Feminism Gives Men Choice

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Last time I wrote about how COVID-19 does not cause positives, people do so by acting in ways that they were capable of doing all along. This got me thinking about an important part of our work on masculinities that I have ruminated on for a long time - choice.

You can choose to be a "non-patriarchal man" and take other positive steps, but one also chooses to do all the negative things about masculinity. As much as we're socialised or brought up in a certain way, at the end of the day we have the final choice over our actions.

In this article I'm going to explore choice in relation to masculinity and expected gender norms. I’ll look at why that choice is limited, what that does to us and how a different more positive outcome is possible.

Over the last few years of doing this job I've often been asked / have thought about what Feminism means to men. My personal answer is: absolutely everything, Feminist principles and politics have changed my life for the better in numerous ways. My quick answer is that it gives men choice.

Now I know that in a patriarchal world that favours men and maleness, men (particularly cis-het & white men) already have more choice than people of other genders. They can choose to dress as they wish without fear of sexual harassment, they can choose to go to work without putting on make-up and know they won't be judged...the list goes on.

What i'm talking about here though is in relation to choosing the type of man / type of masculinity that you want to embody. To understand why men don’t have this choice, we’re first going to explore how women, to a greater extent, do. FYI I’m writing about a UK context here as it’s the one I know.

In very broad terms a large part of women's emancipation has been the over-throwing and re-framing of the gender roles that they have been assigned by the patriarchy. If the "rules" say that people of your gender are to be a mother and carer - and therefore can't go out to work - then if one wants to go out to work one needs to re-frame that view in order to not only show your detractors that you are capable of more, but also to show yourself and those with your shared identity that you can be capable of more - and that you are more.

The struggle for legal and political recognition has been a vitally important struggle, but just as important is a recognition that who you are and how your gender is portrayed is what you make it, not what it is portrayed as by an other (in this case the patriarchy). Having the language and ability to define who you are on your own terms is a vital part of being able to live as your true self. Being one's true self requires choice and in turn leads to further choice.

In further simplified terms, women and non-cis-gendered people have had to show who they are and forge their gender in their own words & methods because they have been portrayed in other ways, by other people. An interesting result of this has been that, in comparison to men, there are many more ways of being a woman and displaying femininity. I have heard this be called "having a more mature relationship with one's gender."

A classic example of this that we often see in our school workshops is in relation to clothing. Generally speaking women can wear jeans & a t-shirt as easily as they can high heels & a dress. Whereas men tend to be more straight-jacketed to traditionally 'masculine' forms of clothing. The boys we discuss this issue with can tie themselves in knots by simultaneously arguing that a dress is very definitely “women’s clothing” and that men should wear trousers, but also accepting that you aren’t born wearing clothes and can choose to put on whatever you wish each day.

Just as men are bound by our clothing choices, we are also bound by numerous other perceived rules of masculine behaviour: don’t show emotion (other than anger), don’t be tactile with other men, don’t drink a Cosmo when there’s beer - in other words, don’t act like a woman [or more accurately, don’t act like your perception of femininity].

The question of why this happens is a huge topic that I would love to write about at length, but we’d need at least a book to do it justice. A short answer would be misogyny: the patriarchal male sees maleness as superior to femaleness in all capacities, therefore considers all things female of a lower status and to be avoided. The necessary answer is much more complicated, not least because today, although still impacted by patriarchal views, individual young men in the UK are increasingly moving away from the view that femininity is inferior more than they are siding with it - at least my experience in the classroom would suggest so.

Without diving into the academic side of theories on masculinity (my personal fave being the Precarious Manhood Theory), an important part of the explanation of why men are bound more rigidly to a smaller set of options is that we don’t talk about what else is open to us.

In reality, men do have the choice to step outside a few confined options of behaviour, but we've been acting like we don't, partly because we haven't had a society that forces us to be different but also because it can be scary to step outside the Man Box - add that to the fact that men aren't supposed to be scared and we find ourselves in a never-ending conundrum. The peer pressure to uphold the values of a monolithic version of masculinity effectively amounts to a giant collective (but never officially recognised) vow of silence between boys & men.

By not discussing where we are and are not comfortable with “the rules” of masculinity we are not discovering what other people - particularly other men - really think about said rules. By not opening up this conversation we are not allowing ourselves to see that our perception of masculinity and how we feel we should behave is rarely shared with as many other men as we might think. If we can break this barrier then we can take a huge step toward creating a happier and more liberating version of masculinity for everyone.

That’s why the main aim of our GLI Workshops is to bring about a discussion in which participants get to discuss what “being a man” and maleness is - and what it means to them. We don’t think that anyone can have the answers to this question, the nature of masculinity is that it’s unique to each individual and is crafted by thousands of interactions and experiences that start at a young age. What we do know is that through bringing the question into the open we allow people to start asking whether their perceptions are accurate, which in turn allows them to move away from the “rules” of being a man that they may have felt compelled to follow, but are not in reality comfortable with.

This is the choice that men can gain which I mentioned at the start. The need to escape oppression led to women defining what womanhood means to them, and in doing so created multiple different ways of being a woman. That same questioning of rigid gender norms needs to be applied to all humans, and especially to men. If we allow ourselves to question, critique and redefine what “being a man” means, then we are giving ourselves the power to choose the person that we really want to be.