![]() In 1978’s About Men, Phyllis Chesler acknowledged that male supremacy condemned most men to be “losers” in relation to other men. Nonetheless, it is not the case that earlier feminists assumed that men were all having a wonderful time oppressing women, or that the pressure to be masculine did not impose significant costs. Not all second-wave feminists have been as generous towards men, or as curious about their inner lives. It also matters for women, though, because when men feel ashamed, they do not just punish themselves.Īs a feminist analysis of masculinity, it is compassionate but it is not servile Faludi is deeply sympathetic towards the men she interviews, recognising that their self-worth matters in its own right. The solution to this is complex, and it certainly goes far beyond exhortations for men to talk more or be more like women. Misogyny will, inevitably, make victims of men themselves. ![]() Using numerous case studies, from the victimisation of a female army cadet to gay men’s mistreatment of drag queens, it suggests that a great deal of male self-hate stems from the impossibility of maintaining a consistent barrier between male identity and femininity. Nevertheless, Faludi took her own era’s masculinity crisis seriously, following up Backlash with Stiffed: The Betrayal of the American Man in 1999. In Feminism Without Women, published in the same year, Tania Modleski went so far as to suggest that feminists should “consider the extent to which male power is actually consolidated through cycles of crisis and resolution”. “A ‘crisis of masculinity’,” wrote Susan Faludi in 1991, “has erupted in every period of backlash, a faithful, quiet companion to the loudly voiced call for ‘a return to femininity’.” Like many feminists at the time, Faludi was highly conscious of the way in which this idea of “crisis” could be manipulated and used against women. It is not new, which is not to say that there is no more need for it today. I’ve found there is quite a lot of feminist analysis that is focussed on men and boys. I write this as both a feminist and a mother of sons (Moran seeming rather contemptuous of the latter unlike mothers of daughters, we’re apparently oblivious to the traumas they may be going through or indeed inflicting on others). ![]() To read it, one might think feminists have never before addressed The Man Question - that, up until this very moment, we have once again done “fuck all” - but this simply isn’t true. This is as much the case with What About Men? as with How to Be a Woman. Whatever she is writing about, no woman has written about before. What she offers is a real-time enactment of the very cover-up she denies is taking place. Moran doesn’t engage with Spender, but then she doesn’t engage much with earlier feminists (beyond declaring Germaine Greer “crackers on the subject of transgender issues”). As Dale Spender wrote in 1982’s Women of Ideas, “women’s past is at least as rich as men’s that we do not know about it, that we encounter only interruptions and silence when we seek it, is part of our oppression”. I don’t happen to share this view of history. Sure, you might find it patronising to be compared to labradors, but at least it’s not being suggested that your half of the human race has contributed nothing of value to the whole of civilisation. It’s a passage that any man currently feeling affronted by Moran’s latest work What About Men? might do well to recall. No Beatles, no Churchill, no Hawking, no Columbus. Let’s stop exhaustingly pretending that there is a parallel history of women being victorious and creative, on an equal with men, that’s just been comprehensively covered up by The Man … We have no Mozart no Einstein no Galileo. “Women,” she states, “have basically done fuck all for the last 100,000 years.” Midway through her 2011 bestseller How to Be a Woman, Caitlin Moran makes a rather bold declaration.
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