Being a feminist means more than just articulating a particular literary theory or cultural critique. Feminism requires change; it demands that we live our lives differently as women and as men. Feminist masculinities embrace the core idea that the personal is political. At the centre of the relationships men (and women) create resides a power dynamic. When men (especially straight white men) come to an awareness of their sense of privilege and their assumption of entitlement, they can begin to create more egalitarian relationships. Women’s equality is one crucial aspect of this quest. Another important component is a feminist interrogation of men and masculinities. The former, men’s active involvement in the campaign for women’s rights, predates both the development of feminism as a radical political philosophy and the application of that perspective to men’s roles in general.
The relation between the sexes has engendered, historically, a critique by men of women’s persistently unequal situation. Prescriptiveness concerning women—their roles in marriage, their educability, their sexuality, their ‘beauty’ and their sphere of activity—informs these ‘pro-women’ tracts. In their writings, these male authors question whether women differ from the writer’s own sex, whether it is natural or just that they should occupy their present status, and how they might be released from the worst effects of restrictions placed upon them.
Men supporting women’s rights have often done so in dialogue with female advocates beginning at least with Christine de Pizan in the early fifteenth century and continuing through today. The earliest male defenders are found in late-fifth and early-fourth century BCE Greece, however, with Aristophanes’ Lysistrata (411 BCE) and Plato’s Republic (380 BCE). In both of these works, women assume roles of equality with men in the context of important political decisions and in educational opportunities. In the Medieval period, Chaucer writes his ambiguously proto-feminist ‘Wife of Bath’s Tale’, with its defence of women against misogyny and an advocacy of women’s autonomy, and he and Boccaccio compile ‘catalogues’ of famous women in history.
After Chaucer, probably the earliest familiar male supporter of women’s rights is Agrippa, who in 1509 argues against the misogynist interpretations of women’s capacities, roles and rights. Several important works by men follow closely upon Agrippa’s treatise: Tilney revives the discussion of friendship within marriage, and Poulain de la Barre provides the first truly radical, uncompromising and profoundly effective defence of women’s equality at all levels of society.
The eighteenth century was a particularly rich period for pro-women writings by men, encompassing a host of well-known French thinkers from Diderot and Montesquieu to d’Holbach and Condorcet, such American writers as Paine and Rush, and the German von Hippel. While the French writers argued on behalf of the rights of women on such issues as birth control and constitutional rights, von Hippel opposes vigorously the dominant ideology of the time: that women are irrational, unreasonable (or without reason altogether) and emotional.
In the nineteenth century, with the rise in Europe of liberalism, Marxism and anarchism, feminism emerges as a radical political theory and movement. Mill and Engels presented arguments in favour of women’s rights, while in America Douglass and Garrison were early advocates of a woman’s right to vote.
The early years of the twentieth century, the period of ‘First Wave Feminism’, were a time dominated by such political demands as equal pay and a focus on anti-war and antifascist activism. First wave feminists endorsed the vote for women, equal opportunities in the professions, access to higher education and the elimination of restrictions within marriage. In Britain, Russell critiqued the repressive nature of conventional sexual morality, while Montagu argued against women’s inferiority.
In her book The Second Sex (1949), Beauvoir provides a crucial transition to what becomes the radical feminism of the 1960s and 1970s. Beauvoir’s identification of woman as Other helped articulate an understanding of the female as alienated from her humanity due to the objectification of woman intrinsic to patriarchy. Following closely on Beauvoir’s history of women’s oppression, and in the context of this decade of radical political engagement and change across all areas of society, men started asking, ‘What does it mean to be a man in patriarchal society?’ From feminism men gained insights into their own dehumanised lives, thus coming to the realisation that manhood may not be all that healthy for men.
In the context of the New Left, the US Civil Rights movement, opposition to the war in Vietnam, and leftist men’s own sexism, the Women’s Liberation Movement emerged. Feminists expanded their struggle to address personal and individual issues, out of which came the crucial insight that ‘the personal is political’. The realisation that who we are as individuals constitutes a political construction, coupled with the creation of consciousnessraising groups, inspired a crucial change in the relationship between feminism and men. For men, feminism became more a critical perspective through which they could scrutinise masculinity and less a call for them to act solely as advocates for women’s causes (though the latter remains an important component of the ‘profeminist men’s movement’).
Beginning in the 1960s, men start to apply feminism to an examination of their own lives as men in a patriarchal society. While many of these analyses evoked reactionary answers, and (at least in the US) several remained liberal at best, out of these initial engagements a more radical position emerged, especially from the UK. Men were not alone in this feminist analysis of masculinities. Several women contributed invaluable insights into the discourse of ‘men’s studies’, ‘feminist masculinities’ and the ‘male condition’, and in this dialogue with women the investigation of what it means to be a man in patriarchal society became more subtle.
The 1970s was a rich period for the emergence of a feminist analysis of masculinities. In the US, Sawyer’s ‘On male liberation’, published originally in Liberation magazine (1970), and Wittman’s ‘A gay manifesto’ introduce the two divergent, though sometimes overlapping concerns: that of male heterosexual liberation on the one hand and gay liberation on the other.
Following closely on Sawyer’s essay came Snodgrass’s helpful anthology, For Men Against Sexism (1977). The essays in Snodgrass’s collection represent some of the more radical work being done by men in the first half of the 1970s. In ‘Toward gender justice’, for example, Stoltenberg locates male bonding and men’s need to oppress women as much in gay men’s liberation as in the heterosexual male community.
Later in the decade, Pleck contributed to the emerging anti-sexist men’s movement. His interest in the world of men’s work, where most American men, far from being power wielders, find themselves relatively powerless, inspired subsequent scholarship, as did his analysis of the psychological reasons why American males seek power over women.
The work of Tolson, a British Marxist, represents one of the marked differences between the more liberal and at times psychologising focus of the American contribution and the more political, overtly socialist analysis of British writers. In The Limits of Masculinity (1977), Tolson applies a Marxist analysis to his personal struggle against sexism. For Tolson, ideology, institutional boundaries and accepted rules of behaviour structure social consciousness. Seidler, another important British intellectual and activist, was an early member of the editorial collective for Achilles Heel, a journal that focused on positive conceptions of masculinity with an emphasis on the ways men can change in response to the challenge of feminism.
Other early radical works include Hoch’s White Hero Black Beast (1979), in which masculinity is seen as an interracial competition for women that rests on a fear of impotence and homosexuality, while positing the inevitable victory of the white hero over the black beast. In Holy Virility (1983), Reynaud, a French intellectual, addresses the fundamental question of what being a ‘man’ within patriarchy means and how power can be redistributed between the sexes.
In the mid-1980s, Connell co-authored a ground-breaking essay, ‘Toward a new sociology of masculinity’, that both reviews the ‘Books on Men’ period of the men’s movement and stresses the absence in most of these early works of any attempt to engage the relationship of heterosexual men’s liberation with gay men’s liberation. In contrast to these previous works, Connell et al. introduce their innovative (though contested) concept of hegemonic masculinity.
Kimmel, one of the major voices in the American profeminist men’s movement spanning the past three decades, has published extensively on the subject of men and masculinity and helped to organise profeminist men in the National Organization for Men Against Sexism (NOMAS). In an oft printed essay, ‘Masculinity as homophobia’, for example, Kimmel sees masculinity as a historical construction defined’ in opposition to a “others”—racial minorities, sexual minorities, and, above all, women’.
In addition to writing about feminist masculinities, men have been active in anti-sexist groups and organisations. Founded in 1975, NOMAS represents the oldest and certainly most active profeminist men’s group in the United States (and has links to several international organisations). Promoting the cause of gender equality and social justice for everyone, NOMAS rests on the principles of profeminism, gay-affirmation, anti-racism and enhancing the lives of men. To realise these principles, profeminist men are active on a number of fronts: they participate in Gay Pride parades; are active in men’s antirape organisations; work in prisons; offer workshops on fathering, on ‘gender training’ (for workers/managers), and on sexual harassment.
These initiatives are by no means limited to the US. The White Ribbon Campaign, for example, that began in Montreal in 1991 after the massacre of fourteen women, spread to the US, Europe, Africa, Latin America and Australia, becoming ‘the first large-scale male protest against violence in the world’ (Flood 2001:1). Today, international campaigns on the part of men’s groups to end men’s violence against women exist in India, the Republic of Trinidad and Tobago, Central America, Nicaragua, Brazil and Australia. In addition, European profeminist networks have been established in Austria, Belgium, Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, Greece, Ireland, Italy, Norway, Spain, Sweden to name just a few. In Japan, as Connell points out in The Men and the Boys, a media debate about men’s liberation arose in the mid-1990s that spawned the foundation of a men’s centre and a national debate on change. Out of these international programmes has come a burgeoning interest in global masculinities.
With the realisation that patriarchy and masculine domination are neither singular nor universal, profeminist men see masculinities as ‘under constant revision, negotiation and movement’ (Whitehead 2002:5). Indeed, men and masculinities exist in particular historical contexts and are thus defined by certain dominant characteristics and assumptions.
At the same time, though, the identification of male roles that represent a marginal masculinity, one that challenges the seemingly hegemonic definition of manhood during any given historical period, represents the potential for disruption that Butler refers to as a ‘subversive bodily act’ and Whitehead describes as a ‘masculine-oriented performativity’. These masculine improvisations can undermine traditional masculine roles while at the same time reinforcing them. This dialectic of masculine performance provides a rich area for problematising a seemingly hegemonic masculinity.
One example of how this dialectic can be interrogated with radical implications is apparent in the way high-speed computer access affects our perceptions of masculinities. Adult video-conferencing sites where men present sexualised bodies as objects of the gaze through an interactive medium, for example, raise questions about how men construct a masculine subjectivity and a male sexual identity that is both an affirmational community performance and an individual erotic display.
As we move into the twenty-first century, other sub-fields of feminist masculinity studies begin to emerge. A focus on the language men use when they talk about themselves as men has been an important area of exploration, for example. By exposing the subtleties of the discourse of male bonding we may be able to alter the way men live as men through changing their habits of speech.
One concern remains central, however: because many men are forced to comply with macho standards of performance, standards frequently reinforced in modern literature and culture, they experience their power and sexuality as heavy burdens. By adopting a model of sexuality and social relations informed deeply by a feminist perspective and thus neither hierarchical nor exploitative, men can begin to construct alternative relationships among themselves as well as with women. Feminist masculinities offer a way to engage these issues and strive to attain these changed relationships.
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