The defining feature of contemporary feminism is that it regards any characteristic associated with the male gender role as beneficial. If men are the ones that go to war, then fighting in a war is a sign of power and male hegemony. Never mind that war means death, terror and destruction for the men who are assigned the task of fighting. Similarly, working outside the home is considered more attractive than working in the home, even when comparing a miner to a middle class housewife, since working outside the home has traditionally been a man’s job.
I could go on and list more gendered tasks that involve both pros and cons, but where feminism disregards half of the picture in order to uphold the illusion that only women are shortchanged by their gender role. However, I’d like to focus on one specific topic.
We often hear that men are the norm, and that this fact is at the epicenter of the oppression of women. Since men are the norm, women are perpetually regarded as the second sex, and so on. Now I’m not saying that this is completely wrong. There are always two sides to the coin, and feminists are generally good at latching onto one of the sides. As usual though, the other side is largely unexplored, and in much need of attention.
The key disadvantage of being the norm is that men are not encouraged to reflect upon what it means to be a man, or what the male gender role means for men. In many ways women have an identity as women, and men have an identity as humans. This makes us men weak when trying to formulate why we don’t agree with society’s current analysis of gender roles. It also means that it’s taken several decades of intense feminism for men to start waking up and noticing that we are under attack. Men are simply not raised to articulate men’s issues or to form men’s organizations.
To understand this at an even deeper level we need to ask ourselves why men are the norm in the first place? Why not women, who give birth to the next generation, and whose lives have always been valued more highly than the lives of men? Men are the norm, since every successful society depends on the disposability of men. And one of the best ways to raise men to be disposable is to make the male norm so strong that it is simply “the human norm”.
The challenge that lies before men is thus one of becoming familiar with our own maleness and our own gender role. Are we automatically doing things for women, even if women have stopped doing certain things for us as a result of feminism? Are we OK with dying for our country, when our country silently condones misandry?
One of the best ways for men to break new ground and change the whole dynamic of the gender game is to simply refuse to be disposable, or at the very least: to demand significant compensation for being disposable, whether in your personal or your professional life.
Pelle Billing is an M.D. who writes and lectures about men’s issues and gender liberation beyond feminism.
