Man Troubles

Making sense of the men's movement.

Cathy Young from the July 1994 issue

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An ex-Marine, Baber has written about the damaging effects of the "masculine mystique," but he bristles at Farrell's description of the soldier as "war slave." He believes that the men's movement, including "mythopoetic" groups, can play an important role in countering negative cultural messages about men. But he does not like to see the movement collude in attacks on traditional masculinity--"the trashing of things like courage and fortitude is just absurd," he says--or try to "get men into therapy." In a speech at the Chicago Men's Conference last February, Baber noted, "It turns out that the men of this culture have been told by both the men's and the women's movement that they are not OK."

Baber warns, too, that the strident, chip-on-the-shoulder, Us-vs.-Them mentality that has made much modern feminism a caricature of itself has a mirror image on the men's side. As an example, he cites the angry mail he got from some regular readers after a column that advised men to be aware of the ways in which women often feel uniquely vulnerable in public places.

Other men sympathetic to the movement share these concerns. Mike Arst, a former photographer and typesetter in Seattle who became involved in men's groups a decade ago, moderates the men's issues forum on the Fidonet electronic bulletin board. Many of the complaints aired on such networks are understandable. A common theme is the perception that women want to have it both ways: to be equal in the workplace but to be protected from rough talk; to have the same opportunity to work in trades that require stamina, yet to enjoy special protection from violence. But Arst finds himself put off by "angry men" in search of causes. He recalls the activist who tried to draw him into an anti-circumcision crusade, demanding, among other things, the right for "mutilated" men to sue the hospital for trauma 20 years later.

"I agree with much of what Warren Farrell says about men and power," says Arst, 43. "But if I think of the men of my father's generation, the bottom line for them was support: They worked their asses off to support their families. It was something of which they were proud, and rightly so; they were not in a gulag."

It is easy to poke fun at male victimism, a stance likely to be dismissed as misogynist by the left and unmanly by the right. Yet it is ultimately a male response to the "culture of complaint" in which, with major help from feminists, we are now enmeshed. If victimization is the way to gain status--"authenticity," as Arst puts it, or "innocence," as Shelby Steele has written--one can hardly blame men for figuring out what works and trying to claim their share of the moral high ground.

One reason that laughable tit-for-tat arguments about which sex was more oppressed 500 years ago continue is that many feminists still use the "centuries of oppression" as a stick to beat men. It is hard to argue with Farrell's remark that the perception of men as having all the power and women as powerless (which was never quite true, and is plainly ludicrous when applied to American women in the 1990s) makes us reluctant to question any expansion of female power. Increasingly, people are coming to see that here and now, biases against men are as harmful as biases against women (even Naomi Wolf teeters on the brink of this idea in her latest opus, Fire With Fire.

After all, feminism has not only displaced men from their traditional ground as the human norm but has often depicted them as less than human. While 19th-century notions of male superiority in intellect, creativity, and leadership are now taboo, Victorian views of female superiority in compassion, morals, and parental love are very much alive. Male putdowns of women are relegated to the lowbrow culture of Andrew Dice Clay; female putdowns of men ("What is the difference between bonds and men? Bonds mature.") are found on greeting cards and in the halls of Congress. Recently at the publishing house HarperCollins, a woman editor irked by a male colleague's behavior designed a "stamp out HarperCollins men" button (the male symbol and the letters "HC" in a red circle with a slash) that was spotted on quite a few female staffers.

Mike Arst speculates that most of the men drawn to the men's movement are reacting at least as much to male bashing as to a frustration with male roles. Some, like Warren Farrell and Ferrell Christensen, started out as champions of women's liberation but were repelled by the rise of anti-male feminism. Christensen says that he sought out men's groups such as the National Coalition of Free Men and Men's Rights Inc. because he was "more and more distressed at the hate movement that feminism was becoming."

The roles have changed as well as the images. One of Farrell's strongest points is that this century's social developments have reduced women's burdens far more than men's burdens. Childbirth became much safer and warfare became much deadlier. The notion that a husband owed protection to his wife outlasted the notion that a wife owed obedience to her husband. And since the advent of feminism, women have gained much greater role flexibility and much more choice between traditional and non-traditional lifestyles.

Accordingly, some activists see the "men's agenda" as a matter of truly equalizing the options available to both sexes. While young women today rarely see full-time homemaking as a viable long-term prospect (even if that is the way of life they would prefer), working part-time or taking a few years off to raise children is something many expect to do. Farrell's assertion that 90 percent of the men he has spoken to would like to do the same sounds a bit dubious. But even if it's only 33 percent, as a 1990 Time survey of college men showed, these men are likely to find that they have fewer opportunities than their female peers to exercise such a choice: For all the paeans to the new fatherhood, a great many people still look down on Mr. Moms.

"When [women] call and say, 'I have a family situation,' managers or employers think, 'Oh God, those women with their children,' but they think it comes with the territory," says Karen DeCrow, a feminist attorney in Syracuse, New York, and a former president of the National Organization for Women who works with men's activists on fatherhood and custody issues. "When men do it, they're considered somewhat weird, or not really interested in their jobs." Many masculists also complain that while women want equality in the "male" sphere of careers and achievement, they often want, at the same time, to preserve the superiority of motherhood.

This complaint has some validity. On a radio show I did with Jack Kammer, the host, Ann Devlin, chided us for our lack of outrage at the fact that women still earn less than men. When I suggested that the way to gain parity in the workplace was to encourage male participation in child rearing, Devlin huffily replied that I obviously didn't understand the "mystical bond" between mother and child that no other relationship could replicate.

In its attempt to change attitudes, the men's movement deals with some explosive issues, including false accusations of rape and alleged bias against men in the treatment of family violence. When men's activists insist that husband beating is as big a problem as wife beating, it seems a sure way to make most feminists see red. Even Wendy Kaminer, who is highly critical of the "woman as victim" party line, comments that "it's like saying the moon is made out of green cheese." But while the claim is undoubtedly exaggerated, a body of solid research--from the 1985 National Family Violence Survey sponsored by the National Institute for Mental Health to a number of studies conducted in communities and in marital therapy clinics--supports the view that female violence is a major part of the problem.

Most of the evidence indicates that spousal assault is usually mutual, initiated in equal numbers by men and women. (When only one partner is physically abusive, it is as often the woman as the man.) True, in those domestic violence cases in which one partner is completely controlled and terrorized by the other, most of the victims are female; but such cases make up a tiny percentage of abusive couples. And while women obviously are at far higher risk of bodily damage in domestic fights, up to 15 percent of the serious injuries are to men. Researchers such as Anson Shupe, chair of sociology and anthropology at Indiana University/Purdue University in Fort Wayne, Indiana, and co-author of The Violent Couple (Praeger, 1994), confirm that male victims of even severe violence by female partners encounter widespread bias if they try to get the authorities involved. This side of the story, men's advocates say, is ignored by the media and by government, which see domestic violence as synonymous with woman abuse.

Meanwhile, the outcry over battered women is increasingly leading to a situation in which men in some jurisdictions are virtually helpless against the flimsiest charges of abuse. This claim is made not just by men's advocates but by Massachusetts Bar Association President Elaine Epstein, who recently wrote in the bar association newsletter: "The recent media frenzy surrounding domestic violence has paralyzed us all ... The truth is that it has become impossible to effectively represent a man against whom any allegation of domestic violence has been made ... In many [divorce] cases, allegations of abuse are now used for tactical advantage."