(I’m %100 confident that much of this has been said before in various ways)
Michael Kimmel is one of the writers I’ve found so far on the issue of men and masculinity. I haven’t read very much of his stuff, but it mostly seems pretty good. There is one major flaw that I noticed which might serve to clarify what I think is missing from feminist theories of masculinity.
There’s a moment where Kimmel recounts a story in which he realizes that his gender is invisible in the same way as his race. Because being a man is the norm, he looked into the mirror and saw a person rather than seeing a man in the same way that he saw a person rather than a white person. To put this in SAT terms: Man is to Woman as White is to Non-White.
It’s not surprising that this theory has gained such prominence in discussions about gender. The academic environment in which feminist theory developed had a penchant for solidarity and totalizing explanations of things. It was desirable for a theory to explain the root cause of all oppression because that helped to maintain a political coalition and fit with the general style of the time. Additionally, from the perspective of the disadvantaged group, the two types of oppression might look similar when in fact the motivation and mechanics are entirely different. I think this view of gender is badly wrong.
Motivation
The difference between racial and gender oppression is that genocide is a coherent idea and gendercide is not. The core racist goal is to eliminate a racial group from your society whether it’s through eugenics, ghettoization or genocide. The ideal world for the racist is one where a particular racial group does not exist. There are certainly other racists motivations, for instance that of the antebellum South, but at the very least the genocidal impulse is coherent and widely prevalent in all the racist societies that I can think of. This is where the true invisibility of whiteness comes from. We structure our society to one degree or another to eliminate other races. We move people physically away from core areas, socially and economically into different strata in society, or in some cases (Jews, Italians, Irish) expand the definition of whiteness to include them.
This view is not coherent when it comes to gender. The fundamental mysogenic goal is more like complete possession and control of women, rather than extermination. Nobody envisions a mysogenic utopia which contains no women; it doesn’t make sense. This is a difference in kind between the two types of oppression. One is based on pushing a group away, the other based on trying to possess and control them. This difference is important because it dramatically changes how you view the mechanism of gender.
Mechanism
Gender is bidirectionally relational, while race is not. When straight men and women are constructing themselves, they are both trying to be what they think the other gender wants. Masculinity is defined and taught in relation to femininity and femininity is defined and taught in relation to masculinity. Whiteness on the other hand, is much more a norm. Lots of things are defined and taught in relation to whiteness, but whiteness isn’t really defined in terms of nanything else, and it’s unclear whether it’s taught at all. Again, that’s true invisibility, if you’re white you can kind of ignore the whole issue of race. Masculinity isn’t like that. I think even men who really don’t think or care about gender could tell you how they learned to be a man, and how their identity as a man is important.
The other basic feature of the gender relationship is that women affect and determine the content of masculinity. I’m a straight white man taller than 6’ 2”, but I never think about what short, gay, or non-white people want me to be. Like most men, however, I’ve spent most of my life worrying about what women want me to be. In North America at least, this is the basic mechanism by which masculinity is taught. We're taught that if we speak with authority, or go to war, or earn enough money, or burn our draft card we’ll be successful in love. Even when we're learning about masculinity from other men, our fathers or friends, the reason to adopt a particular trait is often "girls will like you better." While the content of masculinity changes (think eyebrow plucking) this mechanism of gender remains the same.
This is the bidirectional relationship. Men adopt a certain role because that’s what they think women want from them, and of course women do the same thing. Where it gets tricky is that a key component of masculinity is wanting particular kinds of things from women, and a key component of femininity is wanting particular kinds of things from men. When you adopt a gender you also adopt certain sets of desires and expectations about the other gender. It’s a chicken and an egg thing, I try to become what you want, which includes wanting something from you, and you do the same. This is the reason why you can’t focus on just one side of this relationship: the process of gender itself is bidirectional and genuine change can only take place if you relate to the whole process.
Feminist theory has only really related with one direction of this process, and in so doing has reinforced the basic character of masculinity. I think at this point men generally do have an understanding that what they want from women, and how they behave towards women can hurt them. Women and feminists generally do not have this understanding. In feminist environments and in the society at large, men are taught that we are ungendered, untouched by what the world wants from us. Women don’t understand themselves as having the power to hurt men, and men don’t have the tools to object to this process.
Practically speaking
I wanted to give a few examples of how this relates to a couple of traditional feminist projects:
1) Differential salaries: at least part of the picture of the gender salary gap has to do with the fact that men feel they are failures and will be unattractive if they don’t make a lot of money. This study isn’t perfect, but it’s at least some data. Obviously if making lots of money is a foundational part of group A’s identity, but not group B’s, you’d expect group A to earn more than group B even in the absence of hard discrimination. Women do generally, prefer richer men to poorer men.
2) Date rape: Straight people generally operate with a “Tell me when to stop” method of sexual communication and if nobody happens to say “stop” this turns into date rape. Women are involved in creating and furthering this communication standard.
3) Pick up artists: I don't know if you've all seen these people but they're maybe the clearest example of this kind of gender structuring among men. From a feminist perspective, the whole thing is very problematic, but it's only a degree difference from the way that straight people relate to eachother normally. A lot of the features that these guys are trying to cultivate (control, dominance etc) are the same traits that women (feminists included) often say they want in the men in their lives. Again, men didn't just invent this system on their own.
To reiterate something I started with last week: I am not trying to particularly blame women or let men off the hook. I think gender is a relational quality, which means everyone's a part of its creation.
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