Feminism and Men

Nikki van der Gaag

• Publisher: Zed Books
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781780329147
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Feminism & Feminist Theory
• Index: Social Sciences

Feminism has changed the world; it is radically reshaping women's lives. But what about men? They still hold most of the power in the economy, in government, in religions, in the media and often in the family too. At the same time, many men are questioning traditional views about what it means to be a man. Others resent the gains women have made and want to turn back the clock. Nikki van der Gaag asks the question: how might feminism improve the lives of men as well as women? And is there a place for men in the feminist story?

1 | INTRODUCTION

Time to change: men and feminism

‘Women are strong, bold, and brave, but men and boys also have a big role to play in ending gender inequality. … It’s time to influence change in society.’ (Phumzile Mlambo-Ngcuka, United Nations under-secretary-general, March 2014)¹

Phumzile Mlambo-Ngcuka’s open letter to men asking them to support women’s struggle for gender equality comes at just the right time.

For the last few decades, there have been fundamental changes to the way that many women all over the world live their lives. They have moved into paid work in unprecedented numbers. They have challenged sexism and discrimination and gender inequality and violence. In many countries, girls are not only going to school but doing as well as or better than boys and young men. A raft of new laws have been enacted at international and national level to protect women’s rights.

At the same time, social and economic inequalities have been growing, and together with increasing religious and cultural conservatism threaten to undermine many of the gains women have made. A recent United Nations report² notes that the progress made in the past twenty years towards reducing global poverty is at risk of being reversed because of a failure to combat widening inequality and strengthen women’s rights.

But some things have not changed. Men still hold the majority of positions of power. Men’s violence against women, which cuts across race, class and geography, shows no sign of decreasing. And women and girls in many countries continue to be seen as second-class citizens, especially if they are poor, or come from a black or minority ethnic group.

However, one of the consequences of the changes in women’s lives is that the traditional model of being a man – the strong leader and main provider of the household – is slowly beginning to be questioned, not just by the ‘bold and brave’ women invoked by Phumzile Mlambo-Ngcuka, but by some men as well. Men like Anthony, or Pascal, both of whom we meet later in this book. Anthony had to learn how to move beyond the belief that his wife Janine should do as she was told. And Pascal found that he was becoming a violent man just like his father and didn’t know what to do about it.

This growing group of men in many parts of the world don’t want to react as they see some other men do, with violence bred of frustration. They experience power over women, but they find that does not necessarily make them happy.

And while, in many countries, girls and women, despite many setbacks, continue to have an increasing number of choices about who they can be and how they can express themselves, men and boys generally have more restrictive models of what it means to be a man. This is partly because, as Todd Minerson, from the White Ribbon campaign³ of men opposed to violence against women, notes: ‘When you’re from the dominant group you don’t have that history of struggle and analysis that comes from the non-dominant group’s perspective. It’s not natural, or it’s not something taught. It’s not something that’s shared with us by our fathers.’⁴

As we will see later in this book, there are alternatives. Men too can change. When shown other ways of thinking and behaving, Anthony and Pascal were able to find a way of being that freed them up to be who they wanted to be – and which benefited the women in their lives as well.

There is also growing interest in the ways in which men can support gender equality, for example the recent campaign ‘He for She’ by UN Women, which asks men to come forward to say that they support women’s rights.⁵

But these changes are not straightforward. There are major differences between men like these who support feminism and gender equality, and those who have reacted by becoming part of a ‘men’s rights’ movement. These men feel that their own needs and voices are being ignored in the debates around gender equality – and that feminism is to blame. And they want to make those voices heard, and they are generally raging against women.

There is a resurgence of feminism in many parts of the world. But there are tensions among feminists, who feel that the movement of men for gender equality is taking away precious space and scarce resources from women’s rights activism.

This book explores these sometimes contradictory trends and ideas. It challenges women and men who share the same vision of gender equality to support the widening of the feminist revolution to include men more broadly, without losing the focus on women that remains at its heart.

Feminism and men for gender equality: together or apart?

Marisa Viana da Silva and Oswaldo Montoya Telleria both see themselves as part of this revolution. Marisa is part of the new young feminist wave that is sweeping the world, and Oswaldo one of the growing number of men who base themselves firmly in a feminist tradition in fighting for gender equality.

Marisa, from Brazil, can’t pinpoint exactly when she became a feminist. But she is clear that the seeds were sown at a young age: ‘I was aware that there were differences between men and women in my family – for example, my brothers had more freedom than my sisters and me. They were allowed to travel to villages near by to play football, but we were not. And my mum never learned to read or write so my dad was the one who owned our properties and took care of the finances.’

Marisa comes from a remote area of the Amazon. She didn’t go to school until she was eleven because there was no school where she lived. Then she moved to the city with her brother so that they could both be educated. They stayed with their married sister. Marisa worked hard and caught up with her peers within a year, while her brother struggled. But this didn’t make any difference to her life outside school:

It didn’t matter how smart I was, I still wasn’t allowed to play outside while my brother was – even though I would finish my homework and chores first. Then when we were fourteen and fifteen my sister went to the USA for three months and my brother became the one in charge. Following the rules that I was not allowed to be out, he used to lock me in the house after six while he went out. My sister said it was to keep me safe.

I think that this awareness of the difference between what boys and girls were allowed to do, and the sense of injustice emerging from that, was one of the reasons why today I call myself a feminist.⁶

Marisa now works in New York for the Young Feminist Activist programme of the Association of Women’s Rights in Development.⁷

Oswaldo Montoya Telleria, from Nicaragua, says his involvement in feminism came from working together with women for social change during the revolution:

The push for involving men came from feminist organizations. Our feminist colleagues would challenge us all the time. It was not naive support for men’s involvement, we had strong political discussions and debates. Some women were more reluctant [to involve men in feminist organizing]; others were more open and supportive. But no one is the owner of truth.

The work that we were doing [on gender equality] proved to women that there was a need [for men to be involved]. For example, as men, we were able to reach out to sectors of society that women could not so easily – the police, the military. Because of the long history of sexism in our country, some men started talking about gender equality and others started listening. We provided an alternative for men, proof that we were supporting women but that it was also in our own interest to change. You can continue being a man and embrace this feminist vision. And other men will see the change in you.⁸

Oswaldo is now the coordinator of the MenEngage network, a global alliance of NGOs and UN agencies that seeks to engage boys and men to achieve gender equality.⁹

Both Oswaldo and Marisa support women’s rights as part of an awareness of wider social injustices, but they come to it from their own personal experience – Marisa as the indigenous girl from a rural area who was treated differently from her brothers, and Oswaldo from his history in the struggle for justice and as a man in a feminist organization.

At present, feminism and the work of men for gender equality seem to be moving along separate tracks. This book will argue that they need to stop seeing themselves as parallel, or even competing, trends, and come together in order to effect real change.

And for this to happen, the key question to ask is: is there a place for men in the feminist revolution? And do men want to be part of it?

Why write this book?

My son George, aged about eight, was standing in our local supermarket when he suddenly asked me: ‘Mum, why are you obsessed with women’s rights?’ He had a strong role model in his father but he was also exploring what it meant to be male – and I realized that my writing and activism and feminism were mainly about women.

I had already been working on, and writing about, women’s rights for many years at that point. My feminism grew out of social activism as a young woman, and the realization in my own life that girls and boys were still treated, and expected to behave, differently. I wanted my daughter Rosa to have as many opportunities in life as my son.

But now George was exploring his place in this debate. He set me thinking about whether I might need a new perspective, one that was more inclusive of men and boys, not just on the periphery but as central to what gender equality was about. Having a son and a daughter gave me new perspectives on my own feminism, and what gender equality really meant.

His question remained with me in the following fifteen years as I undertook research projects with women and girls, and came across men and men’s groups who were struggling with their role in debates on gender equality.

I began to realize that other people were thinking about how to involve men in feminism. I started reading books on men and masculinities. I encountered boys and men in many countries who were answering my son’s unspoken question by working, slowly and painfully, on what it meant to be a man, learning what Australian pioneer R. W. Connell explained: that there was not one kind of ‘masculinity’, as so many people seemed to assume, but many forms of masculinities, which change through time and according to class, age, geography, race, sexual orientation and other factors.¹⁰

I met hundreds of women and girls too, who were still suffering at the hands of men and who were a long way from equality and who were often angry. Some felt threatened by men entering what they saw as a woman-only struggle. They wanted to protect the spaces and resources that had been won with such hard toil over many years. And many of my feminist friends were also suspicious of the motives of men who said they wanted to be involved in women’s rights. But there were others who believed that it was vital for men to be engaged in feminism in order for it to succeed.

Then there were the men who brusquely rejected any idea that there was more than one way of being a man. They clung firmly to traditional ideas of what it means to be a man, which we will explore further in the next chapter of this book.

Finally, there were many other men, perhaps even the majority, who continue to live within the power that patriarchy creates between them because of class, race and other factors, but whose experiences of that power are extremely contradictory. They may never even realize that these experiences of unequal power are about gender and about masculinities.

What this book brings to the debates

There have been many books written about feminism, some about masculinities, but only a few that bring feminism and men together. This book is not a history of the involvement of men in feminist or pro-feminist organizing, but rather a view from a particular moment in time that takes a global perspective, bringing together the feminist discourse with the movement of men for gender equality in a worldwide context.

Men’s role in the women’s movement and how they have been affected by it, both negatively and positively, was described in 1990 by British author Lynne Segal in Slow Motion: Changing Masculinities, Changing Men and by American journalist Susan Faludi in Stiffed: The Betrayal of the Modern Man in 1999. In 2003, bell hooks wrote The Will to Change: Men, Masculinities and Love. In 2012 Hanna Roisin wrote The End of Men and the Rise of Women.

There are also examinations and analyses of masculinities and how they are or are not changing, with R. W. Connell the pioneer, but also the International Encyclopedia of Men and Masculinities edited by Michael Flood, Judith Kegan Gardiner, Bob Pease and Keith Pringle.

There are fewer books that examine the issue from a non-Western perspective, the edited volume by Sandy Ruxton, Gender Equality and Men: Learning from Practice, being one, and Men and Development: Politicizing Masculinities, edited by Andrea Cornwall, Jerker Edström and Alan Grieg, another.

There are only a handful that look directly at men’s relationship to feminism, all from a Northern perspective. The earliest perhaps is Micha...

Table of contents

• Cover
• About the Author
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Figures
• Acknowledgements
• 1 Introduction
• 2 Beyond the Binaries: Feminism and Men
• 3 Shifting Cultural and Social Attitudes
• 4 No Zero-Sum Game: Education and Health
• 5 Giving Up Power? Women, Men and Work
• 6 The Fatherhood Revolution?
• 7 Proving Their Manhood: Men and Violence
• 8 Conclusion: Becoming Connected
• Notes
• Selected reading
• Index