One of the key findings of the men’s movement is that defining feature of the male gender role is disposability. Throughout history, men have been expected to sacrifice their lives in wars, accidents and dangerous jobs. The influence men have had on society has invariably been coupled to this willingness to take on dangerous, heavy and dirty tasks that nobody really wants to perform. Helping men realize that being disposable is no longer necessary in modern and postmodern societies is a big step forward, and enables men to let go of the learned helpnessless that characterizes many men when they sacrifice their own life without knowing why. In some ways, there is a direct parallell here to the women’s movement helping women realize that they do not need to be housewives; instead they can work and earn their own living, just like men.
So far so good. But what happens if liberated men continue to choose jobs that are dangerous, and liberated women choose to stay at home with the kids (part-time or full-time)? Does this mean that we’ve gotten nowhere in our struggle to help liberate the sexes?
The distinction that needs to be made here is that truly realizing what options you have, and what choices you actually make, are two completely different things. If I know that I as a man do not have more of a responsibility to be a police officer than a women has, then I have been liberated from my gender role, regardless of whether I choose to actually be a police officer or not. Similarly, a woman has been liberated from her traditional gender role if she knows that she has every option to prioritize her career-even if she then proceeds to focus most of her time on having a family.
In my opinion, the reason that we even focus on the actual choices of the sexes to determine whether we have reached some sort of gender equality, is due to the fact that mainstream feminism has repeatedly taught us that we aren’t equal until women work as much as men do outside the home. This narrow focus on making the sexes identical, has very little to do with gender liberation. Gender equality need not mean gender sameness, regardless of what we have been led to believe.
There is a lot of work still to be done for the men’s movement. Men are still committing suicide far too often, most of the homeless are men, boys are performing badly in school, men are removed from their children after divorces, etc etc. But as we are working to change the conditions for men, let us not make the mistake of telling men how to behave, or what kind of lifestyle is “approved”. Feminism has already walked down that path once, and it simply doesn’t work.
Pelle Billing is an M.D. who writes and lectures about men’s issues and gender liberation beyond feminism.
