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Why feminism has a problem with male victims

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Our post about The Guardian’s censorship of male victims of genital mutilation has sparked some lively debate and brought the feminist campaigner Hilary Burrell to insideMAN. Hilary directed us to a quote by Dale Spender suggesting that people who aren’t feminists have a problem. Here our news editor, Glen Poole, responds to Hilary with an open letter outlining why male victims of various gendered crimes often find themselves at odds with feminism.

Dear Hilary

Thanks for your detailed comment on my article about The Guardian’s censorship of discussions on genital autonomy, which restricts the involvement of those who campaign for male genital autonomy in favour of those campaigning for female genital autonomy.

Let me be clear from the outset. We are seeing the world through a different lens. You are a feminist, I am not.

I am an integralist, which means I seek to integrate “what works” from many different word views and perspectives into my thinking. My theoretical framework for understanding gender issues is “integral gender theory”.

Not being a feminist, means I neither feel the need to attack it nor defend it. I can simply look at different feminist perspectives and ask myself—does this perspective work or not?

The Wisdom of Feminism

There are, as you say, some feminists who promote genital autonomy for everyone—male, female and intersex. One such campaigner is Travis L C Wisdom who is a feminist, an intactivist (ie a campaigner for genital autonomy) and a survivor of genital mutilation. I am a great admirer of his feminist approach to promoting genital autonomy—and I’m still not a feminist.

You say “feminism is about equality, people” which is a well meaning but ultimately meaningless statement which echoes (albeit more politely) the recent words of the feminist campaigner Kate Smurthwaite:

“Feminism is the same thing as gender equality, those who say it is not are lying assholes….please let them know they are misogynist dickwads.”

Kate’s tirade demonstrates why the  fundamental belief that “feminism = equality” is problematic. Just as beliefs  like “my religion=God” or “my religion=good” are also problematic.

More than one way to understand the world

There are many religions, many feminisms, many views of God, many views of equality and many views of what is good. People all over the world deny boys and girls the right to genital autonomy because they fundamentally believe the practice is good.

Some people campaign for genital autonomy for girls (but not boys) in the name of equality. Many of those people are feminists. They aren’t campaigning for equality for all, they are campaigning for better rights for women and girls, sometimes inspite of men and boys and sometimes in direct opposition to better rights for men and boys.

I pass no moral judgment on this. That it happens in an equal rights movements is not surprising.

It happened in the campaign for universal suffrage where some of those who campaigned for all adults to have the vote, realised they’d make progress a lot quicker if they campaigned separately for the male vote.

Not all equality campaigners are equal

People campaigning for the female vote were furious. They smashed things. They killed themselves. They planted bombs.

Today those people—the Suffragettes—are celebrated as heroic campaigners for equality. Many of those Suffragettes were wealthy, privileged women and in terms of voting rights they were under privileged.

Privilege literally means a “private law”, a law which applies only to one group or individual—like the right to vote or not. Like the right to genital autonomy or not.

It is true some feminists support genital autonomy for men and boys and yet campaigners against FGM worldwide have fought for laws that privilege women and girls and leave men and boys underprivileged. Just like some campaigners for voting reform  favoured an approach that privileged men in the first instance.

Suffragettes weren’t against giving men the vote, they were against an approach that privileged men and under-privileged women. Intactivists aren’t against ending FGM, but they are often against an approach that privileges women and girls and under-privileges men and boys.

And all over the world, feminists are campaigning for laws, policies and strategies that privilege women over men—most notably when it comes to “Violence Against Women” initiatives which focus on issues like domestic violence, sexual violence and FGM.

How men are underprivileged 

Feminists don’t, as a rule, set up campaigns to end domestic violence against everyone, to end sexual violence against everyone or to promote genital autonomy for all.

Feminism in practice is rarely about equality for all—there’s a reason it’s not called “equalism” or “genderism” or “humanism”. If anyone needs to know what feminism is predominantly about, the clue is in the name—it’s about female concerns and interests.

Feminism is rarely about equality for men and boys. Feminists can’t even agree whether men should have an equal right to be feminists, hence the ever recurring discussions about “can men be feminists” and the debates about how men should or shouldn’t be allowed to engage in gender equality work.

This is why male victims often have problems with feminism—and feminism has problems with male victims. Some male victims who were denied the right to genital autonomy, like Travis L C Wisdom, take on the struggle of work within feminism. Here’s what he has to say on the matter:

“I think that a current limitation of feminism is that it doesn’t incorporate male circumcision or the concept of a genital autonomy as an inalienable right across the gender continuum, it only focuses on Genital Autonomy as it relates to females and at times I will feel a bit betrayed.”

Feminism betrays male victims

How did the Suffragettes feel when campaigners for the universal vote focused on getting the male vote first? Betrayed!

How do male victims of domestic violence, sexual violence and genital mutilation often feel about feminism? Betrayed!

There are those who say that men can’t be feminists because they can never understand what it’s like to experience life as a woman. By the same token, it is rare to find a feminist who has experienced life as a male victim.

Too often feminism seeks to pull off the confidence trick of presenting itself as having the solution to all gender problems, while simultaneously ignoring and excluding those who seek to resolve the gender problems that men and boys experience—and excluding those who aren’t feminists.

I’m delighted that you consider the genital mutilation of females and males to be a human rights issue. However, you have never experienced life as a non-feminist campaigning for gender equality for men and boys Hilary.

Oppressive, controlling and dominating

You can have no living idea of how oppressive and controlling and dominating and dictatorial and fundamentalist and anti-male feminism can be until you’ve experienced feminism through the lived experience of a male victim of gender discrimination, campaigning for gender equality for everyone—men and boys included.

As some feminists say Hilary, you can be an ally, but you can never be one of us because you will never experience life through our eyes. And if you truly want to be an ally—rather than convert us to your belief that “feminism is about equality”—you will need to acknowledge and validate the fact that many male victims (including many intactivists) have the experience of being betrayed by feminism.

And when a group of people feel betrayed by a movement, unless that betrayal is acknowledged and addressed, there is no way forward. The only way for feminism to prove that it is really about equality and address the betrayal that many male victims of genital mutilation feel, is for feminists to campaign with equal urgency for all boys and girls all over the world to be granted the basic human right of genital autonomy.

If the pro-feminist Guardian was ready to do this, if it was ready to campaign for genital autonomy for all, with equal passion and commitment, there would be no need to censor passionate campaigners for men and boys’ right to genital autonomy.

Thanks for all you do campaigning to end FGM and for providing a page about male circumcisions on your website.

Best Regards

Glen Poole

—Photo Credit: flickr/fibonacci blue

Article by Glen Poole author of the book Equality For Men

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  • karen woodall

    cripes Glen but you’re patient, I just hope this woman can take off her ‘I’m so right that you will always be wrong’ glasses long enough to read it through and think about it. For me, as a former feminist (radical at times in the past too), the light bulb moment came when working with Oxfam UK on gender analysis and understanding through a different lens why inequality in certain spheres was present, tolerated and promoted. It got me thinking about how I had learned to analyse everything starting with the belief that women were inherently disadvantaged just by being women. I began to use a different lens to analyse and began then to realise that feminism is just one way of looking at the world, it is not THE way of looking at the world. From there my perspective grew and the world in all of it’s glory opened up. I like your integral approach though I cannot myself embrace any other theories or systems having put down the feminist theory that bridled me for decades of my life, but equalities work will never stop being my focus even though I no longer identify myself as a feminist. Being able to see those men and boys who suffer under feminism as well as still be able to see the women and girls who suffer in the world is one of my biggest achievements in life and it came from taking off the feminist glasses. When men argue and debate with feminists I see exactly where they come from and why they say what they say and if I put on my feminist glasses I can very easily see the weight of the femnist counter argument, but it is a constructed argument it is not the universal truth, it is but one way of looking at the world and there are so many others, many just as much about equality as feminism.

  • Inside MAN

    Thanks Karen, always a privilege to have you in this conversation, thanks for all you do.

    Glen

  • Nick Langford

    I really find it very difficult to understand how some men can feel ‘betrayed’ by feminism; feminism isn’t for men or about men, it promises them nothing. The clue, as you say, Glen, is in the name; perhaps if it were called ‘womenism’ or ‘womenandgirlsism’ it would be easier for these men to understand. I don’t think you can be betrayed by something that hasn’t offered you anything in the first place, and I think these men must fundamentally misunderstand the nature of feminism.

    Travis’s comment that feminism’s failure to incorporate (revealing choice of word) male genital mutilation is a ‘limitation’ and ‘betrays’ him is, frankly, bizarre. It is the very essence of feminism not to incorporate male issues; it doesn’t care about male genital mutilation, it doesn’t care about Travis’s experience. With respect to Travis, and he deserves a great deal of respect, I think he has a lot of learning and developing to do. Perhaps by the time he attempts his doctorate he will have seen the light.

    Feminism uses the word ‘equality’ in a very specific way, warping its meaning to render it into a word non-feminists can no longer use. Harriet Harman exposed the way this works by always referring to ‘women’s equality’ as if equality could belong only to women. When feminists say that feminism is about equality, then, this is what they mean – it isn’t the version of equality that non-feminists might imagine. Like Marxism, from which it has learnt a great deal, feminism is all about twisting the meanings of words.

    • Matt

      You do realize feminists drastically attack young men (socially and legally), right? And you do realize these actions are covered up by feminists shouting they are for men’s rights as well, right? Pushing for things like “yes means yes”, #killallmen, MaleTears, Man-up, teach boy not to rape and so on are direct attack against men, mainly younger men. If you find it difficult to get a grip on why so many men are not only rejecting feminism, but fighting it, I fear you are slightly out of the loop on how many feminist and feminist organizations attack men, young men and male institutions. Egalitarianism is for equality, feminism is for equal rights of women and women only. Otherwise it would be egalitarianism. Feminism does not and never will care about the rights of fathers, accused men, working men and military men, when it does, it’s not feminism.

      Feminism has made just an accusation a form of guilty, it has made many young men scared shit-less to approach a woman, it has ruined innocent lives of men, no women (brian banks and so on). Men feel betrayed by feminism because young men, mainly, are being not only negatively affected by it, but it’s altering the course of their lives and placing more and more blame on them for issues they never touched in their young life’s.

      It’s disregarded the male victim at almost all costs and minimalism male victims who suffer the same trauma as women. This is why so many men reject feminism, it does nothing in its current state but place blame and harm younger men for no other reason that desire. Woman and men have the same rights, period, there is no arguing that (no one has EVER found a single right that men have and women don’t, in fact, there is a litany of things women get over men, opting out of parenthood, shelter, government funding for personal and business use, the right to never go to war if they don’t want to , genital protection, university and national programs that only accept women, grants based on gender, family court, alimony, child support, jailing and arrests, lesser sentences for identical crimes and so on, men get none of these things.)

      Men and mainly younger men who reject feminism ideals are just tired of being blames, shamed and they are frankly disgusted at the opportunities women have based on just being female while young men are left behind to bust ass just to catch a break while they see their female peer get handed opportunists and then just complain.

      When both men and women have issues that need to be addressed, fairness is key, not playing favorites. And if you want to try to argue and say feminism does not affect men or even helps them, go to now.org and just see how much the national voice of feminism is doing for men. You will not see anything that shows men in a positive light, the only hints of men you see on there is hate, attacking and blame.

      • Nick Langford

        You have misread my comment, Matt.

      • https://www.youtube.com/user/girlwriteswhat Karen Straughan

        I think, Matt, that there is a difference between feeling angry and feeling betrayed, and Nick was speaking about the latter rather than the former, and given the tone and content of the rest of his comment, I certainly don’t think he was defending feminism.

        But while I think you think he was making an argument he wasn’t actually making, he’s still kind of off base. Young men DO have a reason to feel betrayed by a movement that so frequently claims to be for equality, and claims to be for everyone.

        Every once in a while, they’ll even write some ridiculous list of “8 ways feminism has helped men” or some other BS, all of it incidental byproducts of their advocacy for women. Their approach seems to be that because all gender inequalities derive from systemic misogyny, once misogyny is gone, misandry (you know, secondary misogyny) will just magically disappear along with it. Or that because these problems are part of “patriarchy” (even if they are actually the result of early feminism, like the Tender Years Doctrine), if we smash the “patriarchy” all men’s problems will end.

        To say that this is a highly dubious proposition is probably the understatement of the year, but it’s how they sell their snake oil to men, and how they convince men to be patient and wait for feminism to take care of it-“no need for you men to fight for your rights. Feminism’s on the case!”

        Men who get sucked into this load of hooey find themselves in a double bind. On the one hand, we have feminist women like the one filmed at the Warren Farrell protest in Toronto saying, “I don’t see why this event needs to be here. There’s plenty of room to talk about these problems within feminism.” And on the other, you have Kaelyn Polick-Kirkpatrick writing that men are not welcome in feminist conversations about sexual violence because even when they are victims they still have privileges that make it impossible for them to empathize with female victims.

        The young man who believed the first feminist has every reason to feel not just angry, but betrayed, by the attitude of the second one.

  • Patrick Smyth

    I do like it when you take off the gloves Glen. If only I had the intellect that you and others possess, to explain in an articulate and coherent way how women have been a distinctly malign influence in the life that I have lived, right from the moment that my maternal grandmother saw to it that I was circumcised as an infant 57 years ago, no doubt to make me a better man than her lowly intact son-in-law, my father. I was just about to launch into a rant, but I will leave it at that, and save it for later.

  • Nigel

    Thank you Glen for you articulation of a view that places the feminist view as the diverse theoretical theses it propounds rather than some comprehensive world view. 
    To be honest more than what is written I judge feminists on what they do. And here it is that one can see little gender equality and a lot of special privileges. However justified these add up to myopic “gynocentric” privileging. Justified by caricatures of males. These caricatures in fact the very antithesis of the supposed core of feminism, that there aren’t ” essential” traits of sex but that gender is socially constructed. 
    So men, perhaps especially young men, experience all the contradictions Matt mentions because of feminists not in spite of them. Even though the theory would suggest feminism will regard the areas men feel most pressured as evidence of social norms damaging to the individual. The practice is to insist men support women because women are inherently in need and men are inherently better equipped. 
    Of course that means that feminists are  intolerant of men not living up to their social role in the same way as  the suffragettes who gave out White feathers, equally concerned if women are asked to get their “hands dirty” apart perhaps from the army and obsessed with the idea that women are always and forever to fear men as blackguards(to be policed by men on their behalf). 
    As you say if one saw even lip service to the inclusion of boys and men in “gender equality” then one might have more respect. Yet what one sees is actual lying and campaigning against the most modest attempts to ensure men are able to access their human rights . 

  • http://redpilluk.co.uk William Collins

    I realise this is slightly off-topic and that you, Glen, were using women’s suffrage merely as an analogue, however….
    In referring to the early movement for men’s universal suffrage I presume you mean the Chartists. It is true that, with some reluctance, they did pursue a men only agenda, but this was against their natural inclination and a result of a sensible approach to strategy. They were bang on right in that respect, despite the movement failing. It was indeed essential to achieve universal male suffrage before any female suffrage would become possible, for purely political reasons. The suffragettes were essentially irrelevant in achieving the vote for women. Millicent Fawcett’s suffragists were sufficient to put the matter firmly on the agenda (and it was only she, and not the Pankhursts, who attended the Speaker’s Conference in 1916). Female suffrage would come, automatically and with virtually no resistance, once the vote was granted to working class men. For all their faults, the Victorians and Edwardians did believe in rewarding contribution to the Nation. Hence half of men achieved the vote through a sequence of Reform Acts in the Victorian period and the other half, working class men, as a result of the slaughter in the trenches of WW1. The vote for women was a collateral consequence of the latter. That women got the vote due to the deaths of men in the trenches is not a reading of history designed to appeal to feminists. But it is true. The true history of universal suffrage is the history of the working class struggle, not a gendered issue at all. The idea that the suffragettes won the vote for women is a re-writing of history through a feminist lens with vanishingly little historical verity. (Full story http://mra-uk.co.uk/?p=271)

    • Inside MAN

      Thanks William

      I am familiar with that argument and it has merit, however it is too simplistic to give us the full understanding of history (just as the mainstream narrative we’re fed lacks depth).

      With fgm/mgm I encourage people to move away from binary thinking with the phrase “different and sometimes worse than”—-eg fgm is different and sometimes worse than mmgm (and vice versa)

      The struggle that different groups face for democratic and political representation is different and sometimes more difficult…..

      The working class struggle was different and at times more difficult……in terms of the vote, working class men, for example, got there quicker than some richer and younger women

      In terms of women this pattern is repeated in many places around the world with France being a notable example of a modern country that took many decades longer to allow women to vote—despite being the modern revolutionary pioneers of the rights of all men to be equal citizens.

      The idea of men as citizens who voted in return for being prepared to defend the country goes back to at least the ancient Greeks—-and has continued into the 21st century in some places(eg the draft in the U.S.)

      The act of all men wining the vote and all women winning the vote is a very different bio-psycho-socio-cultural struggle — one is a class struggle and the other a gender struggle

      Having an equal right to vote is one way citizenship is defined.

      If you want to understand the different ways we approach men’s issues and women’s issues then it’s important to understand the different social and cultural histories of each gender.

      Part of the challenge we face is that while woman have been conceived as a distinct group called “all women” (or women and children or women and girls)….men have not been conceived as a distinct group with specific needs called “all men” or “men and boys” ….and that is a huge disadvantage to us and continues to plague us today.

      For example all women have the same automatic parental rights whereas men are subjected to a hierarchy of parental rights and that is deemed normal and acceptable.

      The same is true with genital autonomy, the post-modern struggle is for all women to have full genital autonomy and any attempt to introduce exceptions (eg the Seattle compromise) is deemed unacceptable from Western eyes.

      Most people in the west think all women and girls should be protected from all forms of fgm but only some men and boys should be protected from some forms of mgm—-again the concept of “all women and girls” exists culturally but the concept of “all men and biys” doesn’t.

      Why is this? It is in partly because men have never fought for equality as men in the way that women have fought for equality as women—this is part of the reason that the male gender is invisible.

      The fight for female suffrage—which is part of the historic struggle for women to be accepted as public citizens—remains iconic as women all over the world are still unequally represented in the publics realm (whether you think that’s problematic or not is irrelevant for this discussion, it’s undeniable as a fact that there are more men in the hierarchy of public life from politics to religion to business etc)

      Are other groups also under-represented? Yes. Gays, blacks, disabled people, working-class men etc—- but not “all men”

      Men as public citizens are over-represented everywhere’ but men as a distinct group of private individuals with specific needs are invisible. Men as men, men as a gender, we’re invisible….

      ….you’ll be aware of this invisibility…. As male disposability, the male homeless who are simply referred to as homeless people, the male soldiers killed in action who are simply referred to as soldiers, the men who die at work who are simply workers….the male victims of rape and domestic violence who remain invisible.

      Men as private gendered individuals with specific needs are unequaly represented (in the way that women as public citizens are unequally represented) — but the male struggle for equal representation in the private realm is far more complex than the female struggle for equal representation in the public realm —- you can see and measure unequal public representation (eg number of MPs) but it’s much harder to see and measure unequal private representation — but it’s there…..there are glimpses of it….in the number of refuge places for men, in the gender empathy gap, in the number of dads who win custody

      In simple terms women’s struggle for equality is a struggle to be taken seriously as public citizens who can work, vote, lead etc

      Men’s struggle for equality is to be taken seriously as private individuals who can care, feel, be vulnerable and need help and support etc—-to have equal rights as caring fathers, to have bodies that are equally worthy of protection, to require help as victims of violence etc….

      Denying the existence of women’s different struggle to be taken equally seriously as public citizens (eg fighting for the vote) doesn’t help us to understand the very different, but equally valid gender struggle that men as a gender face to be taken equally seriously as private individuals.

      Men and women’s struggles are different but equally valid—in the gender war our tendency is to invalidate each other’s struggles, rather than accepting both sides of the struggle as valid and then seeking to work through the tensions of our different struggles to try and find solutions that work for everyone men, women, girls, boys and any other kind of gender identity.

      Thanks for taking time to comment

      Glen

  • http://redpilluk.co.uk William Collins

    Thanks for taking the trouble to make such a detailed response. Appreciated.

    I agree that there was a separate gender issue in respect of the vote. My point was that the class struggle was always going to be the rate-controlling step. The cause for female suffrage leapt forward after John Stuart Mill and might well have resulted in success prior to 1918. But the vote for the other 50% of men was needed first, or at the same time, in order to carry Parliament due to the perceived electoral imbalance otherwise.

    “If you want to understand the different ways we approach men’s issues and women’s issues then it’s important to understand the different social and cultural histories of each gender.” Yes, indeed. And feminists will use historical oppression as a justification for present privilege. Leaving aside that this is morally spurious, I am not convinced about this “historical oppression” – as opposed from historically segregated gender roles. The suffragette mythologising is a distortion of history to create heroes for the feminist movement. The hypocrisy of the Pankhursts in expecting, and demanding, that men and boys who did not have the vote should go and die for them (yes, for them, women, this is how Emmeline Pankhurst expressed it) is breathtaking. I would choose my heroes more carefully.

    I see the FGM v MGM thing as an echo of this same hypocrisy. Who is it that presents this as a competition? They are both wrong, full stop. Why any debate? To call this an empathy gap is surely an understatement. I get the impression that some women regard males as mere automatons.

    I don’t buy that women any longer have “a struggle to be taken seriously as public citizens who can work, vote, lead, etc.”. At the most senior levels of public office there are more men, true. But this is not because women suffer from unequal opportunities (though they used to). You know the reasons, e.g., the “parenting gap”. And men have been bred/socialised to be competitive, so any position which is achieved by out-competing all comers on an individual basis is going to favour men.

    But so what? What good has David Cameron’s penis ever done me?

    It is notable that when women attain positions of influence they often set about using that position to advantage other women. Indeed, they come in for criticism from feminists if they do not. So they assume that men in positions of power will also use their position to advantage men. But they don’t. If anything, quite the opposite.

    My concern is for the ordinary working bloke. The alpha males will look after themselves and women have their political gender cohesion. But who speaks now for the working man? The unions have all been annexed by middle class feminists, and all three major political Parties are in thrall to the feminists.

    I’ll shut up now but leave you with a question: If by waving a magic wand 100% of MPs and Ministers, 100% of the Boards of all companies, and 100% of university professors and hospital consultants, became women – what would happen?

    • Inside MAN

      William this comment is one of favourite of the year, I may print it and wear it on a t-shirt:

      “What good has David Cameron’s penis ever done me?”

      Regards

      Glen

  • Nigel

    I think this was all succinctly summed up by Warren Farrell. Men are “Human Doings” and women; “human beings”. In essence men are what they “do” and their value is tightly linked to their utility. So they are generally much more affected by social  “class” as a hierarchy and so on. For women, as has been observed by much of the debate here , their value is both more likely to be intrinsic and can be enhanced by simply being with a high value ( class) male. Perhaps the quickest illustration of this is the life expectancy gap. Although there is a gap between women of “high” and “low ” class it is small compared that between classes of men. Indeed as has been commented on elsewhere men at the ” bottom” have shockingly short lives. 
    However one slices this,  our society values least it’s males who appear not to be doing anything valuable. From binmen to “dead beat dads” this has direct consequences. 
    Of course the notion that women are a uniform ” class” has peculiar effects too. This notion appears to blot out variations over the life course, across social class and other circumstances. With clearly powerful women, wealthy women, wise women and confident women garnering privileges that they have no need. On the grounds that “human beings”  deserve such privileges as counter to a uniform oppression. 
    As you say Glen it is effectively inconceivable that such blanket conceptualisations of a ” class” can be applied to “human doings” who exist in hierarchies of value. 

    • Inside MAN

      Very good points, if you have time to expand a little over Christmas Nigel it would make a great article

      Glen

  • Arminds’ copy of Swank

    Excellent response. I’ve found the same thing with feminism. In practice it’s rarely about equality but about securing support or benefits for women