Go Long

Masculinity and Feminism

I keep having roughly the same conversations with various people about masculinity and feminism, and so I thought that I’d try to lay out my position clearly so that some of these conversations could build upon rather than repeat each other. This all seems obvious and trivial to me, so maybe I just haven’t been expressing things clearly to this point.

A couple of initial wards:

First, when I talk about masculinity here I’m talking about mostly about straight, white masculinity, I’m going to use those terms interchangeably for brevity and apologize for any offense this might cause (if you want you can do a find a replace of “masculinity for “straight white masculinity”. If these points apply more broadly, I’m out of my depth discussing them.

Second, while I am claiming that men are harmed by their gender, I am not saying these harms are better or worse than other harms. I’m not sure that the harms which befall various genders can be compared very well, nor am I sure that this comparison is important or useful.

Third, I’m not intending to point fingers at anyone in particular for these kinds of harm. Nor do I seek to let anyone off the hook.

Finally, I don’t have a great grasp of the literature in this area; I took maybe five feminist theory courses in undergrad, and have read the one anthology I could find by men on masculinity. It could be that this is all very well discussed by wiser folks, in which case I’d like to read them.

On to the potatoes:

Sub Heading 1: Epistemic Fairness

This is my second favourite cognitive tool. What it mans is that you should decide on what it is to know a thing before you get attached to your knowledge of that thing. So if you’re determining whether vitamin D prevents cancer, you make some judgement about what it is to know if vitamin D prevents cancer before you start the investigation. If you don’t do this then you might use the results of the investigation to justify an epistemic standpoint, which is circular. The basis for knowing something should be external to the thing that you’re trying to know.

The important implication of this is that once you’ve decided upon an epistemic threshold, the same threshold should be used for the various possibilities regardless whether you believe them or not. You should use the same knowledge threshold for “Vitamin D prevents cancer” as “Vitamin D doesn’t prevent cancer”. You shouldn’t require different levels of proof for a sentence and its negation.

This is a fantastic cognitive tool because we constantly ask for higher standards of proof for things which we don’t happen to believe. You might love health-care reform and use a set of empirical studies to support your position, but unleash a wave of criticism against the alternative study just because you don’t believe it. Very tricksy the mind.

I’m not sure if we have agreed on an epistemic threshold for an understanding of gender. But at the very least an individual’s experience of their own gender is a tremendously important part of the picture. It’s ridiculous to try to understand femininity without taking the experience of individual women seriously, and the same is true about most other groups whose gender is analyzed. You wouldn’t talk about transexuality without talking to some trans people, and you wouldn't talk about black feminism without referring to the experience of black women. Part of this is because you want the methods of criticism to not be oppressive themselves, but just as important is that you’ll tend to get the wrong answer if you don’t tie things back to experience.

I think (and this is not necessarily implied by the above) we should be epistemically fair about masculinity. If we’ve agreed that discussion about a given gender need to be rooted in the experience of that gender, then discussions of masculinity need to take seriously the experience of men. Why should feminists care about understanding masculinity?

Sub Heading 2: The Relational Quality of Gender

Gender is a relational quality, like being to the left of something, or being white or non-white. The only meaning the terms have is relative to one another, and this implies that you can’t understand one without the other. Since feminists are interested in understanding femininity, they need to understand masculinity as well, and you can't do that without taking the experience of men seriously.

On a practical level this relational character is important because almosy every woman finds herself in an important relationship with a man, be that a brother, romantic partner or father, and to some degree wants to help this other person to flourish. The same thing is true of men of course, but the relationship is often a kind of one-sided nurturing. What men want and need to flourish will affect the lives of women even in the absence of hard gender oppression. We don’t want to strip this kind of nurturing from human relationships, and so what one person genuinely wants and needs to be happy will inevitably affect all the other people around them. To change the character of a relationship of care, you need a change in consciousness on the part of both parties.

Typically when I talk about this, I’m talking to feminists, and so I seem to automatically express this project in terms that I think they care about (the oppression of women). It’s worth remembering though, that the harms done to men by their gender are very real. For example:

- Currently we subject large numbers of unwilling baby boys to unanaesthetized cosmetic surgery to make their genitals conform to religious or social norms.

- Masculinity plays a huge role in criminal activity, conviction and sentencing. Men are not, by nature, cruel and violent beings anymore than women are by nature kind and caring. The fact that men are sent to prisons to be tortured, raped and killed in huge numbers because they are men should concern people worried about gender violence.

- Men spend most of their lives being trained not to feel things. We learn not to feel things for other people, for ourselves, for our friends, partners and families.

- In general, I don’t think anyone really wants to be an oppressive force in society, which men undeniably are. Again, the fact that we are this thing is not some artefact of nature; it goes with the gender and is itself a kind of harm.

Before leveling criticism against the above list, do two things: first, remember that I am not attempting to weigh these harms against any other harm. The fact that these harms exist should be enough to make them worth considering. Second, imagine if the subject of the above harms were a woman. Would you call it harm? Would it be due to gender? How would you respond to someone saying “that’s just because they have more testosterone in their blood”?

Sub Heading 3: So what’s the problem?

The problem is that we lack the tools to understand these harms. When a man is date-raped, he thinks that arousal implies consent. When somebody tells him that to succeed in love and life he needs to more perfectly embody his gender norms, he lacks the framework to object. The chief content of masculinity is the idea that we haven’t been and can’t really be harmed. We’re kind of trapped between two areas of criticism. On the one side you have the idiocy of Maxim magazine, and on the other you have the feminist establishment. I hope that everyone reading this understands on an intuitive level why lad mags aren’t a good forum for analyzing gender, so I’ll only discuss the latter.

The basic problem with feminist theories of masculinity as I understand it is that it doesn’t take straight masculinity as a real object of study. Most of the writing on the subject is done by and for other groups. The simple test of this is epistemic fairness. Are feminists learning about masculinity in ways which they would find appropriate if they were trying to learn about some other group? If not, what’s the good reason? Why do men in feminist theory classes typically adopt a stance of antagonism or relentless apology?

It’s important that this discussion and deconstruction take place in a feminist context for two reasons. First, that’s where all the knowledge is. While the content of masculinity may be extremely different from the content of other genders, the methods by which it’s learned and enforced are quite similar. Boys learn about their gender through the same media, and often in the same manner as girls and trans people. Feminists have done a huge amount of work figuring out these processes, and it would be a shame to re-invent the wheel. Second, and more importantly, gender is relational; you can’t understand masculinity without looking at how it relates to the rest of the world. A huge part of being a straight white man in our society is oppressing everyone else and we need to look at that. We won’t, any of us, be able to figure it out alone.