What To Do About the Men Left In Narrow Spaces?
I reject my “God-Given” “masculine” role as a provider and a protector but I’m aware of men’s institutional and systemic suffering. Where does that leave me?
I’m a proud progressive.
When women and men fight for the right to choose, I’m right there with them.
When the poor fight for the right to be paid a living minimum wage, I’m also right there with them.
When the uninsured risk bankruptcy to step up to a government that doesn’t do much to ensure that they have access to affordable healthcare, I’m marching alongside them.
I almost unilaterally oppose the rise of American Conservatism, Conservative Masculinism, Trumpism, Anti-Abortion movements, Race-based nationalism, and endemic racial discrimination.
In every way, I’m a standard run-of-the-mill modern progressive (some might even say leftist).
Except for one, I believe that men, as a group, experience systemic and institutional sexism that deserves to be recognized.
Am I Allowed to Say That?
Saying that line makes me viscerally cringe. Not because I don’t think it’s accurate, or because I’m trying to assuage my conscience while I make an attempt to argue something like: “Well actually, MRAs have a point”.
But because I’m nervous.
My viewpoints sit in an uncomfortable space on the left. On one hand, there are plenty of gender activists who are willing to admit that men do face some challenges throughout their lives, especially (and sometimes only) when it comes to mental health and resultant suicide rates. Many of these activists consider themselves to be “Fourth Wave” Feminists, fans of bell hooks, and enjoyers of the kinder more feminist-friendly version of the men’s movement on Reddit (r/MensLib).
There’s no denying that these are certainly real issues that men disproportionately face. For example, The suicide rate for men is nearly 4 times higher than that of women, yet men are less often diagnosed with depression because of years of institutional negligence, despite experiencing less traumatic events in their lives, women are more often diagnosed with PTSD than men and eating disorders, largely to believed to be non-existent in men, is both rising and underdiagnosed.
However, when discussing the causes of these issues, much of the conversation pivots to an amorphous concept of toxic, hegemonic, or traditional “masculinity” that causes men to suffer (no one is really sure of what any of those terms means and there’s fierce debate on whether it's even worth defining masculinity). Or that if men just went to therapy as much as women do or stop avoiding it, they wouldn’t kill themselves as often. (For the record, this notion is completely and utterly false and comes across as demeaning to the 91% percent of men who sought professional mental health counseling before losing their lives to suicide) <- There will likely be an article about this in the future.
The Depth of Men’s Issues
At this point, discussion about men’s issues typically stops. Mental health, suicide rates, and underdiagnosis of men’s mental health issues are seen as the extent of institutional/systemic sexism against men. Going further often results in running into a brick wall.
The reality is, men’s issues are deeper and way more vast than mental health.
- It includes discrimination in the justice system which is about 3x larger than the racial sentencing gap.
- It includes the fact that despite overwhelming evidence that IPV can and does happen to men (arguably at nearly the same rates as it happens to women), the first men’s shelter in the US was started in 2017.
- It includes the fact that male victims of IPV are often retraumatized while looking for social services to help them because they are either denied service or assumed to be perpetrators.
- It includes the fact that in the NCVS, nearly 40% of victims of sexual violence were men, and before some people say that most, if not all, of the perpetrators against men, are other men (as if that makes their victimization any less important — see gaslighting and victim-blaming), men more frequently report female perpetrators when it comes to the form of non-consensual sex that men are more likely to experience.
- Even in prison, staff perpetration of sexual violence against men is overwhelmingly female and Queer men are 2 to 3 times more likely to report abuse.
- Indigenous men (and men in general) are the most likely demographic group to be murdered in Canada while often being ignored in discussion of the causes/solutins to murder victimization of indigenous people.
- Men make up the majority of the homeless in the US and are often stereotyped as being dangerous and blameworthy, especially by conservatives and especially if the homeless are black.
There’s much much much more to talk about when it comes to male victimization and I’ve only given a taste to highlight to frustrating oversimplification of men’s issues.
In future articles, I plan to dive a bit deeper into each one of these points and more specific and subtle issues with how we perceive and understand male suffering.
No, Caring About Men Doesn’t Make You Anti-Feminist
Seems pretty obvious right?
In theory, yes, I think most people know that caring about the welfare of men doesn’t inherently make you anti-feminist.
However, in practice, caring about men past vague platitudes about mental health and eliminating toxic masculinity meets strong resistance, especially if women are perceived to be threatened (which, in my case, they never will be — Women’s welfare matters just as much as men’s).
A good example is advocating for more resources and awareness of IPV and sexual victimization against men and boys. This shouldn’t be controversial. Men experience IPV almost as frequently as women according to nearly 30 years of data and experience psychological damage as a result. Since the early 1980s, this has been recognized by famous feminist activists such as Erin Pizzey, but funding has been scant because of a lack of awareness of the problem.
This shouldn’t be controversial.
However, the backlash against this idea has been swift and fierce with multiple academics arguing that 1) any advocacy for male victims of IPV is part of an anti-feminist backlash that seeks to undermine female victims and 2) that men’s violence is the more serious social problem.
In the future, I’ll plan to write a more in-depth article on why this way of thinking is both fallacious, problematic, and built off of misrepresentation of other feminist academics and their reporting on female perpetrated violence.
I bolded the word feminist because something that needs to be clearly established is that self-identified feminist researchers are typically leading the charge in bringing awareness towards men’s issues even as other self-identified feminist researchers fight against them.
Yes, I criticize mainstream feminism quite often, but I often lean on feminist vocabulary, arguments, and research to highlight male suffering and I owe the movement quite a bit for creating a foundational framework to analyze male issues.
Now on to the other side of gender politics:
No, I’m Not A Conservative and Conservatives Won’t Like Me
Whenever I talk about men’s issues, in almost any context, I often get branded as a reactionary conservative.
And while this is completely and utterly incorrect, I can understand the faulty reasoning that causes people to associate being pro-male with being conservative.
On the right, there certainly has been a resurgence in a counter-the-counter-culture right-wing movement, especially when it comes to masculinity. So many on the right blame feminism, women-centered activism, the vague “left”, porn, abortion, secularism etc for male suffering. They seem to want a return to a more rugged more dangerous masculinity where men are capable of harm but only in service of “protecting” (read: robbing of agency) women and children.
In fact, one of the US’s far-right politicians: Josh Hawley, wants to take up the mantle of being the leader in a masculinity revival movement. He argues that the left has criticized traditional masculinity as being inherently problematic and that is hurting a generation of boys.
And while there is some truth in the “left’s” castigation of traditional masculine norms, I do not think that returning to a proud, tough, violent but only when necessary, an imaginary past version of masculinity will help the most vulnerable men, especially LGBTQIA+, BIPOC, and poor men.
These classes of men were and still are routinely hurt by “traditional” masculine norms such as lack of emotional vulnerability, the belief that their sexuality is inherently predatory (this is the case for both straight and gay men), violence, lack of fathers in their environment, inherent criminality, anger as singular emotional range, “pull yourself up by the bootstraps” (many men simply don’t have boots), etc.
Closing Words
Personally, I think that conservatives actually deal the most damage to men and boys because of how widespread and mainstream their opinions are among other men. Ideas of individualism, blaming people for being poor, harsh punishments towards men in the justice system, latent racism are some of the foundations for why men’s welfare has been ignored for so long. Much of their individualistic, religious, and rugged rhetoric is responsible for the lack of solidarity that men have and it prevents a strong, pro-male, left-wing movement from actually providing material benefits for men.
Here, I actually think feminists are doing a much better job because at least it’s partially a conversation, even if historically, mainstream feminist activism has largely ignored and demonized men in similar ways to conservatism.
So where do I lie? Am I on the left? Do I sympathize with the right? Can I still be pro-male but still be a feminist? I’m not sure, but I’m the most comfortable in any movement that genuinely cares about the equality of all identities, even the ones that we’ve ignored.
