We Are Progressive Women. Are We Leaving Men Behind?

By Paige Apetino 

*CW – Mentions of Assault*

One month ago, Sarah Everard was taken by a man she didn’t know while walking home and later found dead in Kent. 

Instagram and Twitter exploded with a torrent of educational videos, quotes, and images like: ‘ways men can make women feel safer’, ‘what not to do to a woman when walking home at night’, and ‘call out your male friends when they make inappropriate or sexist comments toward women’. This is all great work – necessary, colossally so, and monumental in the grand scheme of the rights and safety of women. The aim of this torrent is, of course, to make men aware of what they can do to improve the safety of women and how this can be achieved through informed, safe, and conscious behaviour on their part.

My question is, why is this still necessary? 

Do women need to be told that it isn’t nice to shout at people of the opposite sex across the street about how they look? Not that I know of, but we cannot generalise. I am sure some women out there feel the need to call out to the owner of a juicy butt every now and then. But from my own lived experience, the only perspective I can base this on, it is a rarity. 

The women I spend most of my time with actively call out each other when one of us makes a generalising, damaging statement or depreciates a person based on archetypes of a certain caricature. I have been called out myself – in a helpful, educational, and friendly manner – for a politically incorrect comment that I had no idea was incorrect until I was told so. This is what we do as a group of women. We teach each other. We help each other. We pull each other up. Not in a derogatory, ‘you’re-stupid-I’m-clever’ kind of way. More like, ‘you probably didn’t know this, otherwise you wouldn’t have said it, but that term actually derives from a damaging idea misconstrued and perpetuated by the use of that word. Instead, you could say this …’

Do men do this for each other? 

This is not an attack. I have far too much respect for men and the male-presenting people that I surround myself with to assume that none of them are aware of the culturally and politically appropriate ways of speaking and behaving in this world. I do not intend to create a contest between which sex is the most forward-thinking. I do not intend to build a divisive wall of vitriol between men and women or to vilify men; that has already been done enough. 

There is simply a question I want to posit: in the historic progression of women’s rights, through the waves of the feminist movement, did we forget to bring men with us up to the time in which we currently exist?

While women were (quite rightly) focused on bringing our own well-overdue rights into the current century, did we lose sight of the rights of men? Did they stay behind to get nachos, saying they’d meet us later? Are we talking enough about men’s mental health, about men’s right to be sensitive and emotional, their right to live outside the bubble of homosocial behaviour, which upholds an ever-outdated tendency toward toxic masculinity? I for one feel their absence. 

Although it should not be our responsibility as women to educate, update, or inform our men, we must ask ourselves: are we creating a safe enough space for men to come into our own, without feeling a threat to their more vulnerable selves? To clarify, when I say men and women, I mean all people of all backgrounds who self-identify respectively as a man or as a woman.

This leads me to my next question: are society’s stereotypes of men playing a pivotal role in limiting men’s inclusion in sex and gender discourse?

The concept of substituting rigid gender stereotypes with gender fluidity is not a new one. Late in the 19th century, Théophile Gautier explored the complexities involved with inverting ‘masculine’ and ‘feminine’ in Mademoiselle de Maupin. I put the ‘masculine’ and ‘feminine’ in quotation marks because these are binaries that I see to be restrictive and limiting, with no place in 2021. Everyone went wild when that boy from the X-Factor (Harry Styles) wore a feather boa to the Grammys – something Jonathan Van Ness has been doing for years. Are we going to continue to view this as less revolutionary on a gay man simply because a feather accessory matches an imposed idea of femininity that is attached to his sexual orientation? That is such an anachronism. A man wears a feather boa. Woah. My dad has been wearing women’s lingerie to parties since I was seven. 

Decadent writer Joris-Karl Huysmans also challenged prescriptive ideals of any concept of ‘binary’ in his novel of inversion, Against Nature. Throughout, Huysmans explicitly rejects any natural human impulse or tendency towards such things as beauty, comfort, social acceptance, and desire. Instead, he actively embraces their opposites in an attempt to seemingly contort that which is naturally expected of him as a human being, and as a man. In one rejection of ‘nature’, he fills the entrance to his mansion with flowers of grotesque and vulgar shapes and smells, evoking aromas of death and rotting flesh. It’s almost as if he attempts to prove the possibility of existing outside of the confines of expectation and homogeneity imposed by a restrictive society. 

If we can choose to be less assumptive when it comes to gender-specific labels placed on women by removing words such as ‘spinster’, ‘slut’, ‘gold-digger’, ‘air-head’, and ‘ice queen’ from our ammunition list, can we also please remove the derogatory use of ‘hyper-sensitive’, ‘over-emotional’, ‘effeminate’, and ‘gay’ (this is a BIG one) from our ammunition list toward men? If attaching gendered expectations on women reeks of inequality, then the same care must be taken when considering what pressure is placed on the male experience. 

It is important to note that where there might be internalised misogyny in women, there might exist in equal measure levels of internalised misandry within men. By default, true equality can emerge only by rejecting imposed stereotypes of all genders (male, female, neutral, trans, non-binary, genderqueer, cis etc.), not solely those placed upon women. 

And FYI, quotes from Sex and the City should never be used as any kind of example; it may only have been created as close as the ‘90s, but its gender politics certainly do not represent this century (or the two preceding centuries, for that matter).  

Books mentioned: 

Théophile Gautier, Mademoiselle de Maupin, 1835.

Joris-Karl Huysmans, Against Nature (À rebours), 1884.