“The media ignores stories about heroic men.1”
“It’s no longer okay for men to be men.”
“Men are portrayed as bumbling idiots, hyper-masculine ideals, or violent threats.”
“The medical industry ignores men’s health.”
“I’ve never considered a pro-male perspective before.”
“Men-only groups are perceived as sexist, regardless of whether they do anything sexist.”
“Men’s voices are being systematically silenced.”
“It’s all feminism’s fault.”
These are some of the more common complaints I’ve read by MRAs and other non-feminist men. My reaction to these types of comments, particularly the last two, is usually a resounding head-desk followed by a face-palm. After all, I can’t turn around without being confronted with men’s voices and men’s perspectives. Practically all of our politics are shaped by men’s perspectives and the majority of our media is shaped by men’s voices. Men’s voices are everywhere. But that reaction is, well, a bit reactionary.
So instead of head-desking and face-palming, I’m going to try something a little different. I’m going to try to figure out why these sentiments keep popping up in my conversations with non-feminist men. There are a whole lot of social expectations, norms and privileges going on in each of those complaints, but I’d like to focus on what they all have in common. I want to examine why these comments seem to be so common among MRAs and non-feminist men, regardless of the factual (or lack of factual) evidence for them. What is fuelling these sentiments?
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I’m going to switch gears here for a moment, but stay with me. A couple of days ago, I came across this article at Salon.com about the way western culture treats white as the default race and ethnicity. To summarise: it’s basically about how by conceiving of ourselves as the default, white people do not recognize that they have a racial or ethnic identity. The article suggests that this lack of awareness of white people’s ethnic identity actually leaves something of a hole in our conceptions of ourselves. I can certainly attest that I’ve never really had a sense of my own ethnicity and I’ve never really considered how my ethnicity is part of my identity. It hasn’t caused me much internal turmoil, though perhaps that’s largely due to the fact that I have so many other identities of which I am hyper-aware: woman, queer, student, ex-patriot, etc.
Our society doesn’t just have a default ethnicity. We’ve also conceived of a default sexual orientation (heterosexual), a default gender identity (cis), a default body type (thin), and more. In terms of gender, we are androcentric; we have deemed men and the masculine as the “neutral default,” while relegating women and the feminine to a separate, special, sub-category.2 This is true in the way women’s art is displayed in museums and the fact that “woman” is considered a character trait in television and movies, among a myriad of other ways in our society.3
As is probably pretty clear from the many links in the paragraph above, there is a large amount of writing about how androcentrism has affected women, and rightly so. Women get a pretty raw deal out of it, not the least of which is the inability for a woman to ever escape her gender. No matter what I do, I will always be a woman doing that thing, not a person doing that thing. What doesn’t get talked about as much, is how the androcentric nature of our society affects men.
It is with the concept of men-as-default in mind that I want to turn back to the quasi-quotes I brought up at the beginning of this post. We’ll take the complaint that the medical profession ignores men’s health. Well, it turns out that generally medicine considers male bodies to be the default, and thus it is women’s health that is often ignored except when it is separated along traditional gender lines (i.e. reproduction). So, perhaps when men say they feel as though men’s health is ignored, what they actually mean is that men’s health as distinct and separated from general heath and women’s health is ignored.
In television and movies, men are portrayed with much greater variation than women. However, it is true that when “man” is being portrayed as an identity, male characters generally fall into a few limited stereotypes. Men’s voices are far from silenced, but it is true that it’s rare to find men talking about being men. Pro-male perspectives are absolutely everywhere, but it’s less common to find pro-male perspectives defined as distinct from the mainstream perspective. Men are considered the default human, which is generally beneficial, except when men are trying to conceive of their identity as men.
The concept of toxic masculinity explains a lot of what’s wrong with modern masculinity, but what are men left with in terms of identity? What does it mean to be a man? How do we define what it means to be a man? What is a cis-man’s identity? How do we answer these questions without minimising women’s struggles?
I have no idea how to answer those questions. Well, that’s not entirely true. I think that the following from the Salon article applies to the issue of men’s identities and the gender default:
“In order for white suffering to have a voice, white people must realize the largest and most invisible way in which they benefit from their white privilege, and it’s the same thing that’s causing their frustration being The Default…In order to see a person you must see the truth of their pain. If you deny their pain, you refuse to see them. This is what makes black people invisible. And black invisibility is what makes white pain invisible to black people.”
In order for men to form positive, distinct identities as men they must first recognize how society has treated them as the default, and then reject that paradigm. Men cannot be the gender default and a separate, special category at the same time. Human is the default, and we are all human. We’re just slight variations within that category.
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There is a lot more to constructing masculine identities than what I’ve discussed, but I think that’s a good place to start. And now I’m going to link to a bunch of other discussions about masculinity which I find really informative and helpful (because who doesn’t like homework!). Think of this section like an annotated bibliography. To start we have bell hooks discussion of how the patriarchy affects men. There’s the Men’s Story Project that is all about men talking about being men. There’s also the Good Men Project, which is something of a mixed bag. Some of their articles are top notch, and some leave a bad taste in one’s mouth. Jamie Utt doesn’t always write about men and masculinity, but when he does it’s illuminating. Ozy Franz’s blog is always great, though it is not focused on men. Ozy’s No Seriously What About Teh Menz? blog is no longer running, but you can still find the old articles here. I’ve only just become aware of Ally Fogg, but his personal blog looks to be quite relevant to issues surrounding forming a modern identity for men.
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1 “Men” and “women” in this article refer to cis-men and cis-women. This entire article is focused on cis experiences, though of course I do not mean to imply anything about trans* experiences by not mentioning them. Rather, I am not talking about how trans* experiences relate to this issue, because I do not feel knowledgeable enough to discuss them with any authority.
2 I do not mean to imply that racial and gender issues are exactly the same in western society. However, there is quite a bit in common about the power structures within racial, sexual, and gender systems in our society. The problem of the “default” is one of these similarities.
3 Of course, in some ways singling out women as a group is the best way to properly acknowledge women’s experiences and achievements. Take the example of the recent Wikipedia dust up. Because women authors are often overlooked, having a separate “American women author” section actually brings attention to the fact that there are women write excellent novels in a way that would be erased if women were only included in a general “American authors” section. It’s complicated, and it depends in large part on who is doing the separating and why, but that’s a topic for another article.
Filed under: Gender
