Feminism Needs to Find Room for Men

Laurie Penny is a journalist who writes a lot about gender, occasionally for this website. For several years, she has been an eminent British voice in discussions around feminism, misogyny, and the way they interact in a social and economic sense. But now she wants to talk about men. Folding conversations around masculinity into women's rights is notoriously difficult. As Penny herself says, "women are only allowed to be experts on gendered things and nothing else, whereas that's the one thing men aren't supposed to talk about."

But for a generation of young men growing up in an age where the media is obsessed with defining and labeling feminists, it's understandable that they'd want to examine their own place.

For a lot of feminists, myself included, the idea of welcoming men into gendered discussions isn't immediately exciting. There's concern it will draw attention away from female voices already struggling to be heard in the mainstream. But as Penny explores in her recent book Unspeakable Things, male identity needs to be overhauled to address endemic misogyny.

In the lead-up to her appearance at the Festival of Dangerous Ideas, VICE spoke to Penny about making room for men in feminism.

VICE: Hey, Laurie. So your book is about how men fit into the modern gender discussion. Personally I struggle with this, as gender is arguably the only thing women lead discourse on.
Laurie Penny: It's a hugely important step that men are starting to realize how much patriarchal oppression has affected their lives. The logic "men don't have rights therefore women must have taken them away" is gradually disappearing outside the so-called men's activist movement. Men need to claim space to talk about masculinity and its problems in a way that isn't solely about attacking women.

Men's rights movements online raise things like: feminism is bad because it doesn't talk about male rape or suicide and depression amongst men. These are huge problems, structural crises, people have to talk about them. It's sad that for some of these men, the only time that they talk about them is in the context of attacking women.

I've noticed when a man starts talking about the weight of male culture it's perceived as men's rights rhetoric.
Women are only allowed to be experts on gendered things and nothing else, whereas that's the one thing men aren't supposed to talk about. Particularly when it comes to their own experience.

How do men start that conversation?
I know men who have experienced pushback within the feminist movement and have been told they had the wrong ideas—and often they did. They're learning experiences. There's a lot of internalized sexism and misogyny that has to be dealt with. That's one of the most painful things for men coming into the movement, but it encourages guys to recognize that.

That sense of your views being suspect because of your gender, that you know less because of who you are, the fear of not being taken seriously when you talk—that's what women experience every time they try to talk about something that isn't feminism. Men have to accept that if they want to be part of this discussion they won't necessarily be leading it.

Does feminism need men?
There's one thing men really can do without monopolizing the platforms. Men are socialized to be more welcoming and understanding to the same ideas if they're coming from a guy. It's how you behave when women aren't there that's a really important test. It's how you behave when you're in a room and your friends are making rape jokes. As a feminist man, talk to other men and call them out. Your dude friends are going to be more receptive of you saying, "nah dude that's really not cool," than me.

That kind of speaks to the exhausting question of how to you tackle insidious sexism in male culture. But it's difficult to say that battle may have to be started or led by men.
Men are our fifth column in all male spaces. Particularly when so many boardrooms and political meetings are all-male spaces, men can be very useful fighting in that arena.

I heard this interesting comment that said men haven't had their sexual revolution because they've never been pushed to a point where they're obliged to push back. Even looking at feminism, every wave has been brought on by a breaking point where people took a stand: voting rights, reproductive, and body rights, combating rape culture…
That's very interesting. I think one of the reasons men haven't had their big moment where they challenge gender-orthodoxism is that—certainly in the West and in recent memory—their energy and frustration is channelled into misogyny, violence, and a culture of self-loathing. It's going to be very interesting in the next few years to see if men are brave enough to sustain that discussion without it turning into toxic, misogynous bullshit.

Does that feel likely?
I'm hopeful. I'm seeing a lot of men stepping up who have no time for the old patriarchal dogma. They've grown up in a different time, in a culture where you cannot ignore women's realities in the way you once could. Technology has changed that, and I think an awareness of feminism has changed that. Men in their early 20s have been aware of a feminist shift in public conversation from the age of 16 or 17, during those vital growing up years.

But is that enough? Can moral evolution happen without it being forced?
Masculinity has been in a condition of crisis for centuries. The exciting thing happening right now is that a lot of men, particularly young men, are coming to realize that. It will be interesting to see the rallying issues that they pick; whether that's about gender expressions or different kinds of freedoms and how you unpack misogyny within those. Misogyny is coded into all the gender analysis we allow men to have: misogyny is performed for other men to shore up their own masculinity, misogyny is a constituent part of how we imagine modern masculinity.

It's going to be very interesting to watch, I'm a bit nervous, but it's also exciting.

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Laurie will be speaking at the Melbourne and Brisbane Writers Festivals, and the Festival of Dangerous Ideas. To win tickets to see her and a bunch of other interesting speakers at FODI, click here.