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Article Excerpt
It would appear that men are in trouble. The alert has been sounded in movies during the past decade, from Falling Down (1993), about a white male whose dissatisfactions with his life precipitate a rampage, to Fight Club (1999), about basically the same thing. It's been on television, too, with two Donahue episodes in December 2002, one on "Angry White Men" and another called "Are Women Getting a Free Ride?" Those episodes were so popular that the show had an "Angry White Men" week in January. There is an emerging pattern of male confusion and anxiety in the face of a rapidly changing gender landscape. In boys it can take the form of otherwise inexplicable behavior, such as watching with gleeful awe as Steve-O (star of Jackass, MTV's highest rated show) emasculates himself by performing silly but dangerous stunts wearing women's lingerie. In extreme cases, boys have exploded with a level of anger more expected from men, even going so far as systematically shooting and killing classmates at school. (1)
At the adult level, it is not uncommon for men to manifest their anxieties about the gender ferment of the past few decades in complaints that men are being unfairly disadvantaged, or that women are being unfairly advantaged. Thus, antifeminism is a common theme in angry man discourse: feminism has "gone far enough," women have already achieved equality, now it's men who are suffering from inequality, so it's time to tilt the balance back toward men a little.
That appears to be the approximate vantage point of one author, who has determined that men are the victims of what he unabashedly calls "the second sexism." (2) His antifeminism is not overt, although he approvingly cites a particularly notorious antifeminist who has accused (purportedly) man-hating feminists of a "war against boys." (3) He also devotes most of his critical attention to feminist theorists, in one instance chiding Cynthia Enloe for addressing military sexism but ignoring "the much greater disadvantage suffered by vast numbers of men who are forced into combat against their wills" (199). While that's a curious objection to Enloe's work, it points to what makes the "second sexism" claim intriguing. Instead of focusing on how men's lives have been changed in recent decades by feminism, the author emphasizes ways men are purportedly victimized by sexism that actually have been around for millennia, for example, being sent off to war. It's about time we paid attention to long-standing patterns of sexism faced by men, he seems to be saying, and stop giving women all the attention. He expects that this campaign to address sexism against men will be opposed by "those feminists who will regard attention to the second sexism as threatening" (188) (although the nature of the threat is not specified). More interesting is the other group from which he expects opposition, namely, "conservatives who endorse traditional gender roles" (188). (4)
1. The Decline of Men?
The reader who hasn't followed the decline of male status as portrayed in movies and television shows may be surprised to hear of it. It is easy to miss, given the continued ubiquity of signs of male power. Martha Burk, who started the recent effort to integrate women into the Augusta National Golf Club, home of the Masters Golf Tournament, said of her effort, "It's such a big deal because it's got sex, it's got money, it's got sports, it's got all the guy things that guys care about. And whether we like it or not, guys are still running this world." (5) More systematically, Katha Pollitt scouts the gender terrain and concludes:
It takes a real talent for overlooking the obvious to argue that women have achieved equality in contemporary America. After all, ... virtually every important political, social, cultural, and economic institution is still dominated by men: legislatures, courts, corporations, labor unions, the news and entertainment media, education, science, medicine, religion. Study after study shows that women make less money than men even when they do the same or similar work, which they have a hard time getting; that they shoulder the bulk of child-rearing and housework, even in families where both husband and wife work full-time; that they are on the receiving end of a great deal of rape, domestic violence, abuse, and harassment. (6)
That quick survey of ongoing sexism (against women) is complemented by legal scholar Deborah Rhode's recent book, Speaking of Sex, (7) which exhaustively and compellingly surveys the depth and range of gender inequality that continues to disadvantage women. Yet many men have difficulty seeing inequality, Rhode says:
"Pale males eat it again," announces a character in Michael Crichton's popular film Disclosure. This perspective is widely shared. According to recent polls, close to half of all men think that they are subject to unfair penalties for advantages others had in the past. Two-thirds of men and three-quarters of male business leaders do not believe that women encounter significant discrimination for top positions in business, professions, and government. (8)
Why do men have such difficulty seeing gender inequality? First, for the same reason whites have so much difficulty seeing racism: because they don't have to, it's not something they need to notice in their everyday lives. Michael Kimmel recounts how he learned about this aspect of gender and race privilege. In a feminist theory seminar, a white woman told a black woman that they shared a bond as women. Disagreeing, the black woman responded:
"When you wake up in the morning and look in the mirror, what do you see?" she asked.
"I see a woman," replied the white woman.
"That's precisely the problem," responded the black woman. "I see a black woman. To me, race is visible every day, because race is how I am not privileged in our culture. Race is invisible to you, because it's how you are privileged. It's a luxury, a privilege, not to see race all the time ..."
As I [Kimmel] witnessed this exchange, I was startled, and groaned ... Someone asked what my response meant.
"Well," I said, "when I look in the mirror, I see a human being." (9)
It's only when race and gender are a source of victimization, of harm, that they get noticed. When they bring nothing to your life but privilege, when they don't disturb your life, you don't notice them--and you also don't notice how they affect the lives of others. (10)
Another factor that may contribute to some men's inability to see women's inequality is knowing that they, too, can be victims of gender-related bias, abuse, and harassment. What's missing is a sense of how their victimization compares with what women face. As the proponent of the "second sexism" idea acknowledges (some would say understates), "In most [geographical] places, women are generally worse off than men" (196). Those are, however, not places to which he directs his concern. (11) As for the other places, specified as "contemporary liberal democracies" (196), he expresses uncertainty about whether "women [are] worse off than men" (197), speculating that "the extent of discrimination against men is probably seriously underestimated" (197), making it difficult to compare the victimization of women and men. So he's "not convinced" that "men in our society enjoy overall advantage" (205). (12) That doesn't matter, anyway, he says: "Fortunately, I think that the question of which sex suffers the greater discrimination is simply irrelevant to the question of whether attention should be given to the second sexism" (197).
He comes no closer than that to offering an overall appraisal of the seriousness or urgency of the plight of men and boys, but it's possible to gauge it, approximately, with the specific examples he gives of "second sexism": men and boys are more likely than women and girls to be subjected to the following: pressure to engage in military combat, demeaning crew-cuts (and other unspecified demeaning acts) in military training, victimization by aggression and violence, expendability in disasters ("women and children first"), corporal punishment, sexual assault cases being taken less seriously, loss of custody of their children as a result of a divorce, less affection from divorced mothers, and discrimination if they are homosexual. (13) There are still other possible cases of discrimination, he says, for which the evidence is "equivocal" (183).
I'm not so sure that it is "simply irrelevant" to compare those examples, and any larger pattern discernible from them, with the vast, pervasive, systematic, and often horrifically cruel disadvantaging of women throughout the world, for which an immense amount of evidence has been amassed over the past few decades. Nonetheless, his examples leave no doubt that there is some quite substantial disadvantaging of men going on, and that deserves attention.
But does the disadvantaging faced by men constitute, or derive from, sexism or discrimination? I don't think so. I think that's the wrong diagnosis, one that diverts attention from a more adequate account that is necessary for the disadvantaging of men to be effectively addressed. I shall discuss three interwoven reservations that I have about the claim that men are victims of sexism: it fails to identify perpetrators who do the discriminating, it decontextualizes and dehistoricizes, and it relies on a politically anemic notion of discrimination. (14) I'll conclude with a discussion of strategies for ameliorating male disadvantage, as well as examples of gender flux in popular culture that may serve as optimistic signs.
2. Who's Doing These Things to Men?
Who are the perpetrators of male disadvantaging? (15) Is it necessary to point out the obvious? It is primarily men who disadvantage men. It is almost entirely men, historically and in the present, who design and implement policies that are likely to lead to war, who decide that it will be men who will fight the war, who subject soldiers to demeaning hazing (including those crewcuts), and who send men off to do battle. It is primarily men who get aggressive and violent with men, and when men get violent with men, it is more likely to result in serious injury or death than when women are violent with men. It is primarily men who insist on saving the women and children first. Most judges who give custody of children to women are men (although one study shows that when fathers actually try to get custody, they win three times as often as mothers). (16) It is overwhelmingly men who not only discriminate against other men who are gay, but also intimidate, assault, and kill them. Corporal punishment is a bit more complicated, primarily by the fact that women generally spend way more time than men engaged in childcare, but in the U.S. there is a substantial pattern of men bearing a special responsibility for corporal punishment of their sons.
There are manifold other ways in which men behave badly toward other men that could be added to those "second sexism" examples. Most men who are raped are the victims of other men. In the overwhelming majority of anti-male sexual harassment cases brought to the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, the perpetrators are male (and nominally heterosexual). (17) Most victims of injuries and deaths resulting from hazing, including coerced drinking, are men, and they are hazed by other men. It is the callousness of primarily male executives that results in workplace hazards that cause injury, disease, and death to workers, including many cases where the victims are all or mostly male.
So the perpetrators of male disadvantage are most likely to be male themselves. But the "perpetrator" notion must be used cautiously here; I do not mean for it to connote blameworthiness, for in this case blame would require the same decontextualization and dehistoricization that is required by the broader assertion of a "second sexism." (18) Thus, when male...
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