Hugo Schwyzer

I’ve been taking my time to make my way through the nearly forty essays in Men Speak Out: Views on Gender, Sex and Power. The anthology, deftly edited by Shira Tarrant, is a marvelous one, with a breadth and diversity of men’s voices that is impressive — and moving. Though I got a copy in mid-January, it’s taken me nearly two months to read all the essays, generally moving at the pace of no more than one or two per day.

A few of the essayists are celebrated names in the small world of the pro-feminist men’s movement: Michael Flood, Robert Jensen, Michael Kimmel, and Jackson Katz (who penned the introduction.) But most are not as well known. These male voices are ethnically, chronologically, and sexually diverse, united by a strong commitment to gender justice and to creating a different understanding of what it means to be a man in the modern world. The essays are organized into themes: Masculinity and Identity, Sexuality, Feminism, and Points and Perspectives. And yes, I have a short piece in the anthology as well.

Refreshingly, few of the essays are written by academics. This is not to say that those of us who “labor” in the ivory tower (whether in the Ivies or at community college backwaters) don’t often have excellent perspectives on gender, sexuality, and feminism. But the dynamics of the culture being what they are, it has often proved true that the men best positioned to publicly identify as feminists are those who enjoy the protection of tenure. Tenured professors have a firmer rock on which to stand than do their brothers in, say, the military, or the corporate world, or in a factory, or in graduate school. The men who contributed essays to this anthology come from all those places and more, and there is a richness and an authenticity to what they have to say about their lives.

I’ve written about Robert Jensen before (including this three-part response to his meditation on modern pornography and male sexuality, Getting Off). His essay in Men Speak Out repeats some of what he has said elsewhere, but his final paragraph serves as an eloquent description of what it is that led this disparate group of contributors towards gender justice:

We live in a time of sexual crisis. That makes life difficult, but it also creates a space for invention and creativity. The possibility of a different way of understanding the world and myself is what drew me to feminism. I was drawn to the possibility of escaping the masculinity trap set for me, and the chance to become something more than a man… I was drawn by the possibilities of becoming a human being.

If I’m in the right space, I can get quite emotional reading Jensen’s prose. The bold emphasis is mine, and I draw attention to it because, in the end, that’s why I do the work I do. I teach courses on gender and sexuality and work as hard as I can in the community (and in my marriage) because, like Jensen, I want the chance to become something more than “just” a man. I want to be a full and complete human being.

So many of us, particularly women, despair about men. So many of us have had been left bewildered and hurt by the ways in which the males in our lives live out the masculine credo. I can’t count the times my female students have said something along the lines of “You know, I don’t really believe men have feelings the way we do. Maybe a few rare ones do, but it just seems like men don’t think, don’t hurt, don’t engage in anything emotional. I think men just play at having emotions to string us along, displaying whatever they think we want to see, whatever will get them laid or shut us up.” And when one student says something like this, others nod their heads vigorously. Some of those nodding are men.

Of course, men do have feelings — and not just the familiar ones like anger and lust. Reading through this anthology, I felt again and again that sense of relief that comes with realizing “No, I’m not alone in this. Other men feel as I do.” In our hyper-masculine and confused culture, we rob men of the chance to speak about their pain early on; “boys don’t cry” becomes an internalized message that most men carry to the grave. But we make a terrible mistake when we assume that because men seem to lack the same vocabulary for their emotions that women have, that they then somehow lack the emotions themselves. We give men the chance to develop that vocabulary by exposing them to male role models who are comfortable with strong emotion, and comfortable too with rejecting the straitjacket of traditional masculinity.

It’s not possible to talk about each of the essays in Men Speak Out. I’ll mention three of my favorites.

How We Enter: Men, Gender, and Sexual Assault is offered by B. Loewe, a young man who at sixteen was sexually assaulted by two older women. Like so many male survivors of sexual abuse at the hands of women, Loewe struggled for years to name what happened to him as what it was. The traditional narrative — that a teen boy is always hot and ready for sex with good-looking women — made it difficult for him to deal with what had been a traumatizing violation. His masculine socialization taught him that it wasn’t possible for him to be wounded as women could be wounded; Loewe makes it clear just how hard it was for him to accept that he wasn’t invincible. But to his great credit, Loewe doesn’t take the tack so often taken by men’s rights advocates (MRAs). Loewe acknowledges that though men and boys can be abused, the lion’s share of abuse is still done by men to women:

… one out of six boys wil experience sexual assault by the time they turn eighteen. By comparison, though, one in three women will be assaulted in her lifetime. What this means is that we need to include men as victims in conversations about sexual assault without decentralizing women’s experience and without taking away from the leadership of women and gender-variant survivors. We must recognize that while sexual assault affects everyone, it is also a tool of the patriarchy that specifically and disproportionately targets those assigned less social power.

Bold emphasis mine. By virtue of his candor about his own survivor status, Loewe has the credibility to refute the MRA insistence on “equivalence”, a tactic they regularly employ against battered women’s shelters and the Violence Against Women Act (VAWA).

Matthue Roth has a slightly longer essay: Preaching to the Choir. Not unlike many feminist men, Roth found it easier to get along with girls when he was young. In college, he got involved with a group he calls “Womyns’ Issues Now” (WIN), and tried to organize a men-only discussion group about gender issues. The men’s workshop ends in the kind of painfully comic failure so familiar to those of us who have spent years and years doing what used to be called “consciousness-raising.” Somewhat dispirited, Matthue perseveres, but doesn’t try men’s work again. He focuses on working with his fellow feminist activists in WIN, slowly opening up to them as they struggle against an unsympathetic administration and an openly hostile and publicly misogynistic Greek system. The gem in Matthue’s often funny, and very familiar story comes right at the end. He asks, looking back on his college career as a campus feminist activist:

Did we change anything, doing what we did? Did we make anyone realize what was wrong with the system, what was so fundamentally fucked up…?

Maybe not. Maybe we were just preaching to the choir.
But maybe, sometimes, the choir needed to hear it.

Amen, brother Matthue, amen.

Kyle Brillante writes Engendering the Classroom: Experiences of a Man in Women’s and Gender Studies. As a man who teaches women’s history, I was particularly eager to read Kyle’s reflections. Kyle is openly queer, but perceptive enough to reject the myth that gay men share a “natural” or “special” bond with women. He writes about sticking it out in class after class, even in the face of fears like these:

When my classmates look at me perhaps they see that misogynistic, chauvinistic, wife-beating, child-molesting rapist. After all, we have the same Adam’s apple, facial hair, broad chest, hairy arms, hairy legs. My female classmates read me as a man, like those same men I strive not to be, but who, despite my efforts, will always look and sound like me…. I have a silent fear, that the women in my classroom will be unable, or refuse, to look again, past my physicality, and really see me.

Kyle is smart enough to see that his own fears of “not being seen” are all-too-familiar to women, who know what it is to be seen as body parts rather than a full human being. And he’s clever enough to know that in the end, women’s studies isn’t there to make him comfortable, to make him feel welcome, and it’s not his classmates’ job to reassure him that he is different.

At the same time, there are those within both academic and activist feminism who are deeply mistrustful of men’s participation. And while initial mistrust is perhaps justified, the success of a movement to re-vision gender and to bring about true sexual justice requires the active participation of men. It’s not easy to ask women, who have so many tiresome experiences of taking care of men and their feelings, to open themselves to the prospect of men studying and teaching feminism. Gently, firmly, Brillante makes the case that academic feminism must be open — in theory and practice — to men, just as those men must also be open to rethinking their deepest beliefs about gender and sex.

I recommend Men Speak Out with great enthusiasm. Shira Tarrant has done an exceptional job of compiling and editing an anthology of such breadth, depth, and power. It will prove interesting to casual readers, and could serve as a fine supplementary text for a sociology or gender studies course focusing on masculinity.

And I’d say that even if my own essay weren’t within its pages.

UPDATE: I’m a big fan of Robert Jensen, and I recognize just how controversial and radical he is. Let me make it clear that my perception of his essay as the “framing device” for the whole anthology is just that, my perception. It was not Shira Tarrant’s intent to privilege any one of the many contributors over another; if the title of my review gave that impression, let me correct that now.