build is not the same as what the feminists I'm talking to want to build, so I should give it a rest and understand their movement for what it is. And you're right that in practice, my little Substack is not going to change shit about the feminist movement writ large.
But I think there's a moral appeal in my post that's lost in an analogy to legos. There's nothing wrong with building a Haunted Mansion - but there *is* something wrong, or at least hypocritical, about weaponizing gendered stigmas in the name of abolishing them. About mocking, trivializing, or leveraging the insecurities patriarchy inflicts on men in the ostensible effort to abolish patriarchy. About a feminism that claims to be for equality between men and women, but is actually about whatever is best for women.
Appeals to empathy, equality, and liberation from outdated social pressures are what gave feminism the moral high ground to begin with. It's what distinguished punching up from punching down. To betray those principles is not a stylistic or semantic difference, like building a house instead of a starship. It's to undercut the legitimacy of the whole project.
I can't change the priorities of the existing feminist movement - that train has left the station. But I can appeal to the underlying values of the people who support feminism, to encourage them to extend those values and empathize with men too. I can explain, to the many people wondering why men drifted right and why they feel threatened by feminism, how the movement has contributed to that sense of threat, even as it crosses its arms and plugs its ears to that reality. I don't ultimately care whether we call it feminism or meninism or something else - whether it's a starship or a mansion - so long as the empathy we practice is consistent, rather than selective.
I think I agree with you on that. When feminism was just demanding equal rights and wages that was one thing. But when they start talking a lot about the patriarchy and toxic masculinity and how men interact with women, then it's not just something we can cheer from the sidelines about. They can't impose their vision on us, it has to be collaborative. I guess I just never specifically thought of those things as "feminist", but I see now how Barbie wraps all those things together.
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).