Hugo Schwyzer explains how a handful of men are angry for all the wrong reasons.
When I was getting clean and sober in a Twelve Step program many years ago, there was one phrase from the literature that always resonated with me. We addicts have been, the book said, the “architects of our own adversity.” Yes, I thought the first time I read that. It’s time to stop blaming others for my own pain. It’s time to take responsibility.
That same phrase comes to mind when I think about Men’s Rights Activists (MRAs). I’ve been 
crossing verbal swords with the MRAs for many years, particularly since 2004 when I began to develop a public presence as a male feminist writer and professor. I learned quickly that not all MRAs were the same; some offered thoughtful criticism while others offered only nasty invective. (Look up “Hugo Schwyzer Mangina” if you need evidence of the latter.)
As a professor who teaches courses on Men and Masculinity, as well as a mentor to many young men (and as a man myself, of course), I’m intensely interested in the ways in which men position themselves as victims. I’ve spent years reading the literature and talking points of MRAs and “fathers’ rights” groups. I’ve spent a lot of time in conversation with men who are going through divorce, something I’ve been through more than once. My male students range in age from 17 to 70, from bright high school students taking their first college courses to retired professionals curious about gender studies. I meet with so many of them—jocks, geeks, gamers, drifters, ambitious future politicians and wary-eyed Iraq and Afghanistan veterans.
From so many of these men—online and in real life—I hear the same thing: the narrative of helplessness.
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The older, angrier MRAs describe a world in which women (and their male “collaborators”) have usurped traditional male privileges for themselves. Men, they claim, are at a disadvantage in the courts, in the business world, in academia. The MRAs see public space in the Western world as increasingly feminized, and they fancy “real men” (in whose ranks they invariably include themselves) to be under attack from a dark coalition of feminist activists, cowardly politicians cravenly surrendering to the cultural left, and a media that never misses an opportunity to demean and belittle traditional men. It all provides a satisfying sense of being “under attack,” which is why many—not all—men’s rights activists use, absurdly enough, the language of oppression and resistance to describe their movement.
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When heterosexual masculinity is defined by violent obtuseness, these “guy rules” rob boys of their chance to develop emotional skills to thrive in relationships with others.
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These men feel victimized, they feel exploited, they feel ignored, they feel impotent. And those feelings are powerful. I don’t think these boys and men who turn to the men’s rights movement are lying about their pain. The problem is that they’ve completely misunderstood two things.
The cause of men’s very real unhappiness isn’t a biased family court system, or feminist college professors, or the perceived injustices of Title IX athletic funding. The source of men’s anguish and uncertainty is the straitjacket of traditional American manhood. Men are suffering because their emotional, psychological, intellectual, and sexual potential is stunted by their own efforts to live up to an impossible masculine ideal.
Whether they got it from their fathers or their older brothers, whether they learned it from peers or pastors, coaches or drill instructors, almost all American boys grow up learning the “guy rules.” As Deborah David and Robert Brannon first showed in their landmark 1976 book on men, The Forty-Nine Percent Majority, the rules are crushingly simple: Big boys don’t cry. No sissy stuff. Be a “sturdy oak.” “Be a big wheel.” “Give ’em hell.”
Being a man, in other words, is defined by divesting oneself of anything remotely associated with femininity (like kindness, sensitivity, intuition, empathy). When heterosexual masculinity is defined by violent obtuseness, these “guy rules” rob boys of their chance to develop emotional skills to thrive in relationships with others. This frantic effort to shut down a whole aspect of one’s potential isn’t caused by testosterone or Y chromosomes. It’s caused by the longing to live by the “man code.”
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Most MRAs agree that the “man code” exists and that it does great damage to young men. But they blame women for these cruel and limiting rules. According to many MRAs I’ve spoken to, it is women’s sexual desire for the alpha male that forces boys to compete ruthlessly with one another. “Women say they want one thing but choose another: they always go for assholes,” so many guys say. If women would broaden their sexual appetites to include “betas” and “omegas,” their reasoning goes, boys would feel less compelled to compete ruthlessly with one another. (The men’s rights activists tend to be wildly off-base about what women actually want, but that’s another topic.)
It’s a typical but tragic mistake: MRAs wildly overestimate women’s power, sexual or otherwise. Men, they insist, are helpless by comparison. But that claim ignores a long and unmistakable history of male domination in human history. And if there’s one undeniable truism about our species, it’s that the rules are made by the dominant group. The “man laws” or “guy rules” were created by and for men. Historically, winning validation from other men has mattered more than getting sex or love from women. (If you don’t believe that, think for a moment about how hard boys will work to please a demanding football coach.) Males are raised to be “homosocial,” which means they’re taught to get their primary affirmation from other men rather than from women. Working too hard for female approval just makes you a “mama’s boy” or “pussy-whipped,” and the frantic efforts young men make to ensure neither of those labels apply to them tells you all you need to know about who it is they are really trying to impress.
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So men are indeed architects of their own adversity. This doesn’t mean that each boy is individually responsible for his own suffering. But it does mean that the pain so many men feel from broken relationships, social isolation, and the gnawing sense of personal powerlessness is not women’s fault. It’s the fault of a rigid code that was set up eons ago, a code that many of us continue to perpetuate. Extricating ourselves from the emotional straitjacket the code forces us to wear requires taking responsibility for our own lives and choices. It requires letting go of blame. And it requires seeing that feminism—with its remarkable claim that biological sex has nothing to with our human potential—is the best avenue for our personal and collective liberation.
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Meet the Men’s Rights Movement
Paul Elam: On Misandry: What’s Wrong With Men?
Tom Matlack: Adultery’s Double Standard
Amanda Marcotte: The Solution to MRA Problems? More Feminism
Zeta Male: The Top 10 Issues of Men’s Rights
Kaelin Alexander: Men’s Studies: Teaching Masculinities in the Margins
Pelle Billing: Unlocking the Men’s Rights Movement
David Futrelle: Dismantling the Men’s Rights Movement
Dan Moore of Menz: The MRA Perspective
Ron Mattocks: When Men Are the Victims of Abuse
Tom Matlack: Do Divorced Dads Get a Raw Deal?
Blixa Scott: Why Do We Forgive Adulterous Women?
Joseph Caputo: Can We Degenderize Domestic Violence?
Image paula rúpolo/Flickr Creative Commons
About Hugo Schwyzer
I found myself agreeing with a lot of the author’s points here, but there seems to be a fundamentally flawed assumption in the article, and it’s an assumption I think many MRA’s share as well. It’s the idea that a dominant group, however defined, makes ALL the rules, and the subordinate one, however defined, is just exploited by the rules. This just sounds like the flipside to the MRA position, which I find equally oversimplified. Group A controls everything! No, Group B controls everything! You’re responsible for all your problems! No, the Other is responsible for all your problems!
Gendered ideas are very powerful things, but they are produced by a lot of different people. Do some people have more influence over gender ideas than others? Sure. Do gender norms reinforce forms of power? Sure. BUT, notions of masculinity are shaped by men and women. Notions of femininity are shaped by men and women. Powerful ideologies have blind spots and blowbacks and trade-offs and double-edged blades. Ideologues can use traditional ideas to support radical changes, and they can use radical ideas for traditional goals. Or, if these things are just giant impersonal forces, they are created and reworked by all sorts of people.
I’m somewhat fascinated by the mirror image that has developed here between the left and right over gender. They both seem to have a Marxian ideology (Karl Marx more than Groucho Marx) about a single dominant class that makes all the rules, reaps all the benefits, and simply exploits the disposable subordinate class.
I can see why that model is so appealing for either side. It’s simple. It has an explanation for everything (accurate or not). Best of all, if someone disagrees with you, that person is clearly a tool of the dominant class and/or a product of false consciousness. You have either broken out of The Matrix like those who are clear-headed or are hopelessly stuck inside it. I am obviously brainwashed by the dominant class because I fail to see that it’s so simple. Or, even worse, I must be one of those obfuscators who is clouding the real issue by being overlay academic.
I apologize if someone else already made these points. (I skipped over a lot of the “are so!” “am not!” bickering in the middle.)
Your first two paragraphs are fairly similar to a lot of what I was going to say in my post below before the site went haywire on me. I think this is where MRAs often do go wrong, and ironically enough, so do their big enemies the feminists, except of course they look at it from the completely opposite side of things.
I hate to break it to you “male feminists” but you are 90% full of crap. Your solution to correcting discrimination is to discriminate. A male feminist is just an angry beta male that is pissed off at men for the same reasons women are.
I was in the middle of a response about this article, when the website managed to somehow change itself to another article without my touching a single thing. For the love of God, can someone tell me why, and how, it does that? It’s the second time it’s happened to me. This alone would be enough to drive away a lot of people from this site.
I don’t have it in me to retype both decent-length paragraphs I had going before, so I’ll just say I think Hugo has a decent point here but seems to oversimplify things in blaming men for their own problems as a summary of what I had going before.
Lol…hey Reb
Just do what the rest of us are doing and type it all out in word pad or in an email draft…..
Total pain in the ass, but don’t let it discourage you
Guess I’ll have to do that. Though I’ve been here a few times before this week is the first time I’ve ever posted anything here. I’ve never seen a site work quite like this one.
Hugo once again proves that feminists have to rely on sexism and hateful propaganda to ‘prove’ their cases against men.
======== From the article:-
Being a man, in other words, is defined by divesting oneself of anything remotely associated with femininity (like kindness, sensitivity, intuition, empathy). When heterosexual masculinity is defined by violent obtuseness, these “guy rules” rob boys of their chance to develop emotional skills to thrive in relationships with others. This frantic effort to shut down a whole aspect of one’s potential isn’t caused by testosterone or Y chromosomes. It’s caused by the longing to live by the “man code.”
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Whoa… So men distance themselves from ‘kindness’ and suchlike? Wow… I wasn’t aware of this ‘fact’ at all. So all you men, my feminist sisturs were right all along – you am evul menz!
And just which men are defining heterosexuality as violence?
What a sexist man this Hugo fellow is… It must really suck to believe things like ‘kindness’ are feminine traits while ‘violence’ are male traits. I guess he hasn’t looked the child abuser relationship statistics before, showing the vast majority of child abuse occurs “in kindness, no doubt” at the hands of mothers while the safest person a child can be with is their father.
Why on earth are we on a men’s website, and reading an article on some dude, bashing men?? I am not sure what part of your brain you had to starve of oxygen to write this article. For a simple start a modern man does not seek his approval from other men. Look around you, wipe your glasses, and open your eyes. Do you really think men are rushing into salons for facials, so other men would smack them on the back and say “Nice spray on tan Phil”. Your article is so full of flaws that I would need too much time and energy to refute them all.
Please do us all a favor and go back to writing on feminist blog sites, where all you have to do is ridicule yourself and your fellow men to get some cheap easy applause as common sense seems to have been educated out of you.
Seven Chinchillas…….make sure you wash them thoroughly after use!
I second that, mra or not u cant help but feel disgust when reading this article. When you’re young as a boy its almost normal to cater to women every whim since we have no idea whats really going on but as we get older and go from boys to men and women and feminist for what they really are its unimaginable how someone can stay so naive. Not only follow and obey the slave-master but defend her at any cost. Women are not all intrinsically good get that threw you’re head. Here’s an idea, ever heard of you-tube mangie? look up Bernard Chapin warning: you’re master may yank the leash so beware
Peter: Why on earth are we on a men’s website, and reading an article on some dude, bashing men??
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This is NOT a men’s website, this is a ‘Good Men Project’ of Ms. Magazine.
“Men are suffering because their emotional, psychological, intellectual, and sexual potential is stunted by their own efforts to live up to an impossible masculine ideal.”
Thank you, from a woman. I am a feminist but not the bad kind. All feminism is,to me is getting rid of this monkey on our backs; The expectation that anybody should live up to someone else’s ideal. Men, women, trans, whatever, society’s ideals of group-think are ill-thought out, ill-advised, and obsolete, especially w/r/t gender. I have enough on my mind without adding anybody’s opinion of what mold I ought to fit into, and I imagine by your statement that men feel the same way. And good for us for trying to rid ourselves from it. We all want to live like the sky is the limit, and gender expectations aren’t ever going to help that along.
Living up to society’s ideals is the definition of ‘civilization’. without adopting ideals to live up to, you are ruled by nothing but selfish impulses. You are an animal, fit for nothing but living outside of society.
But, when society’s ideals begin to actively CONFLICT with your personal ideology, Then your duty as a civilized human being is to change the ideals for the greatest possible benefit to the greatest possible number of people.
Discarding society’s ideals without forethought and a great deal of introspection and PERSONAL responsibility is an anarchic response that fuels the fires of violence.
The problem is that modern ‘feminism’ is pushing an ideology that absolves females of the neccessity to think for themselves and try to understand all the possible ramifications of their bid for freedom from ‘societal mores’. Most social rules that have developed between men and women in the last ten thousand years (The evil patriarchy) exist because there was at one point a REASON for them to exist.
discarding societal values without understand the reason for their existence is as silly as throwing your handbrake out of the window of a moving vehicle because you do not see the neccessity for stopping when you are trying to go someplace.
Yes, some societal mores were created in a less technologically advanced age, but feminism blindly throwing out the baby with the bathwater in discarding them because they impinge on what they perceive as ‘their personal freedom’ without bothering to understand why they exist, such as protecting more important freedoms of OTHERS from being trampled, is not only short-sighted, but frankly suicidal.
as a brave man once said, “The freedom to punch me stops at the end of my nose”
The problem is, that the current agenda has carried right through with the punch and is fairly plastered in the nose… and the agenda is being supported by a huge number of men who don’t understand that they are also the ones getting punched, and they will eventually feel the hit.
tens of thousands of men are being subjected to the horrors of jails and prison because a woman has stated that they were ‘abused’ or ‘raped’ without physical evidence of abuse or rape or by warping the definition of rape so far that it is nearly impossible to have any physical or social contact with a member of the opposite gender without risking jail time. and yet these men are ‘dismissed’ and ‘marginalized’ by the feminist ideology, since of course, tens of thousands of males being beaten to death and raped violently in prison is no where NEAR as horrible as a few thousand girls getting too drunk to say ‘no’ effectively or feeling ‘pressured’ by a male standing too close or brushing her in an ‘inappropriate’ fashion.
How can you honestly compare the horror a ‘first timer’ with a ‘rape’ charge that gets him 5 years in jail (almost guaranteeing he is going to wind up as a ‘toy’ to another prisoner) to having your nipple tweaked by an unwanted advance? or waking up in bed to someone that you don’t remember before your 2th beer the night before?
You consider this JUST punishment? You consider this even closely approaching equity?
Feminism has lost all sense of balance and all sense of perspective in their fight to destroy civilized conduct between the genders. Is it any wonder that the MRA’s are becoming nearly rabid in their attempts to break this stranglehold of inequality and re-establish some of the courtesy and civilized behavior that have proven themselves to help maintain an equitable and fair balance over millenia?
When I was in high school, a young women that i did not know and did not have any interest in grabbed my crotch.
Modern feminist ideology states that my protest over her crotch-grabbing antics was me, interfering with her right to express herself.
If I had grabbed a young woman’s breasts, without permission or interest from her, I would be in jail for at LEAST a year for sexual assault, right after the football team beat the hell out of me. and I would be permanently and for the rest of my life labelled as a ‘sex offender’.
and feminist ideology protects and encourages these brutal charges for what is, in the end, a fairly minor case of nonviolent touching.
Does this honestly seem like equality to ANYONE?
and feminism would marginalize this disparity as ‘oh, to make great social progress we have to break a few male eggs’ The problem is that this is NOT just breaking a few eggs. This applies to EVERY male and is causing a huge psychological rift in men… every man in america knows by now that he will be ignored if he is groped inappropriately but will wind up in jail if he is caught doing the groping.
This is not a case of feminism ‘not going far enough’. It is a case where feminism has gone so horribly far that an entire half of our species is living in constant fear of reprisal for trying to be ‘equal’ to women. Men’s rights to express themselves, their freedom and understanding of the fairness of all things, is being relentlessly ground out of existence.
And feminism replies with ‘Oh, it’s only fair. you guys have had the power for ten thousand years and now it’s time to screw YOU over…here, here’s a list of statements with no basis in fact that ‘proves’ we have been oppressed for ten thousand years’
Men are living in fear… and our responses are split three ways between trying to ‘appease’ the majority (by reacting to this ‘new society’ as though it’s a positive thing and turning on those who recognize the problem like starved dogs fighting over a chunk of bone ), by trying to ‘ignore’ the problem (Man up guys! I am a man and I don’t feel oppressed at all! all those other guys had it coming, and it can never happen to me!), or by fighting back. The MRA’s HAVE to be twice as brutal and twice as hard core about hoarding what little concession we get, because we are outnumbered at every turn by terrified appeasers and ignorant ‘live and let live’ types JUST among our own gender. not to mention this huge block of feminist propaganda that is turning our own instincts to protect and love women against us, as well as an enormous amount of sympathy that have simply, unthinkingly, bought into this propaganda and ideology without considering the consequences.
Most MRA’s do not hate women (in fact, I don’t know personally a single one that does) in fact, we LOVE women… but we have realized that our backpedaling agreement to every ill-conceived and selfish demand feminist ideology has placed upon us is destroying the very foundations of civilization that we have spent the last ten thousand years building. It is time to STOP caving in to every casual demand that feminism makes appealing to our weakness in telling a woman ‘no’.
We, the MRA, are out searching desperately for the baby that feminism cast out the window with the bath water, and we are going to fight anyone that tells us that it is not worth searching, or laughs at us, or attempts to stop us with fear of repercussions.
You sound crazy. Your ranting about the 10,000s of men being brutally raped in jail after being falsely accused of rape was hysterical hyperbole. You didn’t give a single example of where feminism – which you basically blame for the coming apocalypse – has caused even one man any harm. Before feminism, were there no false rape charges? Was it just a better time because women were more ashamed and didn’t report it?
What the HAIL were you talking about in this post? Because it makes NO sense.
and yes, by your simple statements you have already proven yourself as a ‘feminist, the bad kind’
Stellar, incisive article.
this site is misandric, and hugo is a mangina.
Hugo is starring in this youtube video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ppd6LHfhkd0
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Ahn, the joys of being a sex/gender researcher who specializes in prostitution and sexual tourism.
Hugo, go back to advocating for male genital mutilation.
In sum: Man Up, ignore your pain, and take personal responsibility for listening to men who tell you how to live your life.
Even women are shouting down the hypocrisy of feminism: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=plkeKMTDM9g
I agree pretty much with everything Love Shark is saying. I would only ask why men would even WANT to play victim? I mean it doesn’t seem to have worked out so spectacularly for women, to hear the more reflective and intelligent feminists talk about it.
I remember someone saying that Christianity was a slave religion. Could it be that as our cultures are based on Christianity, that we worship the slave – the victim?
Well, there’s definitely a huge S&M component to Xtianity, that’s for sure.
I do not think, MRAs are getting feminism wrong.
I am not surprised that you delete comments from MRAs on your own blog all the time, because the truth hurts.
Hugo, you are surely not, what I would call ‘a good man’.
“Men are suffering because their emotional, psychological, intellectual, and sexual potential is stunted by their own efforts to live up to an impossible masculine ideal.”
“Being a man, in other words, is defined by divesting oneself of anything remotely associated with femininity (like kindness, sensitivity, intuition, empathy).”
These truisms are something that have to become realized by more boys and men so that we will finally stop repeating the destructive cycle of the “tough guy” attitude egged on by society for ages and ages past. Men are inherently capable of kindness, sensitivity, intuition, & empathy and they should not try to inhibit or hide these critical aspects of the human experience.
Of course Hugo FAILS to account for the hypocritical entitlement mentality of feminism. He is like many emasculated males in our society who are never taught to question the tenets of feminism: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=plkeKMTDM9g
At least Manhood Academy has the balls to expose the scam of feminism.
This is actually very well thought out, Shark, but allow me one big’ol womanly criticism:
Gender police? So very inaccurate. In my experience… well… how about a story?
A college graduate I lived with had a big upset with her fiancee when she found out he had been with five other women over the course of their relationship. They went to therapy, talked it out etc. and mutually decided to stick together, continue the relationship and slowly work through the fall-out. Cool beans, said the ladies over margaritas. While there were one or two loud, wordy exceptions, most of us listened to her and decided to support the couple during hard times.
Then she got a call from her fiancee’s brother. Asking her on a date. Then she got some hate (Facebook style) from his friends. It turns out that, during guys night out, the boys had decided that she was to blame, and had to go. And hey… if she’s single…
It was a mess. She not only had to deal with the delicate issue that is infidelity and dishonesty, but she also had to contend with buddies who had a very “dump that ball and chain” attitude.
So in your struggle to bring awareness and fairness to both sexes, let’s not make any more generalizations okay? They never get us anywhere. People are capable of doing every sort of thing, anytime.
Seems to me that all the people who disagree with what hugo says have been downvoted.
That tells me their are more woman on this so called goodmen project than men.
Now i wonder why it is that a magazine created for men seems to be turning them off could it be because most of their if not all of their article writers are feminists or are bias towards men and in paticular mras,mgtow and pua`s.
the day i take adive from you hugo or any man like you will be the day the femarellas have a collar around my neck and a leash to pull on.
surprised just how many of the articles on here degrade and have outright misandry comments contained within them.
this is one man who is certainly going his own way.
nouse replying to my comment as ive took a leaf out of the feminist handbook and just ignored what i dont agree with or know to be true but would undermine my whole argument.
It’s such a shame that so many women think that feminism is a dirty word. In its best and most common incarnation, feminism is not the latest battle in the war against the sexes, but a means of obtaining reprieve. It concerns itself with violence against women, but not to the detriment of concern for violence against men. It is more about questioning and eventually dismantling a system that is based on myth and stereotype: that women want, need, or lack control, and that men naturally have it and should use force to maintain it, but not too much.
Kudos to Hugo for calling this what it is: a system that is outdated, flawed, and just as harmful to men as to women.
If we can release ourselves from violence, both giving and receiving, then we have done a deed as momentus as the first vaccination, the abolition of slavery, or the moon landing.
If feminism were even remotely an equal rights movement, virtually ever man, woman, and child would call themselves a feminists. Obviously, since very few women almost no men call themselves feminists, it’s clearly got nothing to do with actual equality.