QUESTION: A small but growing number of men's groups are forming to protect or enhance the status of (predominantly) white men in society. These men frequently feel demeaned by the women's movement and fear women want not only parity but superiority. Is their fear justified?
BETSY HART: One reader wrote in response to our recent column on the feminist movement that "some of the rights that women deservedly fought for and won are now being taken away from men." That largely sums up why many men feel they have to fight back.
For most men in the new "movement," concern goes much further than being passed over for a promotion so a company could fill a "woman quota." It's about more than fighting to see their kids after a divorce. What most men object to more than anything else, it seems, is the male-bashing the women's movement has engendered.
It started in the '70s with slogans like "A Woman Needs a Man Like a Fish Needs a Bicycle." In the '90s that same sentiment was expressed on a recent Time magazine cover that asked "Are Men Really That Bad?"
Worse than that, there is no longer any respect for what were once seen as desirable virtues of masculinity. Strength, both physical and emotional; the ability to protect and provide for a wife and children; courage; spiritual and family leadership. Today men are denigrated, and any unique role they might have in a family or society is despised. Women, however, are considered to have special and virtuous qualities, vis-a-vis their femininity. And they do. I think what men are fighting for more than anything else is a recognition that there are unique and positive qualities to being a man, too.
BONNIE ERBE: The lady (my colleague) doth protest too loudly, as do men who fear an Amazonian takeover of society. Granted, feminism has its excesses (as does capitalism or any other organized movement). But actions speak volumes, and reality shows us there is no need for men to fear being "castrated en masse," the hyperbolic prediction of male advocate Rene DeMarco, founder of the group The Voice of Men.
DeMarco's hysteria to the contrary, I, quite frankly, see the emerging men's movement as a healthy development. Men should celebrate their masculinity and gender unity, just as women celebrate ours. Those characteristics were never found objectionable by women who fought for equality. Women fought only to destroy the suppression of their rights - not to destroy men. And Gloria Steinem has apologized ad nauseam for 20 years for her "fish/bicycle" remark.
What's more, we should not be surprised to see some cultural see-sawing. We forget that we are living in a pivotal period. Backlashes are to be expected. Women have been, for the most part, subservient to men throughout the course of Western civilization, only gaining substantial equality under the law in the past 30 years. We cannot change thousands of years of culture in 30 years and expect to reach immediate equilibrium.