It’s no exaggeration to say that in many online conversations about women, a what-abouter will slide in to talk about men.
Violence against women? — Ah but men experience more violence than women? Sexism in schools? You should know that boys and young men are falling behind at an unprecedented rate. Failures in the criminal justice system? What about the bias against men in divorce and the family courts? Anything about the patriarchy? The patriarchy can be just as damaging to men. (Yes, we know. We’ve been trying to tell you.)
Sometimes it’s Incels and trolls out to cause the usual division, but often it’s men with data, men with anecdotes and men who can actually put a sentence together. Men, we assume, who believe what they say. (It should be noted, that sometimes it’s women too.)
As the wife of a man and the mother of two sons, I’m not saying never ask “What about men?”. I’m well aware that the way we bring them up is just as biased and potentially damaging for society. However, when men feel slighted, disenfranchised or threatened, women often suffer, and not enough is being done about that. According to the World Health Organisation the risk factors for both intimate partner and sexual violence include:
“harmful masculine behaviours, including having multiple partners or attitudes that condone violence (perpetration);community norms that privilege or ascribe higher status to men and lower status to women;
low levels of women’s access to paid employment; and
low level of gender equality (discriminatory laws, etc.).”
Additionally,
“The social and economic costs of intimate partner and sexual violence are enormous and have ripple effects throughout society. Women may suffer isolation, inability to work, loss of wages, lack of participation in regular activities and limited ability to care for themselves and their children.”
There’s a lot of work to be done to support boys and men, and a lot of good men out there making strides and trying to get everyone on board. But, as with everything, there’s a time and a place for those discussions and it’s not in the middle of a thread about a woman’s fear of walking alone at night.
Nor does it mean that every book for or about women, is anti-men. Although there’s a section at the end of my book for anyone wanting to be an upstander (instead of a bystander), the book was written for women who would like support in standing up to sexism. It’s not anti-men and I’m not a man-hater, it’s just for women. I read a tweet recently in response to Dr Jessica Taylor’s announcement of her new book. Although the patriarchy is mentioned in the sub-title, the book is about how women and girls are deliberately diagnosed as mentally ill, and disordered. The responder chose to centre men and bemoan the lack of ‘nice’ though:
It even happens with hypothetical questions. When the Feminist Next Door asked her annual Christmas question on Twitter, we saw the same thing. Question — “Women, imagine that for 24 hours, there were no men in the world. No men are being harmed in the creation of this hypothetical. They will all return. They are safe and happy wherever they are during this hypothetical time period. What would change? What would you do that day?”
Yer man just couldn’t resist centering men —
When women talk about issues like women’s rights and women’s safety it’s because there are problems and not enough is being done by those in power (aka men) to help us.
Diverting these conversations to men ignores the fact that men are the power holders, making up the majority of almost every government in the world. (I have no doubt that there’ll be a few #NotAllCountries responses to this, but it changes nothing.) Because they hold the purse strings, men can allocate funds and resources to address their own issues if they so wish, via education, social services, or judicial consequences. In other words, not only are most societies shaped by patriarchal measures, the solutions to the resulting problems are in men’s hands too. Just a hunch but, if you want women to play a bigger role in men’s issues, perhaps allow us a bigger piece of the pie?
When men ask “what about us?”, they are centering themselves. Again. It’s like mentioning cruelty to dogs and being reprimanded for not including donkeys, but worse. Women are where we are because men have been the centre of things for eons. The whataboutery seeks to keep this alive and deny the glaring reality — that the world doesn’t serve women well. Furthermore, it suggests that, not only do these men not want to help women, they resent us trying to help ourselves.
Demanding women talk about men in the middle of trying to help ourselves, also feels like we’re being given more work to do. (And more of the blame.) After years of men looking the other way about toxic masculinity and its effect on both men and women, it sounds a wee bit like “While you’re at it ladies, can you sort out our problems too?”
Photo by Calle Macarone on Unsplash
Perhaps it would help to think about it like this —the less women are hampered by inequity, the more we can focus on others. Or as they say on the plane — Put your own mask on first before helping anyone else.
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This post was previously published on medium.com.
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You may also like these posts on The Good Men Project:
White Fragility: Talking to White People About Racism | Escape the “Act Like a Man” Box | The Lack of Gentle Platonic Touch in Men’s Lives is a Killer | What We Talk About When We Talk About Men |
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Photo credit: Shutterstock.com
“Diverting these conversations to men ignores the fact that men are the power holders, making up the majority of almost every government in the world. (I have no doubt that there’ll be a few #NotAllCountries responses to this, but it changes nothing.) Diverting the conversation to gender itself ignores something even more important and problematic; the narrow and fallacious view that gender is the defining characteristic of identity, individuality, and power: It assumes that differences in outlooks and power are uniform, symmetrical, and ultimately attributable to gender. They aren’t. But the presumption that they are offers bedrock and justification for… Read more »