Women’s Empowerment: What do Men have to do with it?
Photo by Laura Read/www.ReadWriteShoot.com
Representations of men as perpetrator and patriarch have profoundly shaped the terms of gender and development’s engagement with masculinities discourse and practice. Many of those working in the field have remained hesitant, tentative, often hostile to the notion that men might be potential allies in the struggle for gender justice. Even feminists broadly sympathetic to the principle of working with men tend to set out from the notion that all men everywhere are inherently part of the problem. And so efforts have focused on involving men, engaging men, inviting men in – usually on our terms. This is a women’s issue, we say, but there may be a little space for you here.
IN RESPONSE//
Taneta navo!
Polite English translation – I am sick and bloody tired of this men/male involvement/masculinities issue! It is just taking up so much “air time” it is becoming a full time occupation. It feels like I have been spending a great deal of my time in the last ten years discussing it. Even in spaces where it is not on the agenda, it comes up. You can set your timer in any conference, workshop, seminar, interview… Five minutes into it, right on cue, you are guaranteed to get the first question – we keep talking about women (and girls, who have been added these days) – what about the men (and boys! How can the two be separated, its like Rosencrantz and Guildenstern!). So I can’t believe I am engaging in this conversation, yet again.
What do Men Want?
For a hundred years or more, feminists have been answering Freud’s question of what do women want. And for much of this time, it has been presumed by those on both sides of the struggle that the answer to the parallel question of what men want would not be the same. Men’s patriarchal dividend must mean that men’s desire to be ‘in’ feminism with women is suspect. As Heath puts it (1986:1):
Women’s Empowerment: What do Men have to do with it? Response
“Isn’t gender about women and men?” When that question is asked it is typically a reflection of one of two sentiments: 1) an implicit accusation, as in, “if gender is about women and men then why are we only hearing about the ills women suffer, and don’t some women abuse men?” Or 2) it is a genuine, curious enquiry, as in, “is gender really about men as well?”
Contesting and Concurring - Women’s Empowerment: What do Men have to do with it?
It’s not just A Question of Men. The way feminism and gender and development discourse has dealt with – or rather failed to deal with – Men is part of a broader problem of essentialised labelling. As AWID has recently written, because the labelling we use no longer (if ever it did) reflects complex realities, the net can be cast too wide in identifying who is a fundamentalist and sometimes there’s a failure to spot closet fundamentalists.¹ In the process, precious opportunities for potential alliances are lost and some damaging partnerships are made. The trick, then, is to assess agendas rather than the person – in the case of men - look at their politics, and the outcomes of their behaviour for the people around them, and not their physical equipment.
Women’s Empowerment: What do Men have to do with it? Response
Current efforts to get men to sincerely support women’s empowerment are guided by distrustful, if not wrong-headed suppositions, about men being less gendered than women, about practices of masculinity universally benefiting all men and harming women and children, and about the ‘dividends of patriarchy’ being bestowed equally and universally on all men.
Should we say thank you?
For me, the most compelling reason for talking about masculinities is to demand that men change.
In the UK, in the last 50 years, the changes in women’s lives have been staggering. When my mother got married, she was earning more than my father, but she was not able to get a mortgage in her own name. Women who worked for the civil service had to give up their jobs when they got married. Before the pill, arguably the single most important thing in transforming women’s lives in the UK in the last century, getting pregnant as an unmarried woman was socially very risky indeed. As late as the 1990s, there were more men called John than women in the UK Parliament.
