General Discussion
In reply to the discussion: "Man-bashing." My favorite DU pule. [View all]planetc
(7,830 posts)I used to work for a great eastern university, and I worked every day with men who felt they were fully informed about the intellectual underpinnings and aims of feminism, and who assumed that they themselves were guiltless of perpetuating the patriarchy. But they were in error. They actually knew very little about feminism, and harbored attitudes that perpetuated sexism every day.
On this board, many men assume that since their politics are liberal, then of course they couldn't be sexists. They think of themselves as fair-minded and devoted to justice. Some of those men are in error too, on the subject of feminism.
So my question is, how do we go about informing men, and women, about what the main tenets of feminism are (especially that a patriarchy exists, and has for thousands of years), and further inform them about how attitudes on all sorts of things, large and small, can feed into the perpetuation of the patriarchy? Can we tell them to read a book or three? Do we encourage them to talk the subject over with one or lots of women? How do we move off square one on this subject?
I've observed that men who seem most defensive and angry about feminists having their say seem to feel that recognizing just about anything a feminist might say as valid and useful is threatening to them personally. They seem to feel that women's achievement of full pay equality will necessarily take something away from them--as though equalizing men's wages with women's will result in men forever having less. This is an attitude that guarantees little or no learning will take place.
My own understanding of feminism says that when men and women finally recognize each others' contributions, then a lot of bad stuff will disappear--rape, domestic abuse, pay discrimination, the constant need to prove your manhood to every other man. In the utopia we haven't yet achieved, both men and women should benefit, and benefit abundantly.
How do we get everyone working on the same project?