SUBSCRIBE TO OUR FREE NEWSLETTER
Daily news & progressive opinion—funded by the people, not the corporations—delivered straight to your inbox.
5
#000000
#FFFFFF
5
#000000
#FFFFFF
masculinity
The "New" Masculinity Is Actually 50 Years Old
Woven together over decades, the antisexist men's movement has created a multilayered tapestry of one of the most important social change movements you may never have heard of.
Sep 03, 2024
Since the presidential campaign shake-up in July, the national conversation about manhood has been abuzz with talk of a “new” masculinity, embodied by good, decent men like Tim Walz and Doug Emhoff. What’s actually new, though, is what’s now coming into focus: the consequences of 50 years of men's hard work to redefine manhood.
Masculinity has too often been narrowly characterized as poisonous misogyny, and many men seen as patriarchal MAGA heads. The rest of us, apparently, just stand by mute, unwilling to challenge the bigots and bullies. That’s a lie. All men— including even “white dudes”—have been taking back the narrative.
While it’s refreshing to hear the Democrats’ vice presidential nominee, Gov. Walz, and second gentlemen, Mr. Emhoff, cited as models of this “new” masculinity, it’s far from new. Men have been successfully crafting strategies to break out of the man box since the mid-1970s.
"It’s time for men to take a leap of faith and trust that our lives will be enriched in ways we can’t imagine if we loosen our grip and share the reins or, Goddess forbid, hand them over to women..."
Nearly everyone is aware of the bad news about “toxic” masculinity—from men like Andrew Tate to groups like the Proud Boys. Few, though, know the good news: men’s efforts to redefine manhood.
Time for a little history.
For 50 years, a growing number of men of all races and ethnicities in North America and around the world have followed women in working to prevent domestic and sexual violence and protect reproductive rights, while also working to redefine and transform traditional ideas about manhood, fatherhood, and brotherhood.
The antisexist men’s movement incorporates a range of men and men’s experiences: from boys on the journey to manhood and fathering/mentoring to male survivors and men of color; from GBTQI+ men to men overcoming violence; from men’s health to men’s experience with feminism. Woven together, over the decades we’ve created a multilayered tapestry of one of the most important social change movements you may never have heard of.
There are men—and women—around the world, working day in and day out for gender equality. Globally, the campaign is united under the banner of the MenEngage Alliance, a network of more than 1,000 members in 88 countries. In North America, organizations like Equimundo, Next Gen Men, Fathering Together, A Call to Men, and Men4Choice, have for years been transforming our idealistic aspirations into concrete action.
There certainly are men who feel marginalized, deeply resentful of women’s gains. Andrew Yarrow’s Man Out: Men on the Sidelines of American Life empathizes with them; men who are distressed about their place in contemporary society. They’re highly susceptible to being seduced by traditional manhood, characterized by Trump and Vance’s unhinged bluster.
By contrast, Doug Emhoff and Tim Walz represent men able to integrate being both steady and strong and tender and vulnerable. As a high school teacher, Mr. Walz, for example, was able to simultaneously coach football and advise a gay straight alliance.
Today, more men understand that we can’t ignore the power we hold in society. Not a power we earned, but one we received at birth simply by arriving on the planet in male-identified bodies. Relinquishing our grip on the twin symbols of that power—privilege and entitlement—is not easy. Men fear both losing control and having less; fear the unknown wondering, “What will my life look like if I am not in charge?” It’s time for men to take a leap of faith and trust that our lives will be enriched in ways we can’t imagine if we loosen our grip and share the reins or, Goddess forbid, hand them over to women, perhaps beginning in November with Kamala Harris.
Men are rejecting a fixed definition of masculinity, replacing it with an emotionally rich expression of masculinities. We are navigating our lives with both our eyes and our hearts open, beginning to see the contours of a manhood that celebrates rather than dreads men’s tears and uncertainties. Men are now able to negotiate the gender landscape on surer footing, better able to bear witness to women’s lives, understand women’s realities—and our own.
Masculinity based on domination and emotional rigidity has failed men. Men have been working for five decades to replace those traits with compassion and vulnerability. That’s the masculinity inspiring men not just to move forward, but to unambiguously declare, “We’re not going back.”
Keep ReadingShow Less
In Honor of Uvalde, Let Us Reimagine the Texas Two Step as the Texas Peace Step
We, as men, need to follow women’s lead onto the dance floor of change and use our identity to advance life-saving gun control measures.
May 24, 2023
One year after the mass shooting in Uvalde, Texas, officials are still ducking and weaving; still doing little to curb easy access to guns throughout the state.
The Texas Two-Step, a once-scandalous waltz performed throughout the Lone Star state, was recognized as a fancy Bohemian dance called a redowa, a Czech word meaning to steer or whirl around. Apparently, steering and whirling around was what police officers in Uvalde were doing for 77 minutes on the grounds of Robb Elementary School on May 24, 2022.
Whatever whirling around police may have been doing outside, when the siege inside was over two teachers and 19 children lay dead on their classroom floor. No Texas Two-Step for them. Ever.
Too many guys—wrongly stereotyped as having two left feet—nevertheless too often stand flatfooted on the sidelines while women are at the forefront of actions aimed at preventing gun violence.
If you’re sensing anger—think of fictional Howard Beale in Network shouting, “I’m mad as hell and I’m not going to take this anymore”—I hope you also can sense my eyes welling up with tears. Tears for the dead children, teachers, and their families in Uvalde—no Memorial Day barbecues for them—and tears, too, for their 2023 counterparts in Allen and Cleveland, suburbs of Dallas and Houston, and in every other city and town in the U.S. where explosive AR-15 firepower keeps breaking the psychic sound barrier—and the hearts—of people from Louisville, Kentucky, to Nashville, Tennessee; Dadeville, Alabama to Farmington, New Mexico. (Listing all the communities where mass shootings have happened so far in 2023 would have left no room to write anything else. Maybe that’s the point.)
To bring an end to the NRA’s ballets of death in schools, malls, banks, houses of worship, supermarkets, movie theaters, night clubs, and music festivals (have I missed anywhere?), we’ll need to design a dance for life, snaking our way through the streets of every village, town, city, and state, and in Washington, D.C. We’ll need a sustained citizens’ flash mob uprising in every city hall lobby and every state capitol rotunda.
In their call for stricter gun control laws, Tennessee state representatives Justin Pearson and Justin Jones, and Rep. Gloria Johnson, have been at the forefront of a sustained citizens’ campaign that did show up in the state capitol in Nashville. And, with a Tennessean peace force of thousands behind them, Gov. Bill Lee finally pledged to call the legislature back into session in July to pass new gun safety laws. As of this writing, he’s failed to keep that promise.
What would it look like to reimagine the Texas Two-Step “steering and whirling around” in a nonviolent national dance? What role could men play in steering society to safety? Too many guys—wrongly stereotyped as having two left feet—nevertheless too often stand flatfooted on the sidelines while women are at the forefront of actions aimed at preventing gun violence. While men may not be known for dancing, we do know how to march.
So, men—as men—this is a pivotal moment. We need to follow women’s lead onto the dance floor of change. We need to use our identity as men to advance life-saving gun control measures. Father’s Day is just around the corner. It’s an apt moment to leverage our role—if not as a dad, then as a coach, mentor, uncle, or grandfather—to lead our sons and nephews on a march for peace.
With mass shootings a weekly occurrence, we cannot overlook who the murderers are—almost exclusively white men. Right-wing guns-über-alles proponents always focus on the mental health of the (primarily white, male) shooter. They never want to talk about either his gender or the direct link between the social policies they embrace and the loneliness and alienation many disaffected men experience.
Until or unless we acknowledge their plight and begin to socialize boys based on a model of manhood that cultivates compassion, empathy, and cooperation over competitiveness, enmity, and condemnation, we will miss a golden opportunity to choreograph a new direction for society. Maybe there will never be a swing dance called the Texas Peace Step, but imagining it is the least we can do to honor the memories of those murdered in Uvalde, and all the other victims and survivors of American gun violence.
Keep ReadingShow Less
Sen. Josh Hawley’s New Book on Manhood Is Wrong on Everything, Everywhere, All at Once
Although caricatured as a “manhood-obsessed hypocrite,” make no mistake: Hawley's vision for what a man is—or should be—is uniquely dangerous.
May 15, 2023
Ideas about men and manhood have been evolving for more than 50 years, but Sen. Josh Hawley has not gotten the message.
Like so many others working to protect white male supremacy (see Carlson, Tucker; McCarthy, Kevin), he’s driving a gas-guzzling Cadillac on a road increasingly filled with EVs. Just as women are vigorously resisting returning to a pre-Roe v. Wade America, men aren’t going back either. Tone deaf to shifts in the culture, Hawley published a book about men this week, perhaps as a ploy to revive his presidential ambitions.
The book—titled Manhood: Finding Purpose in Faith, Family, and—is a call for American men to “stand up and embrace their God-given responsibility as husbands, fathers, and citizens,” according to Regency, Hawley’s far-right publisher. If you want to know what not to embrace in considering American manhood, it’s all in the 256 pages of this book. Claiming that our country’s all-male founders believed that the U.S. “depends” on certain masculine virtues, ignores the realities of today. There is much to appreciate about men; still, we’d be much better off if we talked about positive changes—embracing gender equality and rejecting white male supremacy.
Tone deaf to shifts in the culture, Hawley published a book about men this week, perhaps as a ploy to revive his presidential ambitions.
Calling men out as unemployed whiners, and trash-talking women while playing video games and watching pornography, misses the mark. Examples of new expressions of masculinity abound, from stay-at-home dads to younger men becoming curious about feminism.
Hawley’s thesis—that men are in crisis—does have a kernel of truth; there are men floundering, but that is not where the majority of younger men are headed. More and more men are abandoning expressions of masculine culture based on oppressing anyone not white or male. Sure, we still have a ways to go, but support among younger men for women’s reproductive rights, gay and trans rights, and voting rights, is on the rise.
There are organizations around the country and across the globe promoting gender equality; challenging men’s violence; and encouraging involved fatherhood—all while rejecting men as “Top Dog” at home, work, and houses of worship.
Danger does exist; just not what Hawley is concerned about. It’s in young men enamored of gun culture, sucked into social media echo chambers of hate. To see how out of touch Hawley is, there’s nothing in his book about perpetrators of mass shooting massacres—primarily young men.
“Ever since the January 6 committee showed the video of Sen. Hawley running from the insurrectionist mob he’d earlier encouraged with a fist in the air, we’ve all had a good laugh at his expense,” Jonathan Capehart wrote in the Washington Post.
Although caricatured as a “manhood-obsessed hypocrite,” make no mistake: Hawley is dangerous precisely because, as Capehart noted, “He is selling a vision of masculinity to White America that has much more to do with prejudice than manliness.” His message may still resonate with older white men, but younger men, even those who may enjoy watching Ultimate Fighting, are tolerant, accepting of their gay and trans coworkers, and are supportive of colleagues who have had an abortion.
The future is not white male supremacy, in part because patriarchy is dangerous for men.
In a March 31, 1776 letter, Abigail Adams, future First Lady to our second president, wrote her husband John, urging the Continental Congress to remember women’s interests as they prepared to fight for independence from Great Britain.
“[I]n the new code of laws… I desire you would remember the ladies and be more generous and favorable to them than your ancestors…” Adams wrote, adding: “Do not put such unlimited power into the hands of the husbands. Remember, all men would be tyrants if they could. If particular care and attention is not paid to the ladies, we are determined to foment a rebellion and will not hold ourselves bound by any laws in which we have no voice or representation.”
There have been profeminist men since at least the 18th century. While Abigail Adams may not have mentioned men, they were allies-in-waiting then, and are growing in numbers today. What is different now is that we’re stepping forward to say so. Fifty years ago, Josh Hawley may have sold a lot of books. Today, I’m betting they’ll be remaindered by the Fourth of July.
Keep ReadingShow Less
Most Popular