Masculinity and the failure of the men's rights movement -UPDATED

Okay, true confession time: if there's one group that really still gets under my skin, it's anti-feminist "men's rights activists." In the comments below this post, a fellow named Jeff JP wrote:

You say, "I'm not hard on men because I am filled with self-loathing."

With all due respect, I just don't believe that. The very fact that you use terms like "predators" and the incredibly overused, misused, and abused "patriarchs" suggests to me that there's really something else going on here.

Furthermore, the gaggle of feminist groupies who hang out here is also telling. Sorry, pal, but I just do not believe it.

If you want to be a feminist, fine. That's your right. However, feminism has by and large been discredited as an anti-male hate movement, so don't be so surprised when men don't warm up to that.

I mean, it's not a particularly profane or nasty comment -- I've read much worse and been unfazed by it. Why do commenters like Jeff JP (and a few others) get to me? Simple: my first reaction is to see guys like him as (not so subtly) questioning my manhood! I've done years of work around my own sense of myself as a man, and have grown infinitely more comfortable in my own skin. I've been called a sissy, a queer, a "wolf in sheep's clothing", "pussy-whipped" and worse from the moment I first started working on gender issues almost two decades ago. Most of the time, it rolls off my back. But every once in a while, it gets to me.

True confession: my very first impulse with men who do this is to be reactive, stoop to their level, and defend my masculinity. "You want to question my cojones, buddy? Let's do a 20 mile round trip race to the top of Mt. Wilson and back, you so-and-so, and I'll show you who's a man!" It's embarrassing, but the first thing I want to do is re-establish my manly credentials by suggesting some variation on a boyish pissing contest! Really, I have to laugh at myself.

Fortunately, I don't actually let myself react that way. Instead, I pause, think things through, and usually (if particularly irked) pray for the person who has enraged me. That usually allows me to return to a calm civility in short order. I don't know if the women who were so casually dismissed as my "feminist groupies" won't still want to respond!

But the men's rights movement bothers me for other reasons that have nothing to do with my own insecurities, such as they may or may not be. I've blogged about them before, in a brief summary of the broader men's movement. Jeff JP put up some of their links in his comments, and I'll repeat them here:

National Coalition of Free Men
Warren Farrell.Com
GlennSacks.Com
Dads' Rights

And many, many more.

The first of these, the NCFM, has a philosophical premise that sounds appealing and valuable: freeing men from restrictive gender roles that have damaged them. In their mission statement, the National Coalition says that they want to free men from the following:

...From the tendency to evaluate themselves and each other by the degree to which they meet an impossible ideal.
...From conditioned competitiveness and the fear of sharing failures, anxieties and disappointments with one another.
...From a mistrust of their feelings and instincts and an over reliance on logical thought processes.
...From the notion that violent action confirms and enhances their manliness.
...From a relative ignorance of their bodily functions and disdain for their body's warning signals.
...From the pressure to be what they are not in preparation for their success role.
...From an over reliance on their jobs for a sense of identity.
...From the social barriers and pressures which stand in the way of their establishing close emotional friendships with other men.
...From the inclination to turn their wives into permission giving mother figures.
...From the need to prove their worthiness as protectors and providers.
...From feelings of inadequacy in matters of child care and child rearing.
...From feelings which inhibit them from developing a closer more emotional relationship with their children

Well, heavens to Betsy, that sounds good to me. Indeed, these "freedoms from" are part and parcel of the "pro-feminist" men's movement for which I have a good deal more sympathy, represented by Men Can Stop Rape and NOMAS. Unlearning violence, developing healthy intimacy with other men, overcoming workaholism -- it all sounds terrific. But where the men's rights movement falls flat on its face is when it chooses to see feminists not as allies, but as opponents. Here are some other things the NCFM wants to free men from:

...From preoccupation with sexual technique and from imperatives to concentrate on satisfying their partners sexually, seemingly at the expense of their own sexual pleasure.
...From divorce laws which presume the naturally superior capabilities of women to care for children and which stereotype men as wallets.
...From harsher treatment under law for criminal violations than the treatment accorded to women in matters of arrest, conviction and sentencing.
...From the notion that as a class they oppress women any more than women as a class oppress them, or than society in general oppresses both sexes through stereotyping.

I bet lots of women are fascinated to know that millions of men are miserable, dutifully denying themselves sexual pleasure in order to concentrate on satisfying their partners. Who knew?

But seriously, it's the last of these statements that is the most patently offensive: an insistence that men's victimization is equal to women's victimization. It's the staggering blindness to male privilege that is so damn galling. It's a gross misunderstanding of history and of culture. (By the way, let me applaud Ampersand's list of our male privileges; it can be found here).

The problem with the men's rights movement is that they confuse men's unhappiness with oppression. They assume that if men were in control, they would be happy, because patriarchal oppressors ought to be happy. Therefore, if a man isn't happy, he isn't oppressing. Newsflash, folks: Just because you don't know you're privileged doesn't mean you're not. Just because there are aspects of your power and privilege that you find alienating and burdensome doesn't mean that you are any less a beneficiary of an oppressive system! Both men and women do need liberation from rigid, traditional, gender roles. The difference is that collectively, men are the architects of the system while women are merely forced to live within it.

Let me quote from Christopher Kilmartin's fine textbook, The Masculine Self:

"(Profeminist men and mytho-poetic men's advocates) see men's oppression as an internalized quality that is changed through self exploration... the men's rights movement sees oppression as a socially pervasive sexism against men, who will continue to be victimized unless something is done about it."

The men's rights movement gives men the luxury of self-righteous indignation; the pro-feminist men's movement forces men to recognize their own role in both their own oppression and that of the women in their lives. The men's rights movement feeds on anger; the pro-feminist men's movement on a sense of profound responsiblity to our mothers, daughters, sisters, wives and lovers as well as to ourselves.

I know where I stand. And Jeff, I'd still like to go for a run with you. No racing or chest-beating, I promise!

UPDATE: Trish Wilson has this great post about NCFM from 2003. The NCFM has a history of opposing government funding for battered women's shelters, claiming that to fund such shelters for women is sexist. Here's what they say about state funding for women's shelters in Minnesota:

We insist that this egregiously sexist law be struck down in its entirety, at which time the Minnesota State Legislature can begin a new process and an entirely new approach to addressing the social problem of domestic violence -- an approach that utterly discounts and discredits the old "women good, men bad" model and forthrightly recognizes instead that domestic violence is a shared problem between men and women.

Yes, domestic violence is a shared problem between men and women. Murder is also a shared problem between the victim and the killer, but that doesn't make the differences between the two any less stark.

Comments

[Ampersand]

If you can do that, great. If you can't, then I think you owe these guys an apology, having effectively smeared them as liars solely because they disagree with you.

You mean, like the way DJW explained that she wasn't going to debate because she thought life's too short; and you responded by implying that she was lying about why she's leaving the debate, and that the real explanation was probably something else? I'm sure you're going to apologize for that real soon.

There's nothing ruder, or more illogical, in a debate than speculating about the motivations of people you disagree with.

[Ampersand]

Incidently, although I know that Hugo can answer for himself, I wrote a detailed critique of the "husbands are as battered as wives" theory. Even Straus and Gelles - who created the survey instrument most-often-cited by men's rights activists - now say that the men's rights activists have misused their work.

(To anticipate an objection, I did - at the end of my post - speculate as to what motivates men's rights activists. But I didn't do that in the context of directly debating a particular men's rights activist and speculating on his motivations, which I think is a good deal ruder.)

My understanding is that woman-on-man violence is not uncommon at all, and that women are the more frequent abusers when the victims are children.

It was fairly clear to me that when Hugo was discussing battery, he was referring to adult victims. And in any case, we were definitely discussing who the victims are - not who the abusers are.

I think it's probably true that women are the more frequent child-abusers, although I'd prefer it if you could provide a specific, peer-reviewed citation. However, my suspicion is that the difference between fathers and mothers is accounted for not by any inherant difference between women and men, but by the differences in who has most of the responsibility for child-rearing and spends the most time with children. (Of course, I realize you didn't imply otherwise).

I don't think anyone is claiming that women are all saints - on the contrary, I think the feminist position is that women, like men, are human and have human flaws. However, due to an unequal society (and also, to some extent, due to biology - i.e., men are physically bigger and don't get pregnant), the power dynamics between men and women are not even; and so in relations between adult women and men, the abusers are disproportionately men.

[Hugo]

It will probably come off as laziness on my part, but Amp did such a good job in his article on the subject of abuse statistics that I defer to him, XRLQ.

[Trish Wilson]

Hugo, I found more information for you. Womensenews reported on an attack by Free Men against California domestic violence shelters in July. A man claiming to be the victim of abuse called 10 shelters out there and was not allowed to stay in any of them. They help both men and women but are not equipped to house men overnight. There is a shelter that helps battered men but he chose to not call that one. He claimed discrimination. This is the same pattern as the last lawsuit filed by Free Men against California shelters, which are already financially strapped. The last time Free Men pulled this stunt it lost. Free Men has been working hard for years to shut down domestic violence shelters and to make it difficult for them to operate. It's an attack against women.

[Xrlq]

Amp, this is now the third time in a single thread that I've had to remind another commenter that my mocking comments about a traditional, "patriarchal" society were directed toward western society, not backward, rural areas of an already backward country in the Middle East. I won't speculate as to your motives for providing a link to a story from rural Pakistan.

I don't think think a fair comparison can be drawn between the vitriol you get and the vitriol Trish may get. You're not Trish, and from what little I've read of both your blogs, your style is not nearly as confrontational, knee-jerk or downright daft as hers often is. That, and not your maleness, is probably the reason your blog entries don't generate the same hate mail that hers do, even if at the end of the day, you both come down on the same side of most of the same issues. I also suspect that if you blogged as a woman, the overall tone of the comments you received would, if anything, improve.

So you didn't like my questioning of DJW's excuse for not backing up her position. Fine. From my experience, "I can't" is a much more common reason for not winning a debate than "I can, but don't want to." Maybe she really can, and really doesn't want to, but you'll have to pardon my skepticism. In any event, I didn't brand her as a liar or a fraud, as Hugo did with respect to the "fraudulent" stats your own article describes as other than fraudulent, albeit of limited utility. Even if I drank the Kool-Aid and agreed with your more strained assumptions (e.g., the implication that since men and women both have reasons not to report crimes against them, it must therefore follow that men and women report crimes in roughly equal numbers), I still would find no justification for the f-word.

Ironically enough, your own piece supports the very conclusion that Hugo initially objected to above:

And to those men's rights activists who say that we need more services for male victims of domestic violence - I agree completely! It's only the men's rights claim that women and men are equal victims of intimate violence that I'm disagreeing with. I don't think anyone can look at the facts and deny that women are sometimes violent, or that male victims of intimate violence need more support services.

IOW, domestic violence is indeed a shared problem. Whether or not it is shared evenly is a relatively minor detail.

[Amanda]

Alright, X--in Western societies, rape isn't nearly as criminal as you would like to think it is. It has traditionally been punished harshly only when one man rapes a woman that "belongs" to another. Until recently, in our country, marital rape wasn't even considered a crime.

[Jeff JP]

True confession: my very first impulse with men who do this is to be reactive, stoop to their level, and defend my masculinity.

Ah, but I wasn't questioning your masculinity. I wasn't and I'm not.

"You want to question my cojones, buddy? Let's do a 20 mile round trip race to the top of Mt. Wilson and back, you so-and-so, and I'll show you who's a man!" It's embarrassing, but the first thing I want to do is re-establish my manly credentials by suggesting some variation on a boyish pissing contest!

Actually, I think arranging a friendly boxing match would be even better!

Fortunately, I don't actually let myself react that way. Instead, I pause, think things through, and usually (if particularly irked) pray for the person who has enraged me.

Prayer is good. We need more of it. You may be interested to know that I pray for feminists, even the most vicious man-hating ones.

Peace.

[Hugo]

Jeff, I love you. Get a blog and start posting. I promise to link to you regularly.

Civility abounds! Whoo Hoo!

[Jeff JP]

Jeff, I love you. Get a blog and start posting. I promise to link to you regularly.

Civility abounds! Whoo Hoo!

Hugo,

Thanks for the compliments, but my message is really no big deal. I'm just sharing a little info about me, that's all. I pray for everyone; it's part of my spiritual practice.

Yes, I get irritated from time to time, but I do still pray for all beings everywhere.

Chow for now.

[Amanda]

If you pray about all the vicious man-hating feminists, isn't that sort of like praying for the salvation of unicorns?

[Xrlq]

Marital rape is a fair point. I'm not sure where you get the info about non-marital rape only being a big deal if the victim "belongs" to another man. Do you have any documentation of that? I can't picture anyone having gotten away with forcible rape solely because the victim wasn't married - or because she was, but her husband was too much of a louse to care.

[Amanda]

The evidence that rape wasn't a crime against a woman so much as a crime against the man who owned her is best understood if you realize that until relatively recently, rape and seduction were customarily not distinguished from each other in the West. Men were prosecuted for "raping" unmarried women who had consented in Europe for a long time--since her consent was not the issue so much as the man who had authority over her's consent.

It's difficult to put your finger on exact laws--it's only relatively recently that Westerners have demanded that law and custom fall in line and have so much definition to them. But here's an interesting story about the culture around the French story "Little Red Riding Hood" that will better explicate how a woman's consent, aka the difference between rape and seduction, was not considered the important factor in a sexual encounter outside of marriage:

http://www.msmagazine.com/summer2004/danceswithwolves.asp

Again, inside marriage, a woman had no legal or cultural individuality and couldn't be raped--no ability to consent or reject, no rape.

[Fred Vincy]

XRLQ,

Are you serious in asking me to identify where you are hostile? Your hostility is dripping from every post, but here are just a few:

"Hugo's privilege and oppression theory is a bunch of crap"

"Spare me the rhetoric...."

"...the plural of "anectdote" isn't "data." Show evidence ... and you may have a real point."

"Please."

"It's clear that you are very thin-skinned...."

And on and on.

And yes, my response to your tone is hostile -- and fully justified.

[Lynn Gazis-Sax]

How severely men were punished for rape, and under what circumstances, in traditional Western societies is going to depend a whole lot on which men you are talking about, and what time period and place you are picking to represent "traditional" Western culture. After all, we know, for example, that African-American men were punished a whole lot more reliably and severely for raping white women than white men were for raping black women, that stranger rape has been more readily punished than acquaintance rape, and that you had better odds of your rapist getting punished if people were persuaded that you were a "nice girl" rather than a "slut."

To be sure, knowing that someone who rapes you will get a long jail sentence under some circumstances, and that under no circumstances will your family kill you for being raped, is a whole lot better than what happens in certain other cultures, where the probability that the victim will be killed appears to be higher than the probability that the rapist will be significantly punished. But I'm not convinced that traditional Western handling of rape was more rape victim friendly than modern Western handling of rape.

[Jeff JP]

UPDATE: Trish Wilson has this great post about NCFM from 2003.

Hugo, I really hope you are reading other information about this case than just the Trish Wilson commentary. I never even heard of her before seeing the mention of her blog here. Even so, what do NCFM-LA, Marc Angelucci, Warren Farrell, and reliable news stories say about this case.

Out of a sense of fairness, I did look at the Trish Wilson blog entry you mentioned. Dude, it is so over the top that I'm pretty stunned you mentioned it. If you want to call a foaming-at-the-mouth rant like that "a great post," you're obviously within your rights to do that. Your blog, your rules.

I, on the other hand, will call it just as I see it: a reckless and obviously misinformed attack on NCFM, Warren Farrell, and anyone who has the temerity to question radical gender-feminist orthodoxy. G-d forbid we should even consider the possibility that women may be just as abusive as men!

When it's convenient, she uses a broad definition of domestic violence. She wrote, 'Domestic violence can be emotional, legal, economic, psychological, physical, and sexual' in a comment to the blog post that you quoted, Hugo.

http://amptoons.poliblog.com/blog/000905.html

If you don't think that women in intimate relationships commit domestic violence through those other forms of abuse and harassment, I don't think there's much hope to convince you. Note, I'm not saying all women do it or even that most women do it. But do they do it as often as men? You bet they do!

The mere fact that male-perpetrated domestic violence tends to be more physical than does female-perpetrated DV doesn't prove anything. The research is insufficient to cover all forms of domestic violence.

There are no doubt facts that most of us can agree on. However, if one's goal is to deny that men commit domestic violence or to deny that women commit domestic violence, then we're not going to get very far.

Finally, we need to do more in terms of prevention. We need to study men and women to find out why some of them behave violently. We need to discover the roots of the problem.

Saying "there's no excuse for abuse" and funding shelters and other programs for survivors of DV will help us in the short term and they're very important. But we also need to dig deeper into the manifold causes of DV if we hope to develop lasting solutions and the underlying social transformation that will buttress those solutions.

[Hugo]

On your last paragraph, Jeff, we are in complete and utter agreement!

[DJW]

Xlrq, two quick points.

1) You're right--I don't think I could convince you women are oppressed in our society. I also don't think that I can convince Hugo that organized religion is a bad idea, or convince a libertarian that they should actually be a socialist. On this issue, the evidence seems clear as day to anyone who looks around. Obviously, you see the world in a very different way. I enjoy discussions and debates with people who see the world quite differently from me, but I find those conversations more productive and rewarding when they focus on more secondary points on which both parties are more likely to be flexible and open to conversation. (For example, I wouldn't come here and try to convince Hugo he shouldn't care about women getting abortions--what's the point--but I will try to convince him that legal prohibition is the wrong way to combat abortion. And so on.) If you wish to take this as an occasion to declare victory, by all means feel free.

2) Not that it matters, I'm not into that whole "real manhood" stuff Hugo likes, but I'm a boy :)

[Joe Perez]

Hugo,

I've read your past blog posts now (well, I skimmed a few of the really long ones) on the men's movement, and generally like what you have to say. I think you're right on in most of your assessments. However, I also chuckled sympathetically when one commenter wrote about your "feminist groupies" among your blog readers. I frequently find both the feminist and father's rights wing of the men's movement to contain out-of-balanced perspectives that are very deficient, including comments by some of your "feminist groupies."

I prefer to call myself an integral thinker, rather than a pro-feminist man, because a balanced perspective just makes a lot more sense to me. As a gay man in the men's movement, I tend to see thinks from a more balanced gender perspective anyways.

I've just added your blog to my blogroll. Looking forward to more of your writings on gender issues.

Joe

[Sheelzebub]

Gosh, Joe. I had no idea that being a gay man meant you could see things from a woman's perspective.

But then again, I had no idea that I was a groupie until you and a few other (male) so kindly enlightened me.

[Xrlq]

Michelle wrote:

Xlrq [sic], we'll just have to wait and see about the draft, won't we?

Wait no longer. When was the last time that any bill got voted down 402-2, with its own author voting against it?!