This article contains references to domestic violence, child abuse, rape, sexual assault and suicide.
“Men’s liberation movement” is the kind of phrase that makes you reflexively tighten your sphincter. “Who or what”, I hear you ask, “do men need to be liberated from?” The answer is, as it so often is, other men. Why then, in the nearly 50 years since the first men began collaborating with second- and third-wave feminists, has a men’s lib movement failed to cement itself? And why has the much more exploitative and reactionary men’s rights movement become more well-known and popular?
Men’s liberation concerns itself with the role men play in upholding a society which limits men’s ability to express themselves, to live freely and openly, and without judgement. The positions of men’s lib activists are unsurprisingly aligned to most modern feminist thought. If you believe that society has organised itself into a rigid social structure which moulds people into a few simple caricatures, you understand that men who step out of line are “othered” in a distinct but similar way to women who do the same thing.
In the 1970s as feminists began to advocate for the rights of women, coalitions of men and male identified persons formed to draw attention to the negative issues which patriarchy enforces on men. Plenty of straight and gay men, as well as trans and gender nonconforming persons, were keenly aware of the consequences of stepping outside the approved gender norms.
Thus, men’s liberationists (MLs), like myself, take the position that dismantling the patriarchy, eliminating gender biases, and allowing people to live freely and openly benefits all persons in these struggles, regardless of gender.
Conversely, Men’s Rights Activists (MRAs), an anti-feminist school of thought, blame the above issues on feminism and the increased acceptance of gender equity. Neither group has managed to coalesce into a larger, unified movement. MRAs have splintered into dozens of various anti-feminist groups in a variety of bitter flavours. Men’s liberationists groups do exist (Men’s Development Network of Ireland stands out as one of the larger groups), but few organisations explicitly focus on men’s issues. MRAs will tell you this is due to a societal stigma against helping men because of feminism, and not because most men are still uninterested in confronting their role in upholding a system which limits their own self-expression and punishes vulnerability.
Theoretically, there are some points the two groups do agree on. Men do get sexually assaulted, and sometimes falsely accused of sexual assault; they do get lonely, die by suicide more often, and do lack some bodily autonomy. False accusations of rape and assault do happen, and men are four times more likely to die from suicide. Given these facts, it’s easy for bad actors to abuse real statistics to trivialise concerns brought up by genuine advocates for men and women’s issues. Rather than advocating for victims of assault, destigmatising mental healthcare, and building third spaces for communities to gather, MRAs instead generally prefer to object to programs aimed at female victims (while ignoring an overall lack of shelters), and claim that women are allowed to accuse falsely accuse men of rape without consequence (often while citing instances of women being prosecuted for filing a false report).
Men are sexually assaulted, as children, adolescents, and adults, by family members, figures of authority, strangers, and peers. We know men are less likely to report sexual assault, but part of this apprehension about reporting is the social stigma driven by a society which views men as dominant and sex-driven. Men make up about 9% of reported sexual assault victims, and are the majority of rapists (70% of male adults raped were raped by men and 89% of male children raped were raped by men). Conversations about the rape of men tends to be heteronormative – there is an assumption that forced vaginal penetration is either the only rape that happens, and/or the only one worth focusing on. Men’s liberation seeks to bring attention to the crime of child and adult sexual assault and promote compassion and empathy for the victims, regardless of their gender or sex. MRAs will generally either dispute the fact that a majority of sexual assaults are committed by men, or claim that acknowledging this disproportionate rate of rape by men is insulting to men who’ve been forced to penetrate someone. Obviously though, these numbers do not disregard the experience of men who’ve been assaulted by women, but rather acknowledges the stigma against the much larger number of men who have been raped by other men.
False rape accusations do happen. When it comes to reporting rape however, most people, regardless of gender or sex, don’t report their rape, and the majority of rapists are never brought to justice, regardless of their victim’s gender. When we look at how people feel about false accusations, we can see clear indications that men who believe that women falsely accuse men of rape are more likely to believe that they themselves will be falsely accused of rape by a woman. Depending on the study, we know between 2 and 10% of sexual assault cases are eventually classified as untruthful, and one review of cases showed 82% of false reports did not attempt to implicate a real person. The fraction of people falsely accused of rape is staggeringly small, and the number of persons investigated, and wrongly prosecuted, or convicted is progressively smaller and smaller. The much larger issue is the lack of reporting sexual assaults, regardless of gender or sexuality.
The most common claim people are familiar with is about a male loneliness epidemic. By the numbers, everyone is lonely, especially young people and the disabled. The WHO estimates 1 in 6 persons feels lonely, but when you break it down by sex, men and women report similar levels of loneliness. We live in an era where more people live alone than ever before, often in increasingly isolated cities and townships. Again, this is an issue where a genderless solution benefits all equally: wanting to develop stronger, tighter-knit communities benefits everyone, even if reasonable people may disagree on how to do that.
Men are more likely to successfully complete suicide, but they’re also more likely to not seek mental health treatment. Despite decades of working to try and advocate for men to seek emergency mental health assistance, there is still a major stigma for men seeking help in crisis, and suicide remains the third leading cause of death for young persons worldwide. This stigma isn’t created by a nebulous concept of feminism, but by the relationship men have with each other and their own masculinity. I can’t help but think that the increased anger towards “woke” causes, the commodification of our various woes, and an increasing disdain for academia and intelligentsia will lead fewer and fewer men to try to combat the pressures of society, and will instead lead to an increasingly alienated slice of young men who may decide to end their own lives due to their perceived failures.
One of the few issues MLs and MRAs often agree on is the unusual acceptance of male circumcision in places like the United States, where the practice is unusually secular. Unlike female circumcision, male circumcision does confer some possible medical benefits, like a reduced risk of transmitting several STIs including HIV (i.e., contracting HIV from a seropositive woman during vaginal sex) and risk of UTIs. In the United States, parents generally cite “hygiene” as the primary reason to elect to circumcise their child, followed by “social concerns” (i.e., having a brother or a father who is also circumcised). Circumcision for religious reasons is far more common in the Middle East and North Africa. Most medical groups are hesitant to propose a ban on infant circumcision, worrying that parents may elect for a “black market” procedure, increasing the risk of serious long-term health issues. Parents should act in the best interests of their child, but for some, the idea that you would subject a child to a surgical procedure to reduce the risk of a UTI, rather than just teaching parents how to wash their baby’s penis correctly, seems a rather unusual motivation.
Why has a serious movement failed to form about the myriad of issues which impact men? Perhaps it’s the diffuse and challenging nature of the various problems. For many men, especially alienated and dissatisfied young men, being told they are on the top of a social pyramid irks them. Ours is a society which expects men to adhere to high standards of economic and sexual performance, and asking them to reflect on the rigid system by which they’ve been expected to live is difficult.
As with so many privileges, it is difficult to see how you personally have benefited, participated in, and suffered from a system of power and privilege, when your view is blocked by your own individual problems and setbacks. It is easier for men to see their issues and failures as caused by a hostile force – the nebulous feminism – rather than questioning whether they failed despite their privilege. Few men seem willing to stop and reflect on a system which demands perfection and punishes deviation.
Men deserve to live full and complete lives. All persons deserve to be free of expectations and demands placed upon them for their gender or sex. We can only hope that more men continue to see the importance of tackling the dehumanising way we’ve organised our social order and move towards a more egalitarian way of life that encourages all persons to be seen as complete and whole agentic individuals. That is men’s liberation.
“We are oppressed by conditioning which makes us only half-human … We want to love, nurture, and support ourselves and other men, as well as women. We want to affirm our strengths as man and at the same time encourage the creation of new space for men…”
The Berkley Men’s Center Manifesto (Feb. 1973)
