“Toxic masculinity is the number one threat to feminists and the world, yet, it’s simultaneously unsolvable?”
I believe the original purpose of feminism, in many areas, is dead.
I will never forget the day I took my first class in a Women’s Studies department during my masters. After engaging with academic courses on women’s studies through literature, history, and sociology for 5 years, and while being mostly surrounded by women in classes and workplaces, and for most of my family life, I thought I was fairly prepared to engage with the course called “Women in Law”.
But I was terribly wrong.
On the first day of class, the teacher broke down our basic guidelines for the course. Following this, it was time for everyone to share their purpose for taking the course. As you can likely guess, I was the only male in the class of about 7 students. As graduate students, my classmates were focusing on theses related to contraceptives, abortion, and other critical matters that tend to polarize the dinner table talks.
When it was my turn to speak, I did so while being extremely mindful of my position, and my context. “Hello, my name is Mark. I am doing a master’s thesis in education, with a focus on engaging high school males with understanding and reducing matters related to violence against women. As a white, middle class, privileged male, my goal for this class is to learn from you (nods across the circle of women) from your knowledge and experiences in order to shape my master’s thesis with inspiration from women’s perspectives. As a man, I will never know what it is like to be a woman, so I value this opportunity to learn from you.”
I couldn’t have conceivably considered a different possible way to say anything with more of an awareness of my environment. Although I would soon learn that my choice to make myself vulnerable and my attempt to show self-awareness could not outcompete the fact that the ideas I put forth were simply reduced to as non-solutions in the fight for gender equality.
This ideologically fuelled reality was further underscored when I was sharing the thrust of my thesis with my classmates. Based on something along these lines, I shared that “the goal of this project is to understand how to effectively communicate with adolescent males so that we may better help to diminish any type of male violence against women.” When I continued to explain my framework, the response from my female peers were fairly clear: “You are rolling out the ‘red carpet’ for young men…Men just need to know how to be good men, period! If they don’t get it, it is not our job to teach them.”
My thoughts…”then if not ‘us’, whose ‘job’ is it to educate our male youth to understand the basics of equality and respect?”
I think the biggest irony I uncovered from this pushback was that while my classmates acknowledged that patriarchy and toxic masculinity were the apparent heart of virtually every problem in society, there was simultaneously no conceivable way to solve the issue because our society was entrenched in such deep patriarchal oppression. At the same time, ‘men just ought to be better’? Thus, according to my audience, it was made clear that neither men, nor women, could save men from their apparent innate demise.
This mind-numbing paradox, epitomized the idea of accepting a collective end towards what was the apparent root cause of our society’s problems: How could we, in one hand, have the world’s biggest issue – toxic masculinity – but on the other hand, have no possible way to solve it?
The death of feminism exists when the number one enemy of many feminists is toxic masculinity, though there is said to be no one who is able to reduce or end this problem.
It’s although those classmates had completely given up on the entire feminisms (yes, that “s” is intentional as there is no universal feminist) project by simply stating that “men will magically ‘get better, or not'”, BUT, not even men could help men to resolve these issues. And I would argue that this mindset of irreconcilable toxic masculinity is pervasive in many feminist circles. To quote an article by Camille Bruneau, women are “the victims of patriarchal order”. So women are victims: end of story.
I will contrast these falsehoods by stating that women have absolutely spearheaded with different degrees of success the fight for equal treatment of both men and women, along with like-minded men. When considering women in parliament as of February 2019, female representation were prominent in Nordic countries, 42.5 per cent; Americas, 30.6 per cent; Europe including Nordic countries, 28.6 per cent; Europe excluding Nordic countries, 27.2 per cent; sub-Saharan Africa, 23.9 per cent; Asia, 19.8 per cent; Arab States, 19 per cent; and the Pacific, 16.3 per cent. [1] These outcomes are thanks to hundreds of years of hard work, among many other great achievements.
Now this is simply looking at parliament, for we can always make our environments more supportive of diverse representation, which is a key tenant of democracy. But at the same time, the above mentioned representation is considerable progress considering that in England, which was considered the world’s most powerful country after the 1700s, used to assert that women had to submit their rights once married to men through the legal doctrine of coverture [2].
Yes, one can argue that by quoting a law from high and middle ages and comparing it to now is ludicrous. Though I would respond that what is more ludicrous is the fact that men have held so much power for so long. Nonetheless, the point is that one cannot both say that toxic male culture is the worst, then simultaneously give up the fight of equality, unless that is something that one consciously wishes to do.
After my university years, I approached different organizations around my community whom explicitly supported women’s rights and access in various ways. My goal was to show my support for women’s rights by being more than just a consumer of lectures, videos, and community events. I wanted to take further action that supported the movement of equality.
Keep in mind that I have been an avid volunteer for most of my life in politics, with children, and seniors, and was known to be an ally within the women’s community. However, my request to engage further with these groups contained non-responses, or “I don’t knows”, to “thank you for your money, but there is nothing else you can do”. Ultimately, it seemed that there was little space for myself to take action in these circles that were “inclusive” and “progressive”.
I will contrast my experiences by stating that some spaces welcome male involvement in the space to fight for equality. For instance, the White Ribbon Campaign. To a degree, The Centre for Research and Education on Violence Against Women and Children, and the He for She movement started by the United Nations. Although these organizations advocate for further engagement of males in ending violence against women in different forms, these organizations are still far and few between.
Keep in mind that my thesis discovered that the males in my study wanted to engage further, but did not know what steps to take [3]. Thus, action is what lacked in my research. Maybe this points to a greater issue, where males are not really welcome to engage in institutional feminism that pushes actions over words? In my mind, male engagement as allies alongside women in the fight of equality and respect is mostly a great headline for the woke Olympics, but hardly a truth that some people want to sink their teeth into.
However, there may be a solution to this. Once we ignore all the outrage wars or the virtue signalling, men can just be good people by supporting women as they would support anyone. Men can support women with empathy, respect, care, listening, observing, putting others first, or being mindful. Otherwise, if we imagine that there is no way to destroy bad behaviour in the world, then we have already given up our purpose towards love driven by reason.
So, is there a place for males to take deeper action within public associations who explicitly support women’s equal to rights? In short, not really. Based on my experiences within various communities, it mostly seems ok that men can talk about supporting women, but not supporting women in reality, unless it is done quietly in the action of one’s own life.
*A key finding was that although 1/3 of my adolescent male respondents were defensive about the topic of violence against women, it was statistically signifiant that the males were willing to take action in reducing the issue. But this is where my masters ended. Boys wanted to do more, but they weren’t sure where to start. And I must say, after a young lifetime of trying to support, advocate, donate, study, and understand how to support women publicly, I would say that it is a dangerous terrain for men to explore.
** I am aware that I am a white male from lower middle class background. I am aware that I am luckier in many ways than I will ever imagine and realize, and that for many people of different identities in the world, I will never know what it is like to be any of them. So largely, I know that I do not know. Which is why my purpose in life is to understand the rich complexities of the world around me, rather than to abstractly distance myself from legitimate problems that we face on the daily basis, such as women’s daily struggles.
Mark Henshaw 