Can we stop treating this holistically and break it down please? I hate the term patriarchy because it feels too abstract, but lets get real here for a moment. It is possible to recognize that men are disadvantaged in some ways, while recognizing that they are advantaged in others. The majority of people seem to agree that women have it worse all things considered, an opinion you evidently do not share. But ultimately, it doesn't matter, because surely we can both agree that the status quo is inadequate for both parties, and that the root causes of these inequalities is the historical context of our society and the cultural zeitgeist in which we live.
There's a sociologist named Michael Kimmel who has written a number of books about gender and feminism that I like, and he recently came out with a book called
The Guy's Guide to Feminism. At a
recent post-keynote discussion he said something that I think gets to the heart of the issue:
"There's two parts of your question I want to address. The first is the terminology - the feminist / pro-feminist question, and the second is what sort of men's movements there are in the States. And the first thing I'll say is that when I first started doing this work, I was very careful to differentiate being "pro-feminist" from being "feminist", and my reasoning was very simple. In order to support feminist, you only need to basically have two things. You have to have one empirical observation, which is "Women and men aren't equal." And the second is a moral position: "And they should be." And that's really all you need. If you observe that women and men aren't equal, and you think they should be, you support feminism. That's basically my position. But to call yourself a feminist, be a feminist, I thought, at the time, that you actually had to have the felt experience of that inequality. Which I didn't have, of course. And it would be analogous to calling myself a black militant as opposed to anti-racist or a gay liberationist as opposed to gay-affirmative. So I didn't call myself a feminist; I called myself a pro-feminist. My feeling is that, you know, some quarter of a century later feminism has been so relentlessly attacked that anyone who wants to call themselves a feminist I'm pretty much okay with. It's simply saying, I want to occupy this space that has been so discredited publicly so relentlessly for such a long time. So I'm okay with that, a little bit. I'm more okay with it, but I agree with you politically, I share the idea.
But let me just say a couple things. Here's the way I see the way in which the men's movements - and I'll say that is plural - have organized themselves or responded to some of the observations of feminism. Feminism basically had two levels, the personal and the political. At the political level, they had that empirical observation. Feminists argued that women were not in power. Well this is pretty obvious - you look at every single parliament, every single board of trustees, every single corporate board, every single academic hierarchy, and you'll see that women, as a group, are not in power. And the second part of what feminism said was that individual women do not feel powerful. So, feminism was designed to redress both - to change the aggregate power imbalance at the top and to empower women to feel more autonomous and make better choices in their own personal lives. So now you apply that to men - nice parallelism for women - "Men are in power" - right, everybody agrees with that part - "Therefore, men must feel powerful" - Bzzt, wrong.
That's the part where in the 1970s we would go to men and we'd say, "Men have all the power, men have to give up the power" and the men would say, 'What are you talking about? I don't have any power - my wife bosses me around, my kids boss me around, my boss bosses me around - I'm completely powerless.' So for women you had to address the symmetry between women's aggregate powerlessness and personal feelings of powerlessness. For men you had to address the dissimilarity between all the aggregate power in the world not - Reagan to the side - trickling down to individual men feeling powerful.
So, the men's movements are all about that relationship between aggregate power and men not feeling powerful. The men's rights groups say, 'You know how you don't feel powerful? You're right. We have no more power, the women have it all now. Let's go get it back.' That's the men's rights position. Then there's the mythopoetic position: 'You know how you don't feel powerful? Let's go off to the woods, we'll do the power drumming, we'll do the power chanting, the power rituals - we'll feel powerful.' Sort of like the yuppies with their power ties, as if power were a fashion accessory. And the pro-feminist men's movement says, 'It is exactly that discrepancy between the aggregate political power and the fact that you don't feel powerful is the lever that we want to be using to talk to men: All that power didn't make you feel powerful. Is it possible that more gender equality at the top will actually make you feel more powerful in your personal life. Isn't that a possibility? Can you entertain that as a possibility? Since all the power in the world didn't do it, maybe equal power in the aggregate will actually free you to feel more powerful, to live the life you say you actually want to live.' And that is the key piece in all of this: We are not imposing some, you know, Obama-esque socialist blue state feminism on unsuspecting men. We are taking men at their word. Men want to have good relationships, they want to be good fathers. So let's take them at their word: This is the only way you're gonna do it.
