Yet
a lot of feminist rhetoric today does cross the line from attacks on
sexism into attacks on men, with a strong focus on personal behavior:
the way they talk, the way they approach relationships, even the way they sit on public transit.
Male faults are stated as sweeping condemnations; objecting to such
generalizations is taken as a sign of complicity. Meanwhile, similar
indictments of women would be considered grossly misogynistic.
This gender antagonism does nothing to advance the unfinished business
of equality. If anything, the fixation on men behaving badly is a
distraction from more fundamental issues, such as changes in the
workplace to promote work-life balance. What’s more, male-bashing not
only sours many men — and quite a few women — on feminism. It often
drives them into Internet subcultures where critiques of feminism mix
with hostility toward women.
***
To some extent, the challenge to men and male power has always been inherent in feminism, from the time the 1848 Seneca Falls Declaration of Sentiments catalogued
the grievances of “woman” against “man.” However, these grievances were
directed more at institutions than at individuals. In “The Feminine Mystique,”
which sparked the great feminist revival of the 1960s, Betty Friedan
saw men not as villains but as fellow victims burdened by societal
pressures and by the expectations of their wives, who depended on them
for both livelihood and identity.
That
began to change in the 1970s with the rise of radical feminism. This
movement, with its slogan, “The personal is political,” brought a wave
of female anger at men’s collective and individual transgressions.
Authors like Andrea Dworkin and Marilyn French depicted ordinary men as
patriarchy’s brutal foot soldiers.
This tendency has reached a troubling new peak, as radical feminist
theories that view modern Western civilization as a patriarchy have
migrated from academic and activist fringes into mainstream
conversation. One reason for this trend is social media, with its
instant amplification of personal narratives and its addiction to
outrage. We live in a time when jerky male attempts at cyber-flirting
can be collected on a blog
called Straight White Boys Texting (which carries a disclaimer that
prejudice against white males is not racist or sexist, since it is not
directed at the oppressed) and then deplored in an article titled “Dear Men: This Is Why Women Have Every Right To Be Disgusted With Us.”
Whatever the reasons for the current cycle of misandry — yes, that’s a word, derided but also adopted for ironic use
by many feminists — its existence is quite real. Consider, for example,
the number of neologisms that use “man” as a derogatory prefix and that
have entered everyday media language: “mansplaining,” “manspreading” and “manterrupting.” Are these primarily male behaviors that justify the gender-specific terms? Not necessarily: The study
that is cited as evidence of excessive male interruption of women
actually found that the most frequent interrupting is female-on-female
(“femterrupting”?).
Sitting with legs apart may be a guy thing, but there is plenty of visual documentation of women hogging extra space
on public transit with purses, shopping bags and feet on seats. As for
“mansplaining,” these days it seems to mean little more than a man
making an argument a woman dislikes. Slate correspondent Dahlia Lithwick
has admitted
using the term to “dismiss anything said by men” in debates about
Hillary Clinton. And the day after Clinton claimed the Democratic
presidential nomination, political analyst David Axelrod was slammed as a
“mansplainer”
on Twitter for his observation that it’s a measure of our country’s
“great progress” that “many younger women find the nomination of a woman
unremarkable.”
Men
who gripe about their ex-girlfriends and advise other men to avoid
relationships with women are generally relegated to the seedy underbelly
of the Internet — various forums and websites in the “manosphere,”
recently chronicled by Stephen Marche in the Guardian. Yet a leading
voice of the new feminist generation, British writer Laurie Penny, can
use her column in the New Statesman
to decry ex-boyfriends who “turned mean or walked away” and to urge
straight young women to stay single instead of “wasting years in
succession on lacklustre, unappreciative, boring child-men.”
Feminist commentary routinely puts the nastiest possible spin on male behavior and motives. Consider the backlash against the concept of the “friend zone,”
or being relegated to “friends-only” status when seeking a romantic
relationship — usually, though not exclusively, in reference to men
being “friend zoned” by women. Since the term has a clear negative
connotation, feminist critics say it reflects the assumption that a man
is owed sex as a reward for treating a woman well. Yet it’s at least as
likely that, as feminist writer Rachel Hills argued in a rare dissent in the Atlantic, the lament of the “friend zoned” is about “loneliness and romantic frustration,” not sexual entitlement.
Things
have gotten to a point where casual low-level male-bashing is a
constant white noise in the hip progressive online media. Take a recent piece on Broadly, the women’s section of Vice, titled, “Men Are Creepy, New Study Confirms” — promoted with a Vice Facebook post that said: “Are you a man? You’re probably a creep.” The actual study
found something very different: that both men and women overwhelmingly
think someone described as “creepy” is more likely to be male. If a
study had found that a negative trait was widely associated with women
(or gays or Muslims), surely this would have been reported as deplorable
stereotyping, not confirmation of reality.
Meanwhile,
men can get raked over the (virtual) coals for voicing even the mildest
unpopular opinion on something feminism-related. Just recently, YouTube
film reviewer James Rolfe, who goes by “Angry Video Game Nerd,” was roundly vilified as a misogynistic “man-baby” in social media and the online press after announcing
that he would not watch the female-led “Ghostbusters” remake because of
what he felt was its failure to acknowledge the original franchise.
***
This matters, and not just because it can make men less sympathetic to
the problems women face. At a time when we constantly hear that
womanpower is triumphant and “the end of men” — or at least of traditional manhood — is nigh, men face some real problems of their own. Women are now earning about 60 percent of college degrees; male college enrollment after high school has stalled at 61 percent since 1994, even as female enrollment has risen
from 63 percent to 71 percent. Predominantly male blue-collar jobs are
on the decline, and the rise of single motherhood has left many men
disconnected from family life. The old model of marriage and fatherhood
has been declared obsolete, but new ideals remain elusive.
Perhaps mocking and berating men is not the way to show that the
feminist revolution is about equality and that they have a stake in the
new game. The message that feminism can help men, too — by placing equal
value on their role as parents or by encouraging better mental health
care and reducing male suicide — is undercut by gender warriors like
Australian pundit Clementine Ford, whose “ironic misandry” often seems entirely non-ironic and who has angrily insisted that feminism stands only for women. Gibes about “male tears” — for instance, on a T-shirt sported by writer Jessica Valenti in a photo
taunting her detractors — seem particularly unfortunate if feminists
are serious about challenging the stereotype of the stoic,
pain-suppressing male. Dismissing concerns about wrongful accusations of
rape with a snarky “What about the menz”
is not a great way to show that women’s liberation does not infringe on
men’s civil rights. And telling men that their proper role in the
movement for gender equality is to listen to women and patiently endure anti-male slams is not the best way to win support.
Valenti and others argue
that man-hating cannot do any real damage because men have the power
and privilege. Few would deny the historical reality of male dominance.
But today, when men can lose their jobs because of sexist missteps and
be expelled from college over allegations of sexual misconduct, that’s a
blinkered view, particularly since the war on male sins can often
target individuals’ trivial transgressions. Take the media shaming
of former “Harry Potter” podcaster Benjamin Schoen, pilloried for some
mildly obnoxious tweets (and then an insufficiently gracious email
apology) to a woman who had blocked him on Facebook after an attempt at
flirting. While sexist verbal abuse toward women online is widely
deplored, there is little sympathy for men who are attacked as
misogynists, mocked as “man-babies” or “angry virgins,” or even smeared as sexual predators in Internet disputes.
We are headed into an election with what is likely to be a nearly unprecedented gender gap
among voters. To some extent, these numbers reflect policy differences.
Yet it is not too far-fetched to see the pro-Donald Trump sentiment as
fueled, at least in part, by a backlash against feminism. And while some
of this backlash may be of the old-fashioned “put women in their place”
variety, there is little doubt that for the younger generation, the
perception of feminism as extremist and anti-male plays a role, too.
This theme emerged in Conor Friedersdorf’s recent interview in the Atlantic
with a Trump supporter, a college-educated, 22-year-old resident of San
Francisco who considers himself a feminist and expects his career to
take a back seat to that of his higher-earning fiancee — but who also
complains about being “shamed” as a white man and voices concern about
false accusations of rape.
As this campaign shows, our fractured culture is badly in need of
healing — from the gender wars as well as other divisions. To be a part
of this healing, feminism must include men, not just as supportive
allies but as partners, with an equal voice and equal humanity.
