The myth of men's oppression
The August 30 issue of the Sydney Morning Herald's Good Weekend magazine proudly proclaimed itself a "special men's issue". The feature articles — on men's friendships with other men, men's work and men's underwear — were (surprise, surprise) boring and trite. In its effort to identify a reason why men deserved special attention in the issue, it failed dismally.
Quality of journalism aside, the main reason it failed is because it had nothing of substance to say. Except for their common biology, the only defining feature of men is that they are situated on one side of the sex divide — a divide which oppresses women. Short of writing numerous articles about male biology (and there's only so much to say on this), there is little to say about men as a whole — except in relation to women.
This is the dilemma for men's support groups, the "men's movement" and all those seeking a basis from which to lament the supposed disadvantages of being male.
Some men are oppressed: as black men, by racism; as gay men, by homophobia; as working-class men, by capitalism. But men are not oppressed because they are men.
But "what about men's inability to express their feelings, relate to their children and form friendships?", asks the men's movement.
The gender roles and ideologies created to allow the super-exploitation of women in capitalism distort all people's psychological health and social relations. All people are alienated to at least some degree in a social system that is founded and maintained on inequalities, exploitation and violence.
To the extent that men's mental and physical health is stunted and impaired, this is mostly a result of their conscription into the oppression of women. Being trained to treat one half of the human race as inherently inferior necessarily distorts the ability to form relationships with others.
Oppression does something to the oppressors as well as to the oppressed. The guards in concentration camps, for example, are psychologically damaged by the brutality and injustice involved in their duties. (There are harmful effects even on ordinary citizens who merely pretend not to know about such oppression.) Discussion groups or psychological treatment might help some of the individual guards, but the only real solution is to close the concentration camps.
"But what about men's higher rate of death by violence?", the male liberationists ask.
To the extent that it is higher (when you add women's deaths by suicide, domestic violence, botched abortions, anorexia, this is debatable), it is a result of men's greater economic and personal independence, their greater access to guns, alcohol and cars in a society that encourages the abuse of these products.
Likewise, men's inability to choose to give up their jobs to spend more time parenting has less to do with the ideological/psychological imperative for men to be the main breadwinner than it has to do with the fact that women's wages are on average less than men's.
Minimising women's second-class status by pointing to "men's oppression" does not help either women or the majority of men (working-class men) to improve their life chances and conditions. Rather, it becomes a collusion with sexism by trivialising women's oppression.
There is thus a real danger of "men's liberation" achieving the opposite of what is intended, further distorting male psychology by training men not to see the real oppression of women.
Ordinary men have everything to gain from supporting women's struggle for their liberation. Because it challenges the very foundations of capitalism, women's struggle is a powerful force for the sort of fundamental change that is necessary to free men from alienating work, sexual repression, mental illness and similar symptoms of a sick society.
By Lisa Macdonald