I’m old enough, just, to remember something of the feminism
of the 70s. Reproductive rights, long hair, burnt bras, sisterhood, rock and
roll. Movies and TV shows featured single young women with jobs and their own
apartments and love lives! And while there were plenty of men who opposed all
this modern independence for ladies, some of them were neutral or even
intrigued. After all, a woman with the pill in her purse, money in her pocket,
and a halter top on is pretty darned sexy. A nature girl with long hair and a
guitar and her own set of wheels is pretty sexy too.
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| Photo by Nathan Cowley |
Friends say “Republicans used to be more reasonable” or “Texas
used to be a lot more live and let live; I don’t know what happened.” But when
conservatives were reasonable, women didn’t have the right to their own credit
card. They didn’t have the right to play sports in school. They didn’t have the
right to a legal abortion. They didn’t have the right to refuse sex with their
husbands. They didn’t have the right to a harassment-free workplace. The faces
of NASA, of science, of medicine, of law enforcement, of business, of sport,
were all male. I grew up in a world where none of the people doing things I
wanted to do looked like me.
The gains that my mother’s generation made
opened a crack in that monolithic man’s world, and women squeezed through that
crack and pushed it open wider so that more women could rush in. Progress has
been uneven and painful; our gains have been hard won, but the numbers reveal
the changes that I have seen in my lifetime, and they are significant.
- 60% of doctors under the age of 35 are women
- 25% of US senators are women
- 23% of US representatives are women
- 18% of state governors are women
- 29% of state legislators are women
- 22% of Fortune 500 board members are women
- 30% of university presidents are women
- 34% of NASA astronauts are women
- 26% of computer scientists are women
- 32% of professional project managers are women
- 49% of college professors are women
- 14% of active duty soldiers are women
- 39% of private companies are woman owned
You know why conservative men seem suddenly so angry and
unreasonable? Because they don’t want to have to compete with women on a level
playing field. They want our feminism to be sexy. They want it to be about
them. And it really isn’t any more. It’s not just that we’re getting the
degrees and the jobs and winning the elections. The numbers above show
phenomenal success but mostly not equality, after all. It’s also the side-effects
of all this education and success and power now in women’s hands. We’re wearing
what we want. We’re eschewing makeup and picking a trip to the gym over a trip
to the salon. We’re getting married later or not at all. We’re not deferring to
our fathers, brothers, preachers or husbands any more. We’re raising families
without men. We’re fixing our own plumbing and tuning up our own bikes and
going backpacking and touring Europe without men. So men aren’t just having to
compete with us in the conference room; they’ve also discovered that we no
longer need them. The social and economic structures that bound us to husband
and hearth are disintegrating. Now we mate and marry only because we want to
and when. We don’t need to be taken care of and we don’t want to take care of a
man either. We want him to take care of himself, and to meet us as an equal in
freedom, not in obligation or dependency. Many (most?) of the women I know have
chosen the single life. Not because they don’t love men and sex, but because it’s
just not worth it. Maybe they had an abusive partner, or an unfaithful one. I’ve had more than one friend tell me that
they just didn’t like being married because it felt like they were losing
themselves. It’s good to pay your own bills, make your decisions, to go and do
as you like, eat what you like, stay up late with a book and a cat and a cup of
tea or get up before dawn and head to Zumba before work and never have to explain
yourself, justify yourself, subsume yourself. In a patriarchal society, maybe a
mating of true equals is simply impossible. More women are unwilling to make
the compromises and sacrifices that traditional marriage demands.
Men don’t seem to be adjusting to this new reality. It’s not
just that they have to compete with women in every field of public endeavor.
They are adrift in relationship to women personally as well. I think a lot of
men have been taught, by family and church and peers and the media, that if
they are good men, women will want them and they’ll find a happily ever after.
Being a good man is a complicated and pretty much unattainable goal. It seems
to include physical and/or intellectual prowess, mastery of all of the manly
arts, some impossible mixture of emotional strength and reserve and gentle
tenderness. And of course, superior sexual prowess. If the ads on the radio are
anything to go by, there are a lot of men who doubt their sexual prowess.
So what is a man to do, who has trained all his life for the
wrong race? No matter where on this continuum of masculinity he falls, it’s largely
irrelevant to modern women. Some men with intelligence and emotional maturity
adjust. They are learning to navigate a changed world and learning to define
themselves as something other than “the opposite of a woman.” They are finding
freedom in shedding restrictive gender roles and growing into equal
relationships.
And then there are the other guys. The ones brought up in
strictly conservative families. The ones who were starved of physical and
emotional affection as children. The ones of lower than average intelligence
who crave structure and authority and predictability. The ones who were abused.
The ones who were never allowed to cry. The ones who were always compared to
their peers and found lacking. They are adult men but bent or broken, unable to
rise to the emotional demands of adulthood but expecting all of the rewards of
adulthood nonetheless. They could be angry at the parents and society that
failed them. They could seek growth and healing. But that’s really difficult to
do. Not everyone can even reach the first rung on the ladder of
self-actualization. They may not even see that the ladder is there. It’s easier
to blame themselves, to fall into self-loathing and rage and despair. I’ve
never yet met a violent man who wasn’t a very weak, hollow man, a shell of a
man. I’ve faced down plenty of them. Some of these hollow men seek roles that
give them hierarchical status. Some of them manipulate social systems to skew
the odds in their favor, with the added benefit of causing harm to others. Some
of them turn to outright violence to attempt to subdue and control the world.
All of them take personal, real pleasure at one-upping or harming others. It provides
a temporary high that dulls the aching void inside. But like any drug, the
results are ephemeral. We call these hollow men narcissists and act as though
narcissism is the exception to the rule. I don’t find that to be true. In a
patriarchy, narcissism is the default setting for men. We only remark upon it
when it manifests in the toxic, self-destructive virulence that we see in Trump
or in Epstein or in mass murderers.
In a twisted way, the manifestos of violent men and the
toxic spew of incels are correct. Women, on our journey to equality and freedom
and joy, have turned the basket of patriarchy upside down and shaken everything
lose. We won’t crawl back into that basket and we don’t owe men comfort or
healing or sex or praise. On the other hand, one only has to read to realize
that the self-destructive legacy of patriarchal masculinity has been with us a
very long time. At some point, I hope men stop raging and start evolving. It
would be a lot more fun.
