Why don't feminists work with humans?

I can't tell you the number of times I have had conversations (read arguments) with people (read men) about why Feminists focus on women. A few days ago a friend said to me ' Why don't feminists work with humans...soon the script will flip...'

Well guess what I found when I was sorting through my files from my days at LSE's Gender Institute? Answers to this very question in the form of fantastic quotes which I will share below:

' What women are challenging is something everyone can see. Men's grievances, by contrast seem hyperbolic, almost hysterical; so many men seem to be doing battle with phantoms and witches that exist only in their own overheated imaginations. Women see men as guarding the fort, so they don't see how the culture shapes men. Men don't see how they are influenced by the culture either; in fact, they prefer not to. If they did, they would have to let go of the illusion of control.' (Susan Faludi, Stiffed: The Betrayal of the Modern Man, p.14)

'(I)t has become commonplace to see powerful and successful men weeping in public - Ronald Reagan shedding a tear at the funeral of slain U.S. soldiers, basketball player Michael Jordan openly crying after winning the NBA championship. Most recent, the easy manner in which the media lauded U.S. General Schwartzkopf as a New Man for shedding a public tear for the U.S. casualties in the Gulf War is indicative of the importance placed on styles of masculine gender display rather than the institutional position of power that men such as Schwartzkopf.'(Pierrette Hondagneu-Sotelo and Michael A.Messner 'Gender Displays and Men's Power: The 'New Man' and the Mexican Immigrant Man,' in Theorizing Masculinities)

'There has also been, alongside the survival of what we might call routine popular misogyny, evidence of the partial reversal of the traditional evaluation of stereotypical masculine and feminine traits...This is not evidence of the arrival of sexual equality in material or ideological terms, but it is evidence of dramatic change...This suggests that popular discussion of the 'crisis' in masculinity and changes in the prospects that face men, or the popularity of appeals to rediscover 'the deep masculine' proferred by Robert Bly(1991) are more than anti-feminist backlash. They are evidence of the material and ideological weakening and collapse of patriarchy. It is a bad time to be a man, compared to the supremacy men have enjoyed in the past - and this is a thoroughly good thing. (John mcInnes, The End of Masculinity, p. 55)

' The feminine mystique's collapse a generation earlier was not just a crisis but a historical opportunity for women. Women responded to their 'problem with no name' by naming it and founding a political movement, by beginning the process of freeing themselves. Why haven't men done the same? This seems to me to be the real question that lurks behind the 'masculinity crisis' facing American society; not that men are fighting against women's liberation, but that they have refused to mobilize for their own-or their society's-liberation. Not that traditional male roles are endangered, but that men are in danger of not acting.' (Susan Faludi, Stiffed: The Betrayal of the Modern Man, p.41)

What are your thoughts on the quotes?

Nana Sekyiamah
Programme Officer
Fundraising & Communication