I came across this article and read it out of curiosity... But I agree with every single word Jesse Lawson has said...
Three Things Every Man Should Know About Feminism
By Jesse Lawson
Jesse is the lead editor for Lawsonry.com, and likes to write about sociology, political and social psychology, and politics. He is married to Sami, the lead editor for the Sex & Gender column, and lives just south of Washington, D.C. Check him out on Twitter and Tumblr.
As a former infantryman, I used to work in an all male environment. Even after changing jobs to be an intelligence analyst, the majority of people in the Marine Corps that I’ve worked with have been male, and all of them have questioned my masculinity and worth because I have upheld a strong belief that feminism is essential to male prosperity. If asked to define Feminism, I would start by saying that feminism is different for a man and a woman because it impacts the primary genders in an entirely different way. In this article I will offer a male perspective on feminism by describing three things Feminism has taught me.
“Humanity is male,” Simone de Beauvoir once wrote 1, “and man defines woman not in herself but as relative to him; she is not regarded as an autonomous being.” When I first met my wife I never imagined that I would come to consider myself as an over-privileged, ignorant, and generally naïve person who has internalized society’s definition of my gender’s role, but through her patient explanation of the gravity of my seemingly harmless comments about women, my commitment to understand why I believed the things I did, and the amazing intellectual treasures that I have discovered when I opened up my heart and mind to feminist theory, I’ve found that feminism is essential to a man’s psychological health.
Before I elaborate on the three things every man should know about feminism, let me start by saying that I’ve written extensively on the topic, both as a student of sociology and a husband to the most insightful women I have ever met, and I’ve learned more about myself and male privilege than I have about anything else. For the common man who would otherwise consider feminism – and anything socially regarded as feminine, for that matter – to be a threat to his individuality and character, the process of self-discovery that the study of feminism ultimately becomes is both intimidating and, at times, painful. When I first started to read about feminism I was immediately threatened by the idea that I was somehow contributing to a one-sided, global struggle between two social institutions that had similar membership numbers but overwhelmingly different social capital. How could I, a person who is devoted to pacifism, academia, and conflict resolution, be pulling the trigger in a battle that I would never elect to fight in the first place?
And that’s the first thing feminism taught me: I was born into a society that considers me more intelligent, stronger, and more capable at anything I do purely because I have a penis and identify as a heterosexual male. This phenomenon has no discernable starting point, either. We can’t point to a time in history when women were considered equal to men, nor can we point to when female submission became the norm because “it lacks the contingent or incidental nature of historical facts.” 2 Even in cases where women can be proven to be more dominant – or at least not as handicapped by their gender as stereotypes often describe them as 3 – cultural stereotypes prevail in the formation and perpetuation of attitudes that socially subjugate literally 50% of the world’s population. “Woman has always been man’s dependent, if not his slave; the two sexes have never shared the world in equality.” 4
I grew up in a household with a father who constantly talked down to my mother, who, for as long as I can remember, has gone through every stage of alcoholism and denial that I can possibly think of. For the most part, the conversations between them tended to place blame on my mother for the verbal and physical abuse my sister and I were witness to, usually culminating in my father taking us away in a car ride to go find my mother (who would be passed out behind a bar, in a gutter, or who knows where) and him yelling at us about how our mother was a piece-of-shit bitch who needed to hit rock bottom or she’ll die alone in her own vomit with her ass hanging out because he didn’t give a fuck about her anymore (his words, not mine). I remember hiding away inside my mind and asking myself why my mom wouldn’t just stop drinking, why she had to do this all the time and put my dad in such a terrible mood that left me on edge for days at a time. Why, why, why was my mom always doing this to the family?
And that’s the second thing I’ve learned: Women are blamed and shamed, while men are excused and infused. My dad never did and never had to take any responsibility for his actions, even though he was half of the relationship. Whether my mom drank because she hated her life or because she wanted to escape, her depression that I never understood was most certainly the product of an unhealthy, abusive relationship with my dad. My mother’s outbursts and alcoholic episodes, to which verbal and physical violence was always the answer, were excuses for my father to reassert his dominance in the relationship and the family, and his verbal assaults infused the gender roles that society puts men in – that is, as the dominators of women.
R.W. Connell (2005) wrote that gender violence is used by the privileged group to sustain their dominance, and can manifest in the form of intimidation (like cat-calling, or verbal or physical harassment) or even literal physical violence. What’s interesting about how my father would rather verbally abuse my mother than ever consider that he was even partly responsible for their relationship’s climate is that his internalization of a socially dominant role illustrated that “violence is part of a system of domination, but is at the same time a measure of its imperfection. A thoroughly legitimate hierarchy [of domination] would have less need to intimidate.” 5 So is this type of control that is used to reassert authority the very reason why the system is flawed? Feminism thinks so.
Apart from the codependency that alcoholism usually comes with, there are social factors involved in why my mother never left my father. “Biological differences which no one can deny,” Bonnie Kreps (1972) wrote, “are used with great enthusiasm by those who wish to justify the status quo vis-à-vis women, by those to whom freedom for women seems a profound threat to something deep in themselves.” 6 Merely being a woman means that the immediate social environment no matter where you go puts enormous amounts of pressure on you to submit to male dominance, for “to have caught a man is proof of a woman’s desirability as a human being; to be without a man is a social and moral disgrace.” 7
Passivity is the essential female characteristic. If a woman has an opinion she had better keep it to herself, unless she wants to be cast off as just being cute, or not knowing what she’s talking about, or just needing some dick. She must be passive because her hormones control her, not the other way around. Since man is the dominator of women he has obviously mastered his own hormones and is in no way affected by feminine things, like jealously, guilt, or any type of emotional response other than aggression.
A woman must trim, wax, and shave, then put on shoes, a top, and do her hair. One day it’s sexy when you women eye shadow; the next, no one understands why women wear so much makeup. “I just want a t-shirt and jeans girl,” I’m sure you’ve heard. At a party all the guys will hoot and hollar at two girls to make out because it’s sexy, but if the women cheer on two guys to make out it’s gay and nasty. Women are socialized into a dependent role and it causes them to constantly be at the whims of the dominant male social class. “To please is to abdicate. That is the lesson the young girl learns.” 8
And if you succumb to this patriarchal definition of who you are, then you cannot possibly have an opinion on the affairs of women. If you are provided for because that is what your environment tells you to be and how it subordinates you, now you are spoiled, good-for-nothing, complain too much, and just need some dick. If you dress up because it makes you feel good, then you are shamed for sporting your body for others when you belong to whoever has decided that you are his to own. Dress down, though, and now something must be wrong, you must be terrible in bed, you’re just hiding your gross body, and you most definitely will not have sex with Mr. Stranger so you might as well go home and try again.
All the while, no one has the gall to ask of men, “Why do you place these standards on the opposite sex?” “Who are you to tell someone else what to be like?” “Why don’t you dress up and impress me!” A group of boys who taunt a woman walking by are “just boys being boys.” If they grab her or explicitly tell her what they would like to do to her, their behavior is excused because it’s just a joke, they’re just being guys, and they didn’t mean anything by it. They benefit from a two-fold system: They’re actions are excused because they didn’t mean anything by it/they were just joking, and their attitudes are infused because by dismissing their obvious display of power and privilege, they not only get to say whatever they want to women, they also get to control how women react to what they have said. But let the woman stand her ground and tell them no, let her verbally strike back and now we have a case of an insubordinate minority who must be put in place. A strong woman is a threat society’s definition of masculinity, because men are so afraid of this word “feminine” that they must dominate all things that have been deemed so. This means that a “real man” never likes shopping, he never shaves his body hair, he knows exactly what every girl needs (his penis), and knows that he has a duty to his fraternity to put this defiant woman in her place.
This example of the male norm leads me to the third thing that studying feminist theory has taught me: What is masculine and what is feminine are not absolute; They are defined by social institutions that profit, benefit, and rely on sexism as a means of social domination. I’m sure anyone can think of men who have adopted qualities that were at one point in time “strictly for the women.” Some examples include: Doing your hair, dressing in expensive, fancy clothes, makeup, and waxing and trimming. But while the integration of “feminine” activities is the first step in diffusing the boundary that separates what is for men and what is for women, the process by which men have adopted these once feminine things only increases the distance between them. Men don’t pluck their eyebrows, for example, they man-scape; this is because “plucking” is for girls, and adding man to the front of anything transforms it into an ultra masculine activity that a man can now take part in. This isn’t progress; this is reducing dissonance caused by one part of your brain saying that you want to do something because you think you’ll enjoy it, and another part of your brain (the part that contains your social character) that must make excuses for this activity because other men don’t do it.
It’s a worshipping of acceptance. The male gender role has no method of self-satisfaction and only draws pleasure from proving that he is a lifetime subscriber to this macho archetypal character. But is he to blame? Is the man who internalizes his dominant role any different than the woman who internalizes her submissive role? Not in terms of a developing social character. Our social character is essential to our psychological health, and by not subscribing to the social definitions of reality we are ostracizing ourselves from every cultural institution in our lives. But it is those people who have the courage and intelligence to stand up for themselves and reject whole-heartedly the gender suits that our world has tailored for us that are on the right path to any resemblance of true equality.
For the male (regardless of sexual orientation), defining your own version of man may ostracize you from other males, but you’ll always be welcomed by the 50% of the world who has been this way (that is, ostracized) since the beginning of our species. To reject the definition of masculine is undeniably a privilege that any man (including myself) has, and the first step in anyone’s transition away from social norms is to recognize and admit that you have the privilege to do so. Both sexes, on the other hand, ostracize women if they fail to subscribe to their gender roles. A girl who likes to have uncommitted sex – or even one who is a sex worker – is a whore, says society. Women view her rejection of chastity as a way to reaffirm their submission to patriarchal control and convince themselves that their own domination is rational because of the way other men disrespect this girl, and men are satisfied with this woman who will have no-strings-attached sex with them, but refuse to acknowledge that she can offer anything other than her vagina to the world.
Feminist theory can open your eyes or shut them tighter. If you are open to the idea that you have lived your entire life on a social throne and everything you say and do is an example of the privilege that your dominant gender has, then you have the ability to start tearing down these social norms and make new ones. It’s not self-flagellation; it’s admitting that all throughout history, sexism has been used to oppress women. Men will continue to see feminist theory as a threat because by feminists showing time and time again that females are equal in every intellectual and most physical respects to males, men are incessantly having to make excuses for their behavior and prove to themselves and other men that they are indeed everything that the world has told them to be.
Feminism is part of our lives and as soon as we can accept it, we can be free. Free from the constant battle to be somebody that we are not, free from the urge to be accepted by our peers, and free to be ourselves and do whatever we want, regardless of how much of a man we are.
Thank you Jesse Lawson. I could not have said it any better...
xx
Emma Bunnie
