Feminism, men, and violence

Jessica at Feministing links approvingly to this Dave Hill column arguing that feminism is beneficial to both women and men:

Feminism has become a dirty word in the mouths of some its enemies, so let’s recall one of its basic ambitions – the release of women from the constraints of gender custom and practice. It insists – or should insist – that the blurring of boundaries between men’s domain and women’s, between traits we call masculine and those we call feminine, is not a dangerous assault on some sacred natural order but an advance for social justice. It’s about fair play, freedom of choice and enhancing human happiness.

Men should embrace these principles too, not only for women’s sake but also for their own. All else being equal, to be born male is to inherit legacies of entitlement that continue to outweigh those bestowed on those born female. Yet the state of maleness carries its own burden of expectations and constraints. Contemporary studies of boyhood shed light on what we’ve always known – what I still remember vividly from my own boyhood – about the disabling and limiting influence of male behaviour conventions, homophobia and general “gender policing” on men in the making and the huge anxieties that inform them.

This is the baggage men drag with them through their lives; the pressure imposed both from without and from within to appear hard and never soft, to make a performance of rejecting anything that smacks of domesticity or femininity, notwithstanding the metrosexual and “new man”. Even men who seem to embody and thrive on this stereotype can feel like slaves to it, and are often undone by it.

At the blog Ways to End the World, Mike Meginnis frequently writes on relevance feminism can have for men, and in particular, the importance of feminism in fighting against the wholesale acceptance of violence against men.  Recently, Meginnis found some resistance to this idea at a major feminist blog:

You may remember that I was unhappy because one of the bloggers over there posted about how men performed the vast majority of violence, and how this violence had been normalized. In other words, she was arguing that male violence was considered standard and was, as a result, more common. There was more to her argument than that but this is where I took issue — because while her limited assertion was correct, she had made an important and troubling omission. In fact, she had made the exact same troubling omission that most other people make when they discuss violence: they fail to describe the extent to which men are overwhelmingly the victims, as well as the perpetrators, of violence. This was particularly ironic in this post because if the normalization of violence perpetrated by men is a problem, surely the normalization of violence committed against men was also a problem worthy of note.

This is probably my main complaint about feminist rhetoric. It’s common to describe the extent to which men are disproportionately violent, but vanishingly unlikely that you’ll see it acknowledged that men are far more likely to be the victims of male violence than are women. This actually perpetuates what it means to ameliorate by normalizing an image of masculinity wherein men are horrifically violent, rapacious, subhuman beasts (the same comment thread, in fact, played host to an oh-so-ironic series of posts on the oppressive and even genocidal measures that would be necessary if men were truly so violent, which was hilarious let me tell you). I don’t mean to suggest that the account of society wherein men are disproportionately violent is inaccurate in any way. I mean to suggest that it’s misleading in the extreme, and actually damaging to the feminist cause, to pretend that men are constantly crushing women under their heels by way of a mixture of brutal assault and sexual violence — it would be far more accurate to say, in terms of physical violence, that men are destroying themselves. The mindset that enables this behavior is damaging to women, but it’s not as one-sided as some would have you believe.

I don’t bring this up so regularly because I’m opposed to the feminist project. I think it’s important and I support it, often with this blog. My concern is that it’s actually harmful to that cause, and furthermore harmful to men, to participate in the normalization of violence against men. This particularly concerns me in relationship to war, which is made possible in part by the valorization of said violence between men.

I have my own thoughts on this, but there’s plenty of time for those.  I’d like to hear what you’all* think.

* The great thing about Latin is that it has a “you-plural.”