Men who embrace feminism face a paradox that is inescapable.
Through feminism, I learned that I should move out of the center and not assume that everyone is waiting for me to speak. “Accept the leadership of women” is, appropriately, one of the commandments for men in feminist movements, which means not assuming that we men know best or that we have authority over women—assumptions that many of us men have learned to make.
How men can support gender equality is a topic that is rarely talked about. Over the last decade, I researched how men as senior leader and middle managers support gender equality in the work context. My book ‘Men Stepping Forward – Leading Your Organisation on the Path to Inclusion’ shows some practical steps men can take to become change agents for gender equality.
In engaging men and boys in preventing domestic and sexual violence, what do we need? In the following, I identify key ways forward, addressing both our overall approach in violence prevention and particular prevention strategies. I focus on primary prevention – on efforts to prevent the initial perpetration of domestic, family and sexual violence.
Men and masculinities are now on the public agenda. There is growing attention in Ireland and around the world to the gendered attitudes, practices, and relations associated with men and boys and their implications for health, violence and gender inequality. There are various signs of this: intensified public debate over codes of masculinity, growing attention to men and masculinities in policy and programming, increasing scholarship on the links between masculinities and various social issues, and men’s activism and advocacy.
Apart from what it means in their own lives, men’s exposure to violence, trauma and adversity are key risk factors for men’s self-inflicted harm and their use of violence against others. Equimundo’s report, Making the Connections: Masculinities and Male Trauma, highlights the role masculinities play in boys and men’s ability to cope with their impact.
An ally is a member of a privileged group who acts to challenge or dismantle that same privilege. Ally politics involves members of privileged groups taking action to undermine that same privilege: white people challenging racism, heterosexual people challenging heterosexism and homophobia, and of course, men challenging sexism.
Key elements of male allyship therefore include the following.
Anti-feminist content by and for men is everywhere online. Social media influencers like Andrew Tate have risen to global prominence and notoriety in the past few years as the ‘manosphere’ of sexist and violence-supportive online forums and digital media continues to grow. But what about pro-feminist digital media?
There is growing interest in using online media among men and boys to prevent men’s violence against women and girls, prompted by two insights. First, such media may be effective ways to reach and educate large numbers of boys and men. Organisations such as schools and universities involved in violence prevention education are turning increasingly to online media as platforms for education on violence, gender, and healthy relationships, using these to deliver curricula to large cohorts of students and others.
Men’s rights advocates (MRAs) are deeply hostile to feminism and feminists. And in turn, MRAs are deeply hostile to pro-feminist men or male feminists.
But *how* MRAs criticise and attack male feminists betrays their own low opinions of men and their hypocrisy.
This account comes from my experience of being a visible pro-feminist male advocate, on Twitter and elsewhere, and noticing the kinds of attacks that anti-feminist men or MRAs direct at me and other pro-feminist men.
