Men and Feminism

Greg Bortnichak is a twenty-three-year-old musician who plays in an experimental punk band. Like Brandon, Greg is a feminist, too. Being a male feminist is challenging, Greg explains, because staying true to ideals about equality and justice means he has to consciously pay attention to the way he behaves. Greg first started thinking about gender justice when he was a teenager growing up in what he describes as a "homogeneous New Jersey town." Feminism provided tools for Greg to start thinking critically about gender and race and his unearned privileges as a heterosexual white male. He tries in his everyday life to avoid doing things that oppress other people, and he attempts to confront oppression when he sees it around him. This means, for example, that Greg speaks up and refuses to be complicit when his Starbucks coworkers make racist jokes or talk in sexist ways about women.

Derrais Carter graduated from the University of Kansas, where he majored in sociology and African American studies. When Derrais started college, he fell in love with hip-hop and feminism. In fact, hip-hop is what led Derrais to feminist politics when he started thinking about rap lyrics and what he calls "the battlefield of identity." Being a feminist gave Derrais a platform for changing his life and how he understands his relations with others. "I began to see women as more than a video prop, extra, and eye candy," Derrais writes in his essay "This Is What a Feminist Looks Like." Instead he realized that women are highly misrepresented figures in society whom he had been "conditioned to mistreat and ignore." When Derrais taught a group of high school students one summer, the conversation led to culture, capitalism, and globalization. "By understanding feminism," Derrais says, "we were able to talk about how our 'needs' can exploit women in various other countries. The discussion made all of us think more about how we are all connected."

Still, being a male feminist is a rough road, Derrais says. People are full of race- and gender-based assumptions. "As a black male in college, I was often assumed to be on an athletic scholarship," he explains. "And when I wear my 'This Is What a Feminist Looks Like' T-shirt, people have accused me of trying to get laid." Others have said the same about his job at the campus women's center. "I used to get angry about it. Now I see these comments as mere ignorance and a failure to accept that there are men who truly care about women's issues."

Current feminist perspectives are challenging concepts of gender in fresh, new ways. More men are getting involved in feminist movements led by women. And there are plenty of examples of gender activism initiated by men, such as One in Four and Men Can Stop Rape, programs that work to prevent sexual assault. Colleges and universities are increasingly shifting from women's studies to programs that study gender and sexuality more broadly. At the same time, more guys are becoming interested in feminism. As Julie Bindel reports in the Guardian, increasing numbers of men are enrolling in courses with feminist content and perspectives.

This book is about men's engagement with feminism historically, about feminism's insights regarding masculinity and masculine privilege, and about men's involvement in feminism today. It's about what men can offer feminism and what feminism can offer men.

Feminists are committed to addressing problems that happen every day. Some of these issues take place behind the privacy of closed doors; others confront us in the public arena. These problems include things such as domestic violence, rape and sexual assault, racism, homophobia, unequal pay, job segregation, sexual objectification, restrictions on reproductive choices, and unattainable standards of gender, beauty, and behavior. In her article "Can Men Be the Allies of Feminism?" journalist Nighat Gandhi describes feminism as "a philosophy and a movement for ending all forms of oppression, including gender-based oppression."

On an individual level, feminism seeks to make room for all of us to explore who we are, separate from gender constraints. Too often, the social rules and regulations for men and women are restrictive. They don't really describe us well. Feminism questions rigid binary categories of masculinity and femininity, looks at the political consequences of assumptions about gender, and helps us search for better models and greater freedom.

Three core theoretical principles are especially important to understanding what feminism is about. These principles, which involve specific approaches to analyzing social and political issues, also point to why feminism isn't just a movement for women. Gender and power are crucial elements in all people's lives. First, feminists do not see biological sex as determining a person's identity. Second, feminism understands that the personal is political. Yet feminism is not only personal. It's more than a lifestyle issue or a fashion statement or a strategically placed political tattoo. This points to the third core principle: Feminism is a social and political movement that is concerned about the patterns of domination and the politics of gender, race, class, and sexual orientation.

"Sex" basically refers to our biology—what's between our legs when we're born. Gender refers to our social class as men and women or—when we don't fit into either of these categories—as transgender or genderqueer. Gender is something that is fluid and learned: We might come into this world with a penis or vagina, but we're not born wanting to fix things with a hammer or carry a purse. We learn gender-appropriate behavior as we go along—or we don't, and we might suffer for it. Gender is taught and reinforced through institutional arrangements that tell us how men and women "should" behave. In other words, gender is about the social construction of masculine, feminine, or genderqueer identity. Gender is not a binary selection but, rather, a continuum of possibilities.

Gender isn't something we're born with. It's something we perform. And we learn about doing gender through friends, school, religion, and family. We are taught to "do" our gender in many ways.

Our parents might tell us to toughen up when we go out for sports. If we're boys, our parents might not worry if we stay out late. If we're girls, we might get in trouble for getting angry. For birthday presents we might get Bratz dolls or skateboards, action figures or video games. Chances are that games with action-adventure names such as Rogue Trooper or Call of Duty are going to the boys. Even toys for the imagination and upping the smarts are often gender coded. LeapFrog, for example, is a toy that teaches kids vocabulary. Yet the cartridges have gender-based names such as "Disney Princess Stories" and "Thomas the Really Useful Engine." The recommended age for these toys is under ten.

Pop culture is another powerful way that gender is constructed, reinforced, and maintained. Pop culture is a potent institutional source of gender messages because we're exposed to it pretty much all day, every day. Every time we log on to the Internet, surf TV channels, watch YouTube clips, go to the movies, or pass a billboard on the side of the road, we are getting messages about masculinity and femininity, how to do it "correctly," and what happens if we don't.

Take Facebook, MySpace, myYearbook, or whatever the flavor of the day. Social networking sites are full of gender lessons. What this means is that some people might post pics to their sites flashing lots of cleavage. And some might not. It's not that all women show skin and no men ever do, but for the most part, who does it and who doesn't breaks down along masculine and feminine gender lines.

It's hard to find a MySpace photo of a guy sprawled across his bed in tiny lace panties, coyly licking his lips, but this type of image is ubiquitous among young women. These poses take their cues directly from mainstream pornography, which increasingly infuses our everyday lives and models for gender and relationships. We might want to pay attention to who's wailing the heavy metal and who's uploading sloshy love songs to their sites. Are people using "boy" colors and "girl" colors for the backgrounds on their homepages? These sorts of everyday experiences help create and reinforce our gender—and our sexual—identities. Often we participate in this process without really thinking about it.

Even Internet spam is gendered, with proposals by women to send nude pics and offers to men for penile enhancement products that promise hardness, lasting power, and bigger size. These adjectives construct gendered ideas about masculinity as being strong, hard, and "built." Even what seem to be innocuous ads are actually loaded with gender cues. Take, for example, a 2008 Martha Stewart Living magazine ad for grilling spices. The photo shows a man standing over the barbecue with his arms raised high over his head in victory, while the ad copy reads: "Master the Flame. Master the Flavor." Messages such as these create images of the male body as functional, triumphant, in charge. Not that there's anything inherently wrong with these qualities. But because we are so relentlessly bombarded by this limited vision of masculinity through jokes, media, consumer products, and soupedup science that masks underlying politics, these gender messages start to seem normal or "just the way things are." Sometimes we hardly even notice the process, and gender messages become naturalized. In other words, we see gendered messages so often that what are in fact constructed ideologies come to seem natural or essential. Feminism provides critical tools and analytical frameworks that help us notice and that make visible the coded metaphors of gender and sexuality.

With all the pressures of early and ongoing gender socialization, it's no wonder that by the time we're grown up, most nurses, strippers, and kindergarten teachers are still women and most politicians, professors, and firefighters are still men; most stay-at-home parents are women and most CEOs are men; most people with eating disorders are women and most people who use performance-enhancing drugs are men. Gender expectations and assumptions affect all of us—not just women. Fortunately, it looks as if change is on the horizon. We're in the middle of some shifting times when it comes to gender roles and expectations of masculinity and femininity. For now, though, there's still much work to be done.

Another way to understand this concept is to ask questions such as who gets the goods and resources in society and who bears the burdens? Who sits in positions of power in Fortune 500 companies and who cleans the company offices? Who does the bulk of parenting and who gets paid more on the job? Who is sexually bought and who buys sexual access to bodies? Who is statistically more likely to experience domestic violence and who are the violent offenders? Who gets catcalled on the street? And while we're at it, we can ask who risks their lives in war. Who makes the decisions to go to war in the first place?

These questions point to complicated political and social issues that matter to each of us at the end of the day in deeply personal ways. When we're sitting at home and just want to chill, and we're wondering who's going to watch the kids, or when we're counting how much cash we have to make it until payday, we can look to feminism to help us critically assess the gendered aspects of these experiences.

Gender roles are shifting a bit. But across the board, men still earn about 25 percent more money than women (before we account for race). According to information collected by the U.S. Census Bureau, men spend 50 percent less time grocery shopping than women do. Although men are doing more housework than they used to do, women still shoulder the bulk of it. Diane Swanbrow, of the University of Michigan Institute for Social Research, reports that these days American men do about sixteen hours of housework each week—an increase from the twelve hours a week they did in 1965, but much less than the twenty-seven hours women are clocking each week.

Violence is another gendered aspect of our personal lives. While men and boys make up about 10 percent of victims in all reported rape cases, men are the perpetrators in more than 90 percent of all sexual assaults and all violent crimes. According to the FBI and the U.S. Department of Justice, nearly 99 percent of the offenders in single-victim sexual-assault cases are male and these perpetrators are most likely to be white. Of course, this doesn't mean that more than 90 percent of all men are rapists. And we know that women can commit violent crime as well. What this does mean is that according to current evidence, the vast majority of violence against women (and other men) is perpetrated by men.

This reality connects directly back to the idea that the personal is political. Rape is something that happens to individual women, and it is incredibly personal. Because the risk of sexual assault is far greater for women than for men, this risk keeps many women fearful, restricting their access to some spaces. Rape is sometimes used as a threat or a menacing "joke" toward women who are perceived to be pushing for too much. Rape is something that individual men commit, yet it is supported on a societal level by a culture that encourages men to prove their worth through their physical strength and their sexual power.

During the past several centuries of the women's rights movement, feminism (whether or not it was called by that name at the time) gave women a tool to examine their daily lives to determine how society's sexism was affecting them on a personal level. Women and girls are still asking these questions—and men can, too. It matters who washes the dishes, who takes out the trash, who feels safe walking down the street, and who gets a raise at work. These are political issues. It's all about who gets what, when, and how. Or who doesn't.