It seems to me to be a dreadful shame and pity that it should even exist. Ostensibly, it is supposed to serve men and their interests but, in fact, it doesn’t. Patriarchal men only think it does. How can it benefit men if 50% of the human race are disenfranchised?
When I say “disenfranchised”, I mean the MEN. Disenfranchised from womankind, cut off from any meaningful connection with them, unable to understand their own feelings, bereft of the vocabulary they need to express the complex emotions they experience. There is the constant denial, the resorting to anger or violence as the only release, the pointless hours spent in the company of men, hoping to find in conversation about beer, cars, politics, sport, work or weather some replacement for the connection that they lost when they were about 11.
Recently I heard about a prison in California, USA, where a pilot programme on emotion has been rolled out to hardened criminals and prisoners. Results have been impressive and inmates have said that they can now experience a wider array of feelings and have had their eyes opened to the possibility that a healthy masculinity is possible, one that precludes any toxic masculinity they had picked up.
This fills me with hope. If this programme was rolled out everywhere to all men, we could hope for a better world, for men, and for women. I myself would like to learn it — then perhaps my feminism would be purer — a more altruistic form and less needy and dependent and women’s better emotional mastery. As it is, I currently take most of my cues from women’s intuition about whether a particular course of action would be good for women or not.
Let’s hope men can be taught this. Then men’s liberation will be achieved as much as women’s, and the aims of feminism would finally be realised.
- Feminism
- Patriarchy
- Toxic Masculinity
- Healthy Masculinity
- Women’s Liberation
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Previously published on Medium.
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