Sometimes, I get lost in the safe and familiar tropes of academic rhetoric, to wit this from my closing paragraph in yesterday’s post:
…men who long to shed the straitjacket would do well to work alongside feminists in common cause to dismantle the institutions that sustain and promote rigid gender rules
To which Lisa Hickey, Tom Matlack’s colleague on the Good Men Project, responded:
that’s the point I want to make to you, Hugo, – and with Tom as well. Is it really that men need to band together to “dismantle institutions that sustain and promote rigid gender rules?†Man, THAT sounds hard. Or is it – instead – to have thoughtful conversations like these where people are allowed to say: “This is my view of the world. Right or wrong, this is what I see. Help me solve the problems we can solve today, here and now, the specific solvable problems that make life better for everyone.â€
Lisa’s right. Talk of “dismantling institutions” smacks of airy theorizing in the safe confines of the classroom. It does sound hard, it sounds mysterious, it sounds like too much damn work with too little viable payoff. She’s right that we need to have conversations, and that we need to make ourselves clear in language that connects with real people’s real lives.
One way we fight to give men a new freedom to live outside of the masculine straitjacket is to enlist men in the feminist cause. I know that to many, perhaps Tom and Lisa, that sounds like subordinating men’s legitimate needs to those of their sisters and wives. But it’s not a zero-sum game. The point that feminists have been making is that feminism is a vehicle for human liberation. Women who are empowered are women who have the freedom to say “no”. And women who have the freedom to say “no” are women whose “yes” can more fully be trusted. So many of our unreasonable demands upon men are linked to myths about women’s frailty and vulnerability; the less women require men for their protection, the more women are free to choose men for love and companionship. This doesn’t mean that feminism is a ticket for men to abandon responsibility, but it does mean that feminism offers men the opportunity to be more than a strong, silent meal ticket.
What does this look like in practice? In March 2008, I went to the Women, Action, and Media conference in Cambridge, Mass. I listened to a young pro-feminist man from Canada, Derek, ask a simple question to a group of panelists speaking on women in contemporary journalism. What, Derek wanted to know, could men do to confront the still very much extant “old boy’s network.” I wrote him an answer in the form of a blogpost: Refusing membership in the Boys’ Club: an answer to Derek about what feminist men can do. The post was about the tactics a young male in the corporate world could adopt to stay out of the “boy’s network”. Since Derek was a passionate young feminist, I didn’t need to “sell” him on the reasons why he should want to.
But the thing is, the road to men’s liberation also lies in refusing to play the familiar games. It is the Old Boys’ Network, after all, that fosters the culture of workaholism that makes it nearly impossible for fathers to both climb the corporate ladder and to be involved closely in the lives of their children. It is the Old Boys’ Network that suggests that loyalty to company and career needs to trump loyalty to family and friends. The Old Boys’ Networks — which exist in academic institutions as well as in the corporate and military worlds, as I continue to see over and over again — promise those who join a sense of cameraderie. You get a group of guys to drink with, compete with, talk about football with, complain (at least obliquely) about your wives and girlfriends with. But you rarely get real friends whom you can trust. The Old Boys’ Networks create a culture of competitiveness, quiet desperation, and silent, private addiction. They harm women by reinforcing the glass ceiling, and they harm their male members by codifying a stifling and rigid code of gender conformity.
Refusing to join the Old Boys’ Networks, wherever they are found, is just one example of where men’s liberation and the feminist cause intersect. By forming friendships with both men and women (yes, Virginia, men and women can be real friends without sexual attraction causing disruption), by building non-hierarchical allegiances with people who share one’s commitments to leading a balanced life, by, if nothing else, starting one conversation about the crushing binds of sexist expectations that limit us all — by doing any of this, we begin to transform everything.
This is not a zero-sum game, people. It’s not empty theorizing in the college seminar. This is real, practical stuff. I am a feminist ally, yes. I am a man who knows first-hand how trying to live up to a masculine ideal brought nothing but ruin and misery into my life and the lives of those who loved me. I do not hate my maleness, but I refuse to be confined by the rules that proscribe a whole set of possibilities to me merely because I have a penis and a prostate. Feminism wasn’t created to liberate me, but liberate me it has, and countless other men as well. When we shatter the glass ceiling for women, when we loose the straps on the masculine straitjacket so that men can be fully human, when we create a world where biology has damn all to do with destiny, then we are all free in the deepest and most meaningful sense. We are all on the same team.
This is everybody’s fight, regardless of color or class or creed. Or chromosome.
Tom, I’m struck that you see the opportunity to have real, loving relationships merely as “utility to others”.
Forest for trees, Hugo. Even your choice of subject and object in that sentence: “The less women require men for their protection, the more women are free to choose men for love and companionship,” highlights it. We’re not pets.
@Talos:
What “dismal view of men”?
“By forming friendships with both men and women (yes, Virginia, men and women can be real friends without sexual attraction causing disruption), by building non-hierarchical allegiances with people who share one’s commitments to leading a balanced life, by, if nothing else, starting one conversation about the crushing binds of sexist expectations that limit us all — by doing any of this, we begin to transform everything.”
Since when did “positive change” = “dismal”?
And, as far as “hate-filled” goes, you’re the one using phrases like “spreading this poison” and “moronic crap”–you’re full of hateful language, you hypocrite. It’s a credit to Hugo that he even allows your trolling in the comments.
(And I’d hazard a guess that the only “movements” you have started involved Tea Parties and/or bowels.)
Jeff, I’ve turned comment mod for everyone until the MRA trolls give up and go. I’m actually fond of some of them, as they’ve been spamming me for some six years now. Bless their little hate-addled hearts.
Feminism liberates everyone, Tom. I don’t know how else to say it. It accomplishes exactly the thing you and I both seem to want, which is liberating men from being seen solely in terms of their utility. It allows them to be fully human. I don’t want men to become more fully human just to benefit women. I want men to become more fully human to benefit men too. How else do you want me to say it?
I remember when a movement was a part of a symphony.
Water, oil, food and so on are zero-sum resources, what you give you lose and what you get someone else loses; so is time, which need not be wasted on trolls. But knowledge and respect are not limited like that; what you give out you don’t lose. That’s why the destruction of limiting gender roles/myths will benefit everyone.
Hugo, I don’t think that there are many better ways to say it now in terms of specifics. That’s a critique of our current ability to conceptualize opportunities and alternatives for men in general, not of your specific failure to offer them.
The most that I’ve seen as to where we’re going and what’s going to be available for us is that we’ll be spending more time taking care of the kids (assuming, of course, that we have any); and that women will be less afraid of us and connect with us on a level driven by something other than material need or fear. All of that is all well and good, but I don’t see it as enough for us in terms of open opportunities. I’ll concede that I don’t know really what would be enough.
In reference to your previous post about not blaming the wives or kids for our unhappiness, based on what I’ve seen around me, a lot of the older men who are fathers and husbands that I’ve seen have been as sustained by their families, emotionally and physically, for much longer and far more deeply than many would probably admit to themselves. I’ve seen a lot of “settling”, I have no other word for it, of men after 20 or 30 years into a family and career into what seems like maybe 20 or 30 years of life more than they otherwise might have had.
I realize that I’m rambling, but I think that the general unifying point is recognizing how externally driven we are. You criticize a “Martha complex” ladled on young women. Past a certain age, I think that we face something similar. Women have gotten a 40-year head start on haltingly discovering new opportunities and ways to live. We have not even really started.
Hey Hugo–you can go ahead and take down my comment if you’d like, since Talos’s comment is no longer there, and it just detracts from the actual discussion going on now…though I am proud of my “movement” line.
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