THE SUBJECT MAN FACING FEMINISIM
One of the most important strategies for perpetuating the patriarchal domination has been to monopolise the ability to become cultured, limiting the accumulation of knowledge to its exclusive use by the masculine elites. However, access of bourgeois women to education and enlightened ideas opened the door for questioning the social invisibilisation women were submitted to leading to what we know as feminisms. The visibility and questioning of the female subject that feminism triggers forces men to rethink their masculinity, since at that time the subject “man” perceived himself as a “human” subject. That the subject “woman” reappears in social life, after centuries of forced invisibility, forcing them to realize that there is another gender within the human specie. Modern man realizes that masculinity is not intrinsic in humanity, opening the door to the conception of masculinity (or masculinities) as we know them today. Since this article intends to focus on the construction of the masculine identity, I shall not elaborate on the development of feminist ideas, but on how they affected the construction of the man subject and on how they are brought to the current masculine imaginary at a social level.
First Wave and Posturing of Men
What we now know as the first wave of feminism, preceded by the “Declaration of the Rights of Woman and the Female Citizen” written by Olympe de Gouges (Marie Gouze), grew during the 19th century and the beginning of the 20th. It initiated a process of organisation and collective action of women, who demanded legal equality in relation to the rights attributed to men. Those mobilisations were met with disdain and violence, and many men devoted themselves to actively confront their ideas and deeds, mocking the women that participated and the men that supported them. The attitude of those men is framed in what we now know as sexism, and they intended to actively perpetuate the patriarchal order, believing they themselves superior to women based on the privileged position the patriarchy conferred them. Those men held the hegemony in the masculine imaginary, but with time and the development of ideas that question the patriarchal domination this hegemony is slowly becoming eroded.
On the other side we can find anti-sexist or pro-feminist men who understand the claims against patriarchy and defend the emancipation and empowerment of women. Within those, we can find two groups: the passive partners who share the theoretical imaginary but do not actively participate in ending patriarchal domination; and the active partners who are actively involved in the struggle against patriarchy. However, that second group of men is a minority, and the hegemony that is being lost bit by bit by the sexist men is being taken by men who are ambivalent about patriarchy. Those men can be identified as progressive and advocate values such as equality, but they make their own the narrative of the State institutions that presents the legislative progresses that have been reached regarding women as equality. They tend to feel disoriented when confronted with the increasing relevance of women in society, inserting some influence of the feminist narrative in their patriarchal rhetoric with a passive resistance to new progress. They can accept the narrative that advocates women liberation, but they react, sometimes violently, if their privileges are questioned.
Second Wave and “Men Groups”
The second wave of the feminist movement started during the latter half of the 20th century and it went beyond legislative vindications, focusing on a deep analysis of women as subject. The academic research and the essentialist analysis of the identity of women intended to separate the original feminine values from those added by the patriarchal domination, such as weakness. Weakness is associated to femininity as opposed to the strength associated to men, since in the dichotomous logic, if men are strong women must be weak. The questioning of the subject woman brought with it a questioning of the subject man, and feminist men intended to replicate the process of deconstruction of the identity woman. Emulating the “women groups” that were organised to debate on feminism, “groups of men” were started, aware for the first time of the deliberated exclusion of women among them. The deep studies about feminisms inspire some men to also start studies on masculinities, following the same methods the women used. But they found out that all the values in the identity man had been constructed by men, which led them to a seeming denial of their identity if they intended to reject the values of patriarchal domination.
Facing the perspective of an identity vacuum of this first studies, the “mytho-poetic movement” emerged, intending to define a masculine identity redefining an imaginary with values which were natural to men. The mytho-poetic movement appeared in the USA in the late 1980s and was led at the beginning by the poet Robert Bly. It mainly comprised heterosexual white men, frustrated and dissatisfied by the identity crisis of man, who respond to what they perceive of an erosion of patriarchy vindicating “natural” or “mitical” spaces where they can “experience their power”. A great deal of their activities result from an introspective work to restore, according to their claims, “the masculine energy” in these times of “absence of the father”, “might of the mother” and “feminisation of males”. The activities they carry on, mainly through groups that gather for the weekend in natural places, consist of rituals to recover the “wild nature” of men, which allows a reconnexion with an alleged “masculine sensitivity”, effectively generating self-help groups and a space for emotional support.
Other “groups of men” were known as “men’s rights”, a chaotic mass including everything from sensitive men that vindicated their rights of fatherhood, to divorcees who were resentful after court ruling that gave custody of their children to their mothers. Those bring together mainly “mild” sexists who considered that women had gone too far and that legislative progress needs to be stopped since it brings, according to them, a reverse discrimination favouring women. Unavoidably, there are also anti-feminist groups, or masculine supremacists, which rarely recognise themselves as such publicly but which intend to restore the “traditional” patriarchal masculinity. Those are frequently linked to religious fundamentalisms or to racist and xenophobic groups.
There are also groups of anti-sexist or pro-feminist groups of men, mainly study and debate groups, mainly with young men having higher eduction in social sciences such as sociology, psychology or anthropology. Those groups confront the injustice that patriarchal domination entails, maybe after witnessing the harm it brings on female partners, maybe after having been victims of the hegemonic model of masculinity, maybe simply after understanding the suffering that patriarchy generates. They start with feminist theories as the basis to review their attitude towards women, analysing also how the patriarchal oppression affects men, with a focus on the mutilating alienation of the masculine socialisation. They intend to profile masculinities that can live in harmony with the new femininities drafted by the feminisms, reviewing the privileges that entails being a man in a patriarchal society.
Third Wave, Intersectionality and Queer Theory
The third wave of feminisms, labeled at its beginnings as post-feminism, started at the end of the 20th century and lives on. Its analyses pull away from essentialism, proposing that there is not one only woman subject, opening the door to analyses on intersectionality. The interaction of different oppressions such as race, class, sexual orientation, age, religion and others is studied and debated. This leads also to the conception that there is no only man subject, opening the door to the study of non-hegemonic masculinities: masculinities that had been invisibilised by the patriarchal oppression of the traditional dominant masculinity.
The queer theory, which questions the dichotomy masculine-feminine in gender roles, widens the perspectives of analysis in the theoretical field. Despite the diverse and innovative possibilities that this entails, the academic framework where these postmodern theories are developed, and the wide technical language they use, excludes a great part of the population from the process of dialogue, which is majorly limited to western people with higher education. Besides, the practical incidence of these theories on the development of the identity man is still unknown due partly to its recent apparition, partly to their condition as an antithesis to the construction of the subjects man-woman. On the one hand, it proposes an imaginary where it is possible to construct identities beyond the dichotomy man-woman, and on the other hand it allows masculine subjects to find shelter in these ethereal identities, avoiding being confronted by their social reality as members of the oppressor gender.
Regardless of all of this, or perhaps even due to it all, the groups of anti-patriarchal men proliferate. They generate spaces of diversity and mutual support, intending to provide a place for those who try to scape the traditional dominant masculinity. They intend to give support to those who suffer the violence of the patriarchal system, trying to elucidate the appropriate ways to accompany partners (regardless of their sex and gender) from positions of care and respect, and constructing an imaginary of masculinity which allows to go beyond the patriarchal domination system.
SOURCE: THE INTERNATIONALIST COMMUNE OF ROJAVA
