The men's movement is a painful place for gay men, says academic Gary Dowsett. He doesn't want to hear about the problem of who does the washing up anymore, as he told Michael Flood.
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Activism & Politics
Why do we need a sexual identity? Is there a heterosexual community? How do we encourage safe sex if we don't validate straight men's sexuality? Writer and activist Gary Dowsett has some ideas. He is interviewed by Michael Flood.
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David Dendy boldly goes where few men have gone before: across the gulf between desire and politics, to seek new forms of monogamy, masturbation and sexual preference.
Stubbornly, with determination, I resisted. I knew and experienced emotional and sexual desire from an early age as complex, broad-ranging and variable. It was and is still not a simple attraction to one sex or another. It was and is not fixed to one pattern of attraction, lust or pleasure.
Men have responded in complex and contradictory ways to the profound changes of the last three decades, changes set in motion by the women’s movements, changes in family organisation, economic and social shifts and other forces. Small numbers of men have responded by mobilising in support of feminist goals, changing their own behaviour and working with women to shift gender relations in progressive directions. Yet other men have mobilised in opposition to feminism and the changes in gender with which it is associated, forming “men’s rights” and “fathers’ rights” groups. An organised backlash to feminism is now visible among men in Australia, as in most other Western capitalist countries.
We have reached a pivotal moment in terms of fathers’ roles in families and communities. There is, at present, a significant opportunity for fathers to develop stronger, more intimate bonds with their children and to enhance their roles within their families. Indeed a growing number of fathers are embracing this situation. But the opportunity is in danger of being lost. The unhelpful agendas of some participants in fatherhood debates, and continuing economic and cultural obstacles to paternal involvement in child-rearing, threaten to limit men’s positive involvement in parenting.
Public attitudes towards fathers have shifted, but has fathers’ behaviour shifted too? Michael Flood describes the obstacles to paternal involvement, and the potential dangers in the new emphasis on fatherhood.
This paper examines the hate speech and extremism of fathers' rights groups. It scrutinises the behaviour and language of the two major father’s rights activists organisations, the Shared Parenting Council of Australia (SPCA), and the Fatherhood Foundation (FF), particularly in relation to issues of violence against women and children and how these intersect with the emergent contemporary discourse of “fatherlessness” assertion and role models for children. The paper provides evidence that the internet based collectives affiliated to the two key fathers’ rights activists organisations incite virulent hatred of, and harmful action towards targeted women and their perceived supporters. This paper examines why these two key fathers' rights activist organisations are gaining such open access and encouragement to/from politicians when much of their agenda expresses high levels of hate and vitriol against women and why this is seemingly ignored in public discourse to the detriment of women’s and children’s safety.
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This excerpt from Michael Flood’s report discusses the problems with a rebuttable presumption of joint custody, and describes the broader context for these debates.
See below for the attachment, in PDF.The fathers’ rights movement is defined by the claim that fathers are deprived of their ‘rights’ and subjected to systematic discrimination as men and fathers, in a system biased towards women and dominated by feminists. Fathers’ rights groups overlap with men’s rights groups and both represent an organised backlash to feminism. Fathers’ rights and men’s rights groups can be seen as the anti-feminist wing of the men’s movement, the network of men’s groups and organisations mobilised on gender issues.
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