Men and Feminism | Teen Ink

Men and Feminism

February 23, 2014
By ThetrueGuy509 GOLD, Dorchester, Massachusetts
ThetrueGuy509 GOLD, Dorchester, Massachusetts
19 articles 0 photos 0 comments

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The idea that men should care about women’s issues is not just going to change the condition of our socio-economic life; but men caring about women’s issues is the sine qua non of civility, courtesy, and signs that men have truly evolved from uneducated to being logically educated. It is illogical and weak for men to tolerate that their wives, mothers, sisters, girlfriends, nieces etc are to get treated unfairly at their jobs and controlled and dominated by other men. Men do not only need to care about women’s issues to ameliorate gender equality and all, but men [including myself] need to speak up and use their “testosterone” to manifest signs of how much they care about their mother’s, wives, and other women’s issues.






Although some men believe that marriage draws and strengthens their alliance with their wives, however if men demonstrate how much they care about women issues their act will certainly be the epitome husband and wife or men and women symbiosis.






Men should certainly support feminism for the same reasons that make women feel that they are inferior, unequal, and inept to men; as The Guy’s Guide to Feminism informs us, “Anthropologists think that organized, patriarchal societies go back only eight or ten thousand years but that some forms of men’s domination started long before.” These are the reasons why men should support the feminist movement; it is as similar as any other social movement.

Feminism will indeed improve social conditions for men by allowing boys and men to be free from the Men box, the box in which all males; big and small should act according to the men norms. Jessica Valenti clearly points out the expectations that deform boys and transform them into robots, literally. ; “Be a man. Boys don’t cry. Boys will boys...These gender expectations hurt men like they hurt us[women]” (Full Frontal Feminism.)

Many men feel threatened by feminist thinking due to the fact that the conservative mass media did an excellent job highlighting unanalyzed anti-male acts in the movement; as Hooks clearly explains “Conservative mass media constantly represented feminist women as man-haters. And when there was an anti-male faction or senti- ment in the movement, they highlighted it as a way of discrediting feminism. Embedded in the portrayal of feminists as man-hating was the assumption that all feminists were lesbians. Appealing to homophobia, mass media intensified anti-feminist sentiment among men” (Bell Hook)
The movement was constantly considered anti-male, due to the fact that in the middle of the feminist movement came a faction of feminists whose role was to portray all men as the enemy in order to represent all women as victims. This automatically focus on men’s deflected attention from privilege feminist activists which eventually would increase their class power; which sounds a lot like the “Patriarchy”.


The author's comments:
Although I cannot yet characterize myself as a feminist YET, but I certainly cannot help seeing sisters, mothers, girlfriends, nieces, and wives being oppressed by the patriarchal norms. It's just illogical to me.

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