Man Troubles

Making sense of the men's movement.

Cathy Young from the July 1994 issue

(Page 2 of 4)

Farrell's book is filled with startling challenges to the standard view of gender inequity. Why, he asks, do we hear about the clustering of women in low-paid jobs but not about the clustering of men in dirty, physically demanding, hazardous jobs, or about the fact that 94 percent of workplace fatalities are male? Why is it that the higher mortality rates of blacks compared to whites are seen as clear evidence of racial disadvantage but the higher mortality rates of men compared to women are overlooked? If women killed themselves four times as often as men, rather than the reverse, wouldn't we be hearing about it from NOW and from Pat Schroeder? How were men empowered by the fact that they were the ones who got killed in wars?

In short, Farrell wants us to see the sacrifices often involved in the male role, from risking one's life in battle to breaking one's back in a factory. (The traditional husband who wanted his wife at home also made himself work harder to support her and the kids.) According to this view, both sexes were equally enslaved by a division of labor that was historically necessary to ensure survival: Men provided and protected so that women could bear and nurse children--and, since the survival of the species required more females, males were more "disposable."

Technological progress, Farrell says, eliminated most of the need for the old division of labor, enabling people to seek personal fulfillment. But because men were seen as the powerful sex, the reexamination of gender roles focused solely on female disadvantage. So role restrictions that oppressed women were largely eliminated, but those affecting men, such as the male-only draft, remained.

This version of history is surely more accurate than, say, Marilyn French's The War Against Women (Summit, 1992), according to which the human male is always in search of ever more ingenious ways to abuse and degrade the human female. Traditional sexual arrangements always had elements of social contract, not merely subjugation.

And yet it is far too simplistic to say that men's dominance in the outside world was balanced by women's dominance in the family. "Doesn't Farrell understand that economic power outside the home translates into power within the home?" says feminist writer Wendy Kaminer. "Of course, if the man loves the woman more than the woman loves the man, she has a certain power, and that's a real power. But it's so difficult to generalize. We can find five relationships in which the woman has more power emotionally and five relationships in which the man does."

Even many of Farrell's admirers, such as Barbara Dority, have doubts about the lengths to which he takes the "equal oppression" argument--particularly when it is not limited to recent Western history. On the status of women in Islam, Farrell comments, "If women had to promise to provide for a man for a lifetime before he removed his veil and showed her his smile, would we think of this as a system of female privilege?" He forgets that men in Muslim societies generally have had the power not only to restrict their wives' movements, and in many cases to kill them, but also to divorce them at will.

"If we can make meaningful comparisons," says Ferrell Christensen, a philosophy professor at the University of Alberta in Canada and co-founder of MERGE, the Movement for the Establishment of Real Gender Equality, "I'm inclined to say that in this culture and in this century men and women have been pretty equal. I would not say that this is true historically and at all times." It is more accurate to say, he writes in the pamphlet The Other Side of Sexism, that women often received compensations for their subordinate state (such as greater protection) and that men's dominant role often carried a high price.

One of the key issues that animated earlier feminists, from Mary Wollstonecraft to Simone de Beauvoir, was that the human condition was seen as embodied in men, and the activities that defined what it meant to be human were defined as male. "It is [the] unique human capacity...to live one's life by purposes stretching into the future--to live not at the mercy of the world, but as builder and designer of that world--that is the distinction between animal and human behavior," wrote Betty Friedan in 1963. "[M]an has always searched for knowledge and truth." Friedan knew that this destiny was not an easy one, and she even suggested that "men may live longer...when women carry more of the burden of the battle with the world" (anticipating the men's movement's concern with the longevity gap). But she clearly felt that women were hurt more by being left out.

If masculists often seem oblivious to this historical male advantage, it is in part because participation in the human enterprise no longer ranks high on the feminist agenda. In most universities today, the above passages from The Feminine Mystique would be branded as conservative. "Battle with the world" reeks of militarism; to speak of the search for knowledge and truth is to accept the patriarchal model of knowledge as possession; to exalt the capacity for building and designing one's world is to glorify white male rape of the earth; to elevate humans above animals is specieist. We are now supposed to see male "separateness" rather than female dependency as the problem, and to scoff at "male" notions of unique genius rather than lament the absence of a female Shakespeare.

The irony is that when "male" civilization and its accomplishments are devalued, the notion of male privilege is much easier to question. If traditionally masculine qualities turn from virtues to defects, some men will say that gender oppression made them that way. And if individual liberty is declared to be a (white and bourgeois) male prejudice, the distinction between the burden of oppression and the burden of risk as the price to be paid for freedom will be blurred. Thus radical feminists undermine their own critique of patriarchy.

Similar contradictions can be observed within the men's movement. Many masculists seem to be saying simultaneously that the works of men have been a boon for humanity and should be admired and that the roles which enabled and sometimes pushed men to do those things were oppressive and bleak. Although Warren Farrell writes that the socialization of both sexes should combine the best of the "male" and "female" heritage, the overall sense one gets from The Myth of Male Power is that being expected to strive is a dismal fate ("Men are not human beings, they are human doings") and that to admire a man for his achievements is as sexist as it is to admire a woman for her large breasts.

Thus, although masculism challenges the politically correct view of women as an oppressed class, it often shares some key elements of P.C.: the "politics of identity," which eclipse the notion of a universal human condition; an antipathy to such Western values as rationality, competitiveness, and individual achievement; the tendency to view human experience as shaped primarily by restrictive social forces rather than individual will and action. Even Kammer, who generally urges both women and men to embrace self- reliance and optimism, echoes academic radicals with their theories of subtly enforced self-policing in liberal societies. He writes, "Men...are in the most maximum security prison of all, the prison that convinces its inmates that they are right where they want to be...and that if they ever begin to think otherwise, they must have a 'personal' problem."

Kammer says the prison metaphor is simply a dramatic way to make a valid point: Men often fail to see their problems as related to gender bias because they have been taught that they are the powerful sex. Yet the result rings uncannily similar to the radical feminist position caustically summed up by Christina Sommers in Who Stole Feminism (Simon & Schuster, 1994): "If...some women point out that they are not oppressed, they only confirm the existence of a system of oppression, for they 'show' how the system dupes women by socializing them to believe they are free, thereby keeping them docile and cooperative."

At its worst, masculism can sound like the ne plus ultra of political correctness: The pantheon of the oppressed is completed by the admission of straight white guys. (That leaves us with no oppressor, but an impersonal entity like "the sex/gender system" might do.) Men's advocates often rail against the victim mentality, but they are hardly immune to its temptations: High-school football is "male child abuse"; circumcision is socially sanctioned violence against infant boys comparable to female genital mutilation; women who walk around looking sexy yet remaining unavailable are abusing men; and anyway, men's higher mortality rates are unassailable proof of victimhood.

Barbara Dority has often joined men's groups in opposing pro-censorship feminists. "As long as we're talking simple egalitarianism, we're delighted to work together," she says. "But I refused to participate in anything in the feminist movement that went under the banner of victimhood, and I don't think the mantle of victimhood looks much better on men than on women." The tendency to adopt "the politics of victimization" also disturbs Asa Baber, who has written Playboy's "Men" column since 1982 and is a strong advocate of men's issues. "The focus on the male as victim," he says, "is simply going to deepen this culture of victimhood."