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| https://www.manuncivilized.com/blog/all-men-are-real-men |
A Sense of Doubt blog post #2663 - Why All Men Should be Feminists (according to a male feminist)
The link under the photo above is very problematic. Reactionary male bullshit. I like the photo, but the blog post is pretty much reactionary in the same way that "all lives matter" or "blue lives matter" is reactionary bullshit in response to "Black Lives Matter" by people who do not fucking get it.
One of these days we will get to a place in which we can just focus on HUMAN rights as a universal concept, but until then, we need to keep focusing on the ways that so-called minority groups are oppressed and stop the hate, even from so-called "allies."
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| https://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/blogs/sumeet-keswani-blog/why-notallmen-is-part-of-the-feminist-movement-not-against-it/ |
Why #NotAllMen is part of the feminist movement, not against it
Last week, a Facebook friend shared this cartoon strip which emphatically defined male feminists like this:
Male Feminist: A male who has created an entire identity and culture around being a self-professed feminist ally, but who is utilizing the feminist premise to elevate himself above other males, center his own importance, and win the adulation of women.
Then it went on to caricaturize categories of male feminists, who, it said, were really misogynists and sexists (or worse) in their private lives — under the banner headline: ‘Our male feminist allies be like…”.
Not for one moment will I claim that the caricaturized men in that Facebook post do not exist; I’m sure they do. But there’s one major problem here. It defines the ‘Male Feminist’ as inevitably a devious little creep who exploits the label for debauchery. This is a generalized form of hatred that does nothing for gender equality (the original core tenet of feminism), but only denies the existence of any legitimate male allies of women. Simple quantifiers like ‘some’ or even ‘most’ (given how deeply embedded patriarchy is in society) would have sufficed, but I guess it was too inconvenient to include them in a sweeping definition.
So I dared to differ in the comments. My argument: fighting stereotypes with more stereotypes and hatred isn’t the solution, and that there are actual male feminists who do not deserve to be put under the umbrella definition. What followed was an angry rant by a ‘feminist’ who was offended that I had even dared to utter the words, ‘not all men.’ My comments were deemed part of a men’s counter-movement that was so ingeniously evil that it derailed the feminist movement with subtext! As entertaining as that sounds, it’s not true. Before I get to that, let’s look at some actual male feminists:
1) In October this year, TOI’s Rashmi Chouhan wrote about some sections of Delhi working towards a society in which women are educated, safe and empowered. It’s not much, but it’s a start. What is most constructive about this is that this change is being driven by groups of men who were being educated on the topic by CSR (Centre for Social Research).
2) Gender inequality prevails in all strata of society, from the impoverished, under-educated shanties of India to the average middle-income metro household and even the radiant red carpets of Hollywood. When Jennifer Lawrence lashed out against the industry’s unequal-pay practices in a viral essay for the Lenny newsletter earlier this year, her male co-star Bradley Cooper declared he would include his female colleagues in all future pay negotiations. “Usually you don’t talk about the financial stuff, you have people,” Cooper told a news agency. “But you know what? It’s time to start doing that.”
Let’s be honest, Bradley Cooper doesn’t need the ‘male feminist’ label in order to, as the joke puts it, ‘win the adulation of women’. I doubt he had any ulterior motives there.
3) Then there’s the menstrual man, Arunachalam Muruganantham, who got ostracized by his whole village and was abandoned by his wife and mother for pursuing an initiative to make cheap sanitary pads for rural women. He kept at it and succeeded.
I could go on and on, but you get the drift. There are male feminists (who may or may not use that term) bringing about change for women. The more the number of such men, the more successful an equality movement will be. And that is why positive terms like ‘male feminist’ must not be morphed into something evil. Those men who do exploit such a label deserve to be called out — as exceptions, not the norm, let alone the definition of the term. The #NotAllMen hashtag, which I found to have made recurrent appearances, does not serve to derail the feminism movement; it seeks to draw the line between feminism and misandry. Let’s be clear: feminism doesn’t call for hating all men; in fact, it seeks to include them in the reform process. (Remember Emma Watson’s #HeForShe?)
To extrapolate your experience of bad men on to every male who identifies as a feminist is not only unfair but that is what actually derails the movement. This is not about being sensitive to the emotions of a small subset (male feminists) within a privileged majority (men), but about the success of the movement itself. Gender equality can truly be achieved only when both sexes are actively on board and working towards it. In the same way that communal hatred can go away only when tolerance is instilled on both sides of a religious feud. And Islamophobia can be defeated only when all non-Muslims start taking a more liberal view of their Muslim peers without projecting the image of a few terrorists on everyone who wears a skullcap or grows a beard. (I’m looking at you, Dean Jones.)
As opposed to anti-patriarchy posts which point out deep-rooted flaws in our social fabric, posts like the one that triggered this blogpost only serve to feed misandry with cruel stereotypes strutting around as definitions. They dig the gulf deeper and wider between the two sexes while denying any progress that has actually been made in the feminism movement. Counterproductive, isn’t it?
When I pointed out the same, I was led to more ‘educational’ social media posts on how a generalized definition “should not hurt a real male ally”. If you go by that logic, you might as well defend insensitive memes on other harmful stereotypes — Muslims and terrorism, or African-Americans and crime — with that smug disclaimer attached: “If you are mentioned in this joke but do not fall under the mocking definition, you must not get hurt. If you do, feel free to leave.”
Classy, isn’t it?
Why All Men Should Be Feminists (According to a Male Feminist)
Gender equality is a responsibility for all men, argues blogger and consultant Robert Franken—yet men still seem to have a problem bearing that responsibility. The following was adapted from Franken’s speech at the 2018 iphiGENIA Gender Design Award ceremony in Cologne, Germany, on November 8, 2018.
I am an activist of privilege. I am a 45-year-old white, heterosexual, cisgender male living in Germany. You can’t be more privileged than I am in this world, even if you tried very, very hard. And this is the number one reason it took me so long to realize that there are quite a few things going terribly wrong in this privileged world of mine.
To all the guys out there like me, here’s a piece of advice for you: You don’t need to be ashamed of your privilege—but you need to be aware of it!
Have you ever thought about your privilege? Have you ever made up your mind about how your privilege constitutes your status? It sounds good: “I am privileged.” But it’s just your personal reality. Your routine. Your norm.
You might have heard of or participated in a diversity awareness exercise. Imagine a group of people forming a line, holding hands. They’re asked questions such as, “Do you think your gender is properly represented in the media?” or “Did you have access to a full school education?” If the answer to one question is “Yes,” then the participants are asked to take a step forward.
You can also add questions where a “no” as an answer would mean a step back. And you can use very tough and challenging questions. For instance: “Have you ever been a victim of sexual harassment?”
The goal of this exercise is, of course, to challenge privilege. It helps prove that the particular group is much more heterogeneous than you might think, and that privilege sometimes leads to discrimination—and vice versa.
When the exercise is over, you ask the people standing in the back how they’re feeling. Usually they don’t feel great, because they’re confronted once again with their personal discriminatory past and/or present.
The most interesting part of this exercise, however, is how the people in the front are feeling. The people who answer “Yes” to almost every single question. They are the privileged ones—but it doesn’t seem to feel particularly good.
In fact, the people who are standing in the front usually feel extremely weird. “Weird” as in uneasy or bad. And that’s because they have just been confronted with their privilege, maybe for the very first time ever in their whole life.
So what have they been missing?
There’s so much discrimination in the world of ours that it would take ages to even come close to a summary. On a night where we are celebrating great achievements in gender design, I feel it’s quite an obligation to confront ourselves with at least some facts that are driving inequalities.
According to the latest German government gender equality report, the average gender care gap in Germany is 52.4 percent. What does that mean? This means that, on average, women are doing 87 minutes more care work per day than men. Every day. The most dramatic care gap occurs at the age of 34: Women of that age are doing more than five hours of care work every day—men only two and a half hours. This represents a care gap of more than 100%!
And why at the age of 34? Well, this is when there are children in the household. It’s as simple as that. With our family structures and our strange out-of-date attribution to motherhood, women are still a kind of a default option when it comes down to childcare.
This has to change if we really want to tackle the gender pay gap and all the other financial imbalances that follow and that have dramatic consequences.
A smart mind once coined the term “homosocial reproduction” which basically means that people hire people who are resembling themselves rather than diving into diversity. It’s a diversity horror movie with a lot of sequels. There’s not much more progress in my nation’s politics, either: More men with the name Hans have become state secretary than women.
The backlashes are everywhere, and they seem to be getting worse. A sexual predator is president of the United States of America and a sexual offender will be in the Supreme Court until his death. The Hungarian prime minister has ended gender studies programs at public universities because the government does not “consider it acceptable for us to talk about socially-constructed genders, rather than biological sexes.” An Austrian female politician has been charged with libel for calling out a male harasser because the judge doubted her evidence. The terrible stories keep on coming, day by day. Are we fighting patriarchy’s final battle? Or is “patriarchy’s dividend” so attractive that a majority of people are working on upholding its systemic paradigms?
Let’s face it: Women will not be able to initiate a turnaround here by themselves. And they shouldn’t have to. The obstacles that come with working in a sexist culture are beyond any individual’s control. Or, as writer and lawyer Ephrat Livni has argued in a recent article for Quartz: “It’s the society we operate in that needs fixing, not how we ask for money, the tone of our voices, or our outfits.”
We need to stop fixing women. In order to find a collective answer to the question, “how do we want to live and work together in the future?”, we, as men, need to live up to our responsibilities.
To me, one thing is crystal clear: men have to get moving. We have to stand up and show sustainable solidarity in the fight to end patriarchy. This fight is for our own good. The sooner we realize this, the better for us all. As Canadian author Justine Musk writes, “The enemy of feminism isn’t men. It’s patriarchy, and patriarchy is not men. It is a system, and women can support the system of patriarchy just as men can support the fight for gender equality.”
If I had something to say, I would make the diversity awareness exercise I described a monthly routine, maybe with a changing set of questions. It is so utterly important to challenge our norms and biases on a regular basis. By doing so, we train ourselves to change our perspectives. To learn to walk in other people’s shoes. To create an understanding of systems and norms and privilege and discrimination. To develop an empathic approach to diversity and inclusion.
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- Bloggery committed by chris tower - 2206.03 - 10:10
- Days ago = 2527 days ago
- New note - On 1807.06, I ceased daily transmission of my Hey Mom feature after three years of daily conversations. I plan to continue Hey Mom posts at least twice per week but will continue to post the days since ("Days Ago") count on my blog each day. The blog entry numbering in the title has changed to reflect total Sense of Doubt posts since I began the blog on 0705.04, which include Hey Mom posts, Daily Bowie posts, and Sense of Doubt posts. Hey Mom posts will still be numbered sequentially. New Hey Mom posts will use the same format as all the other Hey Mom posts; all other posts will feature this format seen here.
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