When Men Experience Sexism
NOAH BERLATSKY
MAY 29 2013, 3:15 PM ET
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Posters encouraging men to fight in World War I and World
War II (Library of Congress)
Can men be victims of sexism?
An NPR Morning Edition report this week suggests strongly
that the answer is "yes." As Jennifer Ludden reports, after
divorce men can face burdensome alimony payments even in
situations where their ex-wives are capable of working and
earning a substantial income. Even in cases where temporary
alimony makes sense—as when a spouse has quit a job to
raise the children—it's hard to understand the need for
lifetime alimony payments, given women's current levels of
workforce participation. As one alimony-paying ex-husband
says, "The theory behind this was fine back in the '50s, when
everybody was a housewife and stayed home." But today, it
looks like an antiquated perpetuation of retrograde gender
roles—a perpetuation which, disproportionately, harms men.
This isn't the only case in which men can suffer from gender
discrimination. David Benatar, in his 2012 monograph The
Second Sexism discusses a whole range of other ways in
which men as men are disadvantaged. Men, for example,
receive custody of children in only about 10 percent of
divorce cases in the United States. Men also, as Benatar
writes, are subject to "a long history of social and legal
pressure...to fight in war" —pressures which women do not
generally experience in the same way. Along the same lines,
physical violence against men is often minimized or seen as
normal. Benatar refers to the history of corporal
punishment, which has much more often been inflicted on
boys than girls. Society's scandalous tolerance of rape in
prison seems like it is also related to a general indifference
to, or even amusement at, sexual violence committed against
men.
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Millennial Generation
Perhaps most hideously, men through history have been
subject to genocidal, or gendercidal, violence targeted at
them specifically because they are men. Writers like Susan
Brownmiller have over the last decades helped to show how
mass rape and sexual violence against women are often a
deliberate part of genocide; similarly, there has been
increasing awareness in recent years of the gendercidal
results of sex-selective abortion and infanticide in places like
India and China. But the way gendercide can be directed
against men is much less discussed. One of the worst recent
examples of this was in the Balkans war, where, according to
genocide researcher Adam Jones, " All of the largest
atrocities... target[ed] males almost exclusively, and for the
most part "battle-age" males. " Similarly, in Rwanda
according to Judy El-Bushra (as quoted by Jones):
it was principally the men of the targeted populations who
lost their lives or fled to other countries in fear. ... This
targeting of men for slaughter was not confined to adults:
boys were similarly decimated, raising the possibility that the
demographic imbalance will continue for generations. Large
numbers of women also lost their lives; however, mutilation
and rape were the principal strategies used against women,
and these did not necessarily result in death.
Many of these examples—particularly the points about
custody inequities and conscription—are popular with men's
rights activists. MRAs tend to deploy the arguments as
evidence that men are oppressed by women and, especially,
by feminists. Yet, what's striking about instances of sexism
against men is how often the perpetrators are not women but
other men. The gendercides in Serbia and Rwanda were
committed against men, not by feminists, but by other men.
Prison rape is, again, overwhelmingly committed by men
against other men—with (often male) prison officials sitting
by and shrugging. Conscription in the U.S. was implemented
overwhelmingly by male civilian politicians and military
authorities, not by women.
Even in cases where women clearly benefit from sexism, it's
generally not the case that women, as a class, are the ones
doing the discriminating. Neither alimony nor custody
discussions are central to current feminist theory or current
feminist pop cultural discussions. Thereis no ideological
feminist commitment to either of these discussions in the
way there is to, say, abortion rights, or workplace equity. On
the contrary, the alimony and custody inequities we have at
the moment seem mostly based, not on progressive
feminism, but rather on the reactionary image of female
domesticity that feminism has spent most of the last 60-odd
years fighting against.
When men suffer from sexism, then, they do so in much the
same way women do. That is, they suffer not because women
rule the world and are targeting men, nor because feminism
has somehow triumphed and brainwashed all of our elected
officials (most of them still men) into ideological misandry.
Rather, men suffer because of the same gender role
stereotypes that hurt and restrict women—though men,
being of a different gender, fall afoul of those stereotypes in
different ways. Women are supposed to be passive and
domestic and sexual—so their employment options and
autonomy are restricted and they are fetishized and targeted
for sexual assault and exploitation. Men are supposed to be
active and violent—so their claims to domestic rights are
denigrated and violence directed against them is shrugged
off as natural or non-notable.
"For me," Heather McRobie wrote in an excellent 2008
article about genercide, "feminism has always been about
how rigid gender roles harm everyone, albeit primarily
women." Talking about sexism against men is often seen—by
MRAs and feminists alike—as an attack on feminism. But it
shouldn't be. Rather, recognizing how, say, stereotypical
ideas about domesticity hurt men in custody disputes as well
as women in the job market should be a spur to creating
alliances, not fissures. Women have been fighting against
sexism for a long time. If men can learn from them, it will be
to everyone's benefit.