| Men's Role in Ending Sexism |
There has been a great confusion through out the western world at least as to a workable way for men who are ready, to work towards eliminating the oppression of women. The stereotyped expectation is that men need to get smaller and take up less space so that women can leave the victim position and get bigger. After 20-30 years of this, the results are in on that approach and it has not led to happy people in good relationships. Happy people in good relationships are doing something else.
In using the word oppression I am using it in a way that is different than it is commonly used. I am using oppression to mean the one way mistreatment of a group by either another group or by the society as a whole with it's institutions as the agent of that oppression.
The oppression of women (sexism) is an institutional oppression. It is not caused by an individual man but is a result of men's oppression. Institutions oppress males who out of the effects of that mistreatment then pass on some of this to women. Men as a group are the agents of women's oppression. The major social institutions are the agents of men's oppression. The biggest challenge facing us in the current period is to gain broad unity across many different groups including men and women to change the way society functions so that the economy and the environment that we all depend on for our survival become sustainable long term. To achieve this we will need to learn how to treat each other well in all situations. We need to find new ways to end the old practice of harming other humans, out of our feelings of desperation or pain, to improve a bad situation.
Each of us has a choice as to whether we help or harm another in a tense situation. Violence and competition are at the core of what's wrong with the current business, legal, sport, education as well as the domestic culture, anytime any trouble breaks out. As men we have been traditionally raised to handle this by winning competitively and toughing it out on our own or forcing our will over the top of others. Many men have train themselves to become subcervient to others in a rigid way which has not helped either. Females have traditionally been raised to play a "caretaking" role that leaves females particularly vulnerable to mistreatment from males. This has everything to do with the way we all have lost to the vast society wide forces that constitute oppressions. While this traditional set of expectation have changed some, the very early age that the society damages everyone leaves everyone with a challenge to really be their "true self" and break with oppressive traditions that cause harm to oneself or others.
The first guess for an alternative to men having to always win, of getting men more accepting of loosing has just led to more messes. Deeply damaged men, and openly resentful women get stuck in warfare, without really turning around the damage being done to women. Society as a whole with it's institutions is where the forces against men or women comes from. While it is men as a "group" who have played an enforcer role in the socialization of women into a very limited version of femininity it is not men personally. Society as a whole has been carrying a very large unresolved store of hatred, violence, competition to mention just a few things that gets pointed harmfully at humanity. Just about every person is tense about this state of affairs. Tense enough that thinking free of those tensions is difficult.
To recover from the processes of oppression, relationships are needed that are different and "human" enough to allow change to take place. It is the dynamics of both the injury process personally and the oppression process institutionally that make us replay what has gone wrong in our lives. A woman's injury from a male then colours relationships with men. The major challenge then for a man in a relationship with a woman is to get to be "fully human" enough that recovery takes place. This is for both him and her. It's helpful for men to think of any tension that he is carrying to do with any woman as the content of his sexism personally. This is not to blame him or make him less in any way but to have a label for the tension. With out the label as something external to the man he is blamed personally for the tension he caries about any woman. The process of discharging the tension a man carries about any woman is the process of discharging his personal sexism.
The core message of all the many different kinds of oppressions is that the group targeted by an oppression is less than fully human. Of course those messages end up being accepted at very young ages. It is to be expected that most people will initially defend and resist attempts at getting a better life. Lives often get bound into living in a "rut" of limited choices. Getting more choices means becoming unnumb - a "process" that involves feeling and discharging old emotions. It is however only the process of reclaiming our ability to care "fully" and be our "real selves".
Men's socialization is destructive of men and only some of this destructiveness gets passed onto women. There is nothing about men or women that is bad or wrong as a man or woman. It is the social pressure on men and women and the separation from our natures as full and complete humans that causes the mess. Violence and competition need to be opposed through out the whole of the culture for all of our interests as they really serve no-one's long term benefit. Short term violence and competition has been used to maintain order, profits, motivate people and needs to be used less and less as better ways to live are found.
We are not taking very good care of ourselves or each other at any level. All people are mistreated according to stereotyped prejudice. When we get hurt as a male or female we get forced to live inside of the constraint of that tension that is built up over our life times. We have a world economy dependent on the population staying tense to be motivated in our "jobs".
To get successful at stopping social systems that damage everyone we need to get large enough as men to get in the way of this and force social change towards a culture that embraces a fair exchange of effective support and complete respect for all.
Men need to have a full enough program for their own personal liberation and their liberation as a man. We need to be coming from a place of being OK as a man to be able to be able to work towards the assistance to any other group.
Somewhere in all of us we carry the messages that we are somehow less than fully human. Men's acceptance of this about himself as a man is what gets passed on to women as his sexism. Mostly as men we don't see it very well. So a systematic approach is needed to review our lives. As we, as men find the places that we have been "trapped" in less than a "fully human" life we gain the ability to end the passing of this on to women.
I propose a three point program for the personal work towards reclaiming our power and integrity as an ally to women. To eliminate the oppression of women we will need to achieve this personally while we organize other men to join us in the challenge to end the institutional nature of women's oppression:
1. Getting larger as a man, visible, powerful and influential.
2. Work on fully respecting our mothers and the other significant women in our lives.
3. Review and exhaustively discharge the distress patterns and behaviours that are less than fully human to do with women that have resulted from any way we have been mistreated in societies institutions.
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