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If you’d rather watch me read this:
My friend Kyle sent me a recent GQ profile of Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, aka AOC. (Check out my recent interview with Kyle if you haven’t already, A queer perspective on men's woes.)
The conversation with AOC centered on how men should combat misogyny.
AOC pointed out that abortion impacts men as well. And went on to say that men being vulnerable and talking to each other is going to shift things the fastest, soonest.
I’d argue that this applies to much more than abortion rights.
In sum, we’re not going to defeat misogyny without getting men on board. Or, maybe we could. But I suspect trying to do so will take a lot longer and be a lot less pleasant.
We need to reach men because men are half the population.
I was going to write that we need to reach men because they hold disproportionate power. But I’m not sure that’s true of the average man anymore.
I’m watching this really interesting video, shared with me by my friend Matt Powers, about the Manosphere. The video points out that in the worst corners of the Manosphere you see men dehumanize everyone who isn’t a straight white cis man. One solution to dehumanization is meta-humanization. But this often requires people who have been dehumanized to empathize with the people who have dehumanized them.
It’s certainly true that power is held disproportionately by men. That is, the people in power in nearly every major institution worldwide are disproportionately male. But that doesn’t necessarily mean the average man holds more power than the average woman.
Research suggests that men are more likely to exist at the extremes. Looking at a standard distribution, women tend to cluster more around the mean and men tend to cluster more around the tails.
Look at measurable intelligence, for instance. On average, men and women have roughly equal IQ scores. The difference is that there are far more very smart and very stupid men than there are very smart and very stupid women.
Life outcomes for men and women also tend to be different, in terms of extremes. Yes, there are more men at the top. But there are also more men at the bottom, at least in terms of incarceration, suicide, accidental deaths, deaths on the job, etc. “Rates of ‘deaths of despair,’ from suicide, alcohol, or an overdose, are almost three times higher among men than women,” writes Richard V. Reeves for the Atlantic.
Some of this is likely biological. Some of it results from sexism.
I think that if we want to end sexism, it’s going to go faster and better if the people who have the willingness and capacity to meta-humanize their “oppressors” do so.
And when you look for it, there’s plenty to empathize with men about.
I’ll quote AOC:
Men suffer from being under patriarchy. They don’t go to the doctor. They suffer from much higher rates of completed suicides. Even though they report lower levels of depression, that doesn’t mean that they suffer from it less. Just a couple years ago the American Psychological Association released a very deep paper and a campaign about how these traditional cultural markers of masculinity—stoicism, competition, domination, dominance—are leading to mental health issues for men. There’s a stigma around men being vulnerable.
I don’t think men are going to act better, en masse, until the average man is having a better time. And even if making life better for the average man doesn’t eradicate sexism, it’s still the right thing to do.
For that to happen, we need to significantly reduce the power and omnipresence of sexism in society. This will require, among other things, recognizing the extent to which violently enforced gender norms make life more difficult for most men.
Narrow, rigidly enforced conceptions of masculinity and femininity are the fundamental problem.
The idea that men must be masculine and therefore can’t be feminine punishes men for being vulnerable, asking for help, feeling their emotions, and displaying any emotion other than happiness and anger. Men cannot thrive in a society which demands that they repudiate a huge part of their humanity in order to be real men. This is how rigidly enforced gender roles dehumanize everyone in their sway. But they impact men more violently because society more violently punishes men for violating gender norms.
Looking at it this way, it seems like humanizing men and eradicating sexism are the same project.
I don’t agree with AOC on everything, not by a long shot. But I appreciate that she’s taking an empathetic approach to sexism. By talking explicitly about how sexism hurts men, she’s modeling meta-humanization. It’s a model I’d like to see more people, especially feminists, adopt.
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