Full Frontal Feminism: A Young Woman's Guide to Why Feminism Matters (19 page)

I mean, really, can you imagine what it must be like to know that one of the only ways to demonstrate your “masculinity” is to do violence to someone else? To never let your guard down? Seems pretty goddamn awful to me.

Feminism can help men too, but only if they’re open to it. We can’t have a fully successful feminism if we’re missing half the population. The thing is, how can we relay the super-fabulous stuff feminism is made of to the men in our lives?

I am by no means an expert on masculinity. There are great people doing amazing work on how sexism hurts men—like academic and masculinity expert Michael Kimmel and organizations like Men Can Stop Rape. I’d highly recommend checking these folks out if you’re looking for in-depth information on masculinity.

My thoughts on men and feminism are really just starting to be formed, but it’s too important a topic to not get into it. Especially now, in a world where what it means to be “a man” has the potential to damage both men and women. Whether it’s a consequence of the way that masculinity is used during wartime, or the way it’s presented in pop culture—something just isn’t right.

Without dissecting how masculinity standards affect men, we’ll never be able to comprehensively address sexism and how it affects women. They’re linked like a motherfucker. Besides, imagine how much easier it will be to develop male allies in feminism when they realize that they have something to gain from the movement as well.

A commercial for Milwaukee’s Best beer shows three guys digging a ditch in a back yard (can you smell the testosterone?). When a bee buzzes too close to one of the men, he
frantically tries to wave it away while giving off a little high-pitched (you know, girlie) scream. His friends look on in horror. A huge can of Milwaukee’s Best falls from the sky and crushes the offending man—who clearly is too femmey to live. The voice-over says, “Men should act like men.” The same thing happens to another man who dares to soak up his pizza grease with a napkin. The moral of the story? Act like “a girl” and be killed by giant beer cans. Lovely.

What I find truly interesting about this commercial—and this limited view of what it means to be a man in general—is that masculinity is defined as whatever
isn’t
womanly. So long as you’re not acting like a girl (or a gay!), you’re all good.

It’s kind of along the same lines as that “what’s the worst thing you can call a girl/guy?” exercise. The idea being that there is nothing worse than being a girl, and that being a man is simply the polar opposite of whatever “woman” is. So really, masculinity as it’s defined in our society is ridiculously tied up in sexism. How sad is that?

So back to “men should act like men.” I think the Milwaukee’s Best commercial is so telling—it really does
represent the current state of masculinity in a lot of ways. Not only does it define what it means to be a man by pitting it directly against girlishness, but it also implies that what’s really important is that you “act” like a man. In a way, the commercial recognizes masculinity as a performance. So even if you are freaked out by bugs or don’t want nasty grease on your pizza—suck it up and act like men “are supposed” to. Creepy, right?

But of course, expecting guys to “act” like men isn’t limited to beer commercials—it’s everywhere. How many times have you heard “Boys don’t cry,” or “Be a man”? Or even my personal favorite, especially when it was said to me as a kid, “Don’t be a girl.”

The new trend, however, seems to be deviating from manhood altogether, and instead fetishizing boyhood.

Something kind of new in American masculinity—at least in terms of pop culture—is the resurgence of boyhood as the cool standard. Like, back in the day, being a man meant taking care of your family and having a good job and all that. Now, at least if you look at commercials and television shows and the like, it seems that the ultimate way to be a man is to stay a boy.

You know what I mean—the new cool is this “bros over hos” mentality that seems to be inundating our culture. Just think of all the commercials in which perpetual boyhood is the ultimate—where playing cards, watching football,
drinking beer, and picking up chicks is the norm (even for “older” guys), and girlfriends and wives are annoying, nagging, distractions from fun.

In a March 2006 article entitled “Men Growing Up to Be Boys,” Lakshmi Chaudhry says that an “infantilized” version of manhood is making its way to the mainstream:

Some say that this goes beyond pop culture silliness where
Maxim
magazine is king. In 2005, Rebecca Traister wrote about “listless lads,” men who “are commitment-phobic not just about love, but about life. They drink and take drugs, but even their hedonism lacks focus or joy. . . . They exhibit no energy for anyone, any activity, profession, or ideology.”
²
Traister theorizes that maybe this is a crisis in masculinity—where men don’t want to be men.

But what does that mean, anyway?

It seems unclear what “being a man” actually is. Is it simply
not
being a woman? Or is it something more?

According to Michael Kimmel, there are “rules of manhood”:

Kimmel describes it as “relentless pressure on men.” I would imagine so. I can’t imagine it’s easy living that way. But unfortunately, this limited view of what it means to be a man truly fucks up the way men treat women.

Kimmel says that feminist-hating can be tied to masculinity as well. Because for men who are holding on for dear life to the traditional idea of what it means to be a man, feminism is a real threat—because it asks people to question traditional gender roles. He also believes that “manliness” can be tied to violence against women: “Men tend to be violent against women when they feel that their power is eroding, when it’s slipping.”
⁴
Ugh.

But this seems par for the course in terms of feminist backlash. Feminism changed things around in a lot of ways, and that is scary as hell to a lot of men—because they
benefit from sexism. Sexism means that they’re the ones with the power, with the rights, and with their dinner made every night. It’s no wonder feminism scares the shit out of them.

My first real taste of feminist phobia came when I taught Intro to Feminisms at SUNY Albany in upstate New York. I taught the class as part of a teaching collective program in which undergraduates could teach other undergraduates. So I was pretty psyched, but not so much with all of my students.

One guy, who was my age, took the class just to be disruptive. I knew it wasn’t going to go well when, on the first day of class, we asked everyone to write their names on a piece of paper and hang it from their desks so we could all talk roundtable-style, and the guy wrote WOMAN HATER.

The semester was pretty miserable, with him trying to make me feel like shit at every turn. He wrote “Jessica is a bitch” on every test he handed in. He showed up at the anti-rape rally Take Back the Night to tell me that he had had sex with a girl when she said no (but that she liked it). He even had occasion to wander past my apartment drunk one night, just to yell out not-so-nice things. At the time, I just thought he hated me because he was a fucked-up person. Looking back, I realize that this guy was terrified of what he was being confronted with in class. It was going against everything he had ever learned, and his immediate reaction was to lash out. Plus, he was just a dick. He was acting out and felt he could
without consequence because I was a woman his age—not an authority figure.

Since I’ve started Feministing, I’ve seen similar reactions online. We’ve gotten our fair share of hateful comments on the site, but none have compared to the vitriol spewed our way from a group of guys on the Internet who call themselves “men’s rights activists.”

Basically, their deal is that they blame feminism for everything from not being able to get dates to increasing crime rates. Weird stuff. Some of them hated what we were doing so much that they created a parody site modeled after Feministing! They stole our logo (though they made it look like she was fingering herself—classy), our name, and put this tagline on it: “Because women are never sexist. So there.” Uh huh.

They posted articles every day and even talked to each other in comments using female pseudonyms and language they thought feminists would use: “You go grrrl!” Yeah, I know. It was amazing to me that anyone would spend so much time creating and keeping up a site that no one really
looked at or read besides their small group of online buddies. Besides, why weren’t they out being active on behalf of men?

Again, it’s the fear of feminism. They are terrified by the idea that women could actually be autonomous people with opinions. Interestingly, they blame feminism for ruining American women; on one of their websites (which has the lovely header “Ameriskanks suck”), they often discuss how Asian women are “real women” because they adhere to traditional gender roles. I won’t even get into how dumb and racist that is, but the idea is that the perfect woman is one who doesn’t, you know, talk back or have opinions.

This kind of misogyny (and yes, I do think a hatred of feminists is based in an overwhelming hatred of women) is unfortunately fairly widespread. There is just something about feminism that really pisses some guys off. Us gals from Feministing have actually received death threats, threats to cuts off our breasts (seriously), and threats of rape. Which is insane. But it’s because feminism is powerful. If these same men who hate feminism so much weren’t threatened by it and its power, they wouldn’t waste their time creating sites, causing disturbances, and emailing threatening letters.

In a way, this fear of feminism is a testament to its strength.

When I had that kid in my Intro to Feminisms class, I used to think that if only he would really try to understand feminism, it could really help him. Because it was clear that he was looking for something. And at times I felt that way about our online “admirers.” The truth is, some guys will
never be open to feminism because misogyny is just too ingrained in them. Which is sad. But that doesn’t mean that there aren’t amazing men out there who support the cause.

Can men be feminists? Hell yeah; I’ve been lucky in my life to be surrounded by feminist men (hi, Dad!) and I see the difference it makes, so I’m all for men joining in on the fun, and I believe we need male allies. But not everyone agrees. Some feminists think that the movement needs to be woman-centered, and I can understand this hesitancy to include men. There is a fear that they wouldn’t be willing to learn, and that they would try to take shit over, because they’re used to leading. I even have friends who take issue with men calling themselves feminists. They think that women need a word all their own, and that only someone who experiences life as a woman can truly understand feminism.

So, some guys call themselves “pro-feminist” as a way to stand in solidarity with feminists without co-opting the word/movement. As far as I’m concerned, they can call
themselves whatever they want, so long as they’re down to do the feminist work.

Self-identified pro-feminist blogger and academic Hugo Schwyzer says it’s imperative that men mentor other men in order to spread a nonsexist message.

Unfortunately, it’s not just men like Hugo who are trying to reach out to younger men.

The same conservative messes that are telling young women that they have to be chaste, married, and popping out babies are telling young men that they have to be strong, be “soldiers.”

James Dobson, daddy of the terrifying conservative religious group Focus on the Family, wrote a book called
Bringing up Boys
in which he tells parents how to raise their male children. A lot of it is concerned with nurturing boys’ “natural” masculinity and making sure they don’t turn out to be homos. Seriously. The Focus on the Family website
(which promotes Dobson’s book at every turn) says much the same thing: