How Telling Women to “Ease Up on Men” Gets It Wrong

I’ll start by saying that Good Men Project has got some really great articles. Seriously, go check out the collaborative piece titled “The Healthy Sex Talk: Teaching Kids Consent, Ages 1-21” and this great piece by Jamie Utt titled “An Open Letter to the Rapey Frat Brother and the “How to Get Laid” Generation.” There’s also this wonderful piece by Julie Gillis titled, “Men Deserve Real Empathy, Not Deference.” However, this post is going to focus on an article that really does my head in and has me banging my head on the desk: Tamara Star’s “Why We as Women Need to Ease Up On Men.” In this long, two-page post, I’m going to go through the article and breakdown the bits I find problematic. I’ll start with the title.

Here’s the thing, an article asserting that society places too much pressure on men to conform to masculine ideals would be fine, possibly great. However, that’s not what Star’s article does. Instead she says that women are placing too much pressure on men and that women need to cut men a break. The pressure which Star discusses in the article doesn’t come from women, though; it comes from patriarchy, and patriarchy has no gender. Whether it is women or men who are enforcing those patriarchal gender norms, the root is still patriarchy.

The onus should not be on women to single-handedly change patriarchal norms because they are hurting men. The onus should be on everyone to do their part to change patriarchal norms because they hurt everyone (though women more acutely). And the way this discussion is framed matters.

At one point Star even acknowledges men’s role in perpetuating traditional gender norms. She writes, “Often juggling his ever-changing role with mom, he naturally starts to bond with dad and old rules such as “buck up, boys don’t cry and get over it” from prior generations are passed on once again.” But rather than stop and acknowledge that men have a responsibility not to enforce these norms on their children, she moves right past that and again focuses on her main point, that women are the ones who need to “ease up” on men.

What’s more, placing the burden of men’s emotions in women’s hands is actually part of the old gender system Star states she wants to breakdown. At the beginning of the article, Star explicitly states she’s not talking about “men that hurt on purpose, men that rape, or men that abandon their families.” However, telling women they need to manage the emotions of the men in their lives is precisely the sort of social norm that abusers exploit. More importantly, it’s precisely the sort of social norm which makes it all the more difficult to recognise abuse when it happens. We run into a similar problem to telling women to protect themselves to prevent rape. On the surface it sounds like a good idea, but that advice is actually part of what perpetuates the social problem we are trying to fix.

I want to turn back, for a second, to Julie Gillis’ article I linked to at the start of this post, in which she advocates for real empathy. She writes, “Pain, shame, and the violence it engenders is not limited to a race, or a sex, or an orientation. It’s something that affects us all. But why do the oppressed have to… make room for and adapt ourselves to their pain?” The root of the problem of Star’s article, I think, is a lack of awareness of that question. A lack of awareness of the power dynamic which makes it so problematic to tell women they need to “ease up on men” without also acknowledging that men need to “ease up on” each other and especially “ease up on” women.

To quote Julie Gillis again, “We need to see their pain. We need to understand it. But they need to see and understand ours. And they (whoever they are) need to work on themselves and their own places of pain, even as we’ve (whoever we are) have been doing that all while dancing and adapting and accommodating them.”

———–

Another issue with Star’s article is the way it makes the assumption that men’s relationship to masculinity is more fraught than women’s relationship to femininity (or masculinity, for that matter). She states, “Our men are striving for a balance in a world where the rules of masculinity keep changing.” And that is true. However what she fails to acknowledge is that women are also striving for balance in a world where the rules of femininity are in constant flux. This is perhaps most obviously exemplified by the continuing struggle between being a “stay-at-home mother” and a “working mother.”

Also, due to the way in which our society privileges masculinity above femininity, women are not exempt from social pressure to display masculine behaviour. In her article, Star is specifically talking about expressing emotion. Though it is true women have more leeway to express emotion, when women do so openly they are derided as being overly feminine and weak. This is not to say that men and women have the same relationship to masculinity. Rather, I am merely pointing out that neither men nor women have a simple relationship with masculinity and women have the added burden of having a fraught relationship with femininity.

Certainly women (and men) could do with easing up on men when they are emotionally distant due to having been socialised in a world which asks them to close off their emotions. But then, men (and other women) could also do with easing up on women when they act in problematic ways due to how they’ve been socialised to relate to masculinity and femininity. I keep going back to Julie Gillis’ sentences, “We need to see their pain. We need to understand it. But they need to see and understand ours.”

———–

The issue of understanding each other brings me to this sentence in Star’s article, “Men still struggle to make sense of women.” This is an old trope and a problematic one. Women are not more complex than men. Women do not behave in such drastically different ways that we require figuring out. A large part of the reason we have a cultural narrative about “mysterious women,” is that we simultaneously have such cultural hang-ups about actually treating women like autonomous individuals able to express themselves. Women are only mysterious if you don’t trust that they are self-aware enough to adequately communicate their wants and needs.