One of the great challenges of our time is to create shared meaning with oppression. What does it mean to be an American, to be proud without being nationalistic? What does it mean to be a man, beyond dominating women?
My go-to example of meaning without oppression is loyalty to sports teams. Even if the Yankees are the “best” baseball team, neither the Yankees nor their fans oppress others. Yankees fans and Mets fans each have a common identity and shared history that is not oppressive of the other.
College loyalties are another example: people are inducted into clans and forever identify with their alma maters. Of course, education is closely linked with wealth and class, so saying “I went to Harvard” carries a lot of baggage. But I wouldn’t say that Alabama’s Crimson Tide oppresses Texas A&M Aggies or vice versa. Ditto for fraternities and sororities.
I want to be part of the struggle against oppression. American-centric jingoism and the patriarchy should both wither and fall. But I worry that we’ve thrown the baby out with the bathwater. The bathwater is oppression, and it’s good that we threw that away. The baby is shared meaning, what it means to be part of a community, or to draw meaning from your identity in that community. It’s good to throw away male oppression, but I think we are also throwing away any communal sense of what gender means, especially what it means to be a man.
The typical framing is that, for men and women to have equal power, men must surrender some of their power. Resistance to feminism arises because men want to keep all the power. As a man sympathetic to the fight against oppression, I propose an additional possibility: that feminism makes it unclear what it means to be a man. In other words, some men resist feminism not only because they will lose power but also because they will lose identity.
My thesis is that men need to find an identity, a statement of what it means to be a man, that is totally decoupled from the oppression of women.
I’m not saying that men need some special dispensation in this new cultural order. I am suggesting that there is a deeper question: in a world where men and women are equal, what does it mean to be a man or a woman? Are these categories to be simply abolished? Should sex be a purely medical fact like blood type that has no social dimension at all? What about gender?
I ask these questions because I am a man who finds male identity confusing. My grandfather could be confident in his masculinity because he was the breadwinner and he had male friends and he liked manly things like boats. His wife kept the house and cooked the food and raised the kids. If he got angry and yelled, well, anger wasn’t a religious virtue exactly, but it was a sign of being a man, which was a good thing ipso facto.
Today, the picture is more confusing. For better or worse, womanliness seems to be associated with globally positive qualities like being nice to children. By contrast, manliness seems to be associated either with globally positive virtues that we think should belong equally to men and women, like strength and ambition, or to wholly negative traits, like being mean to children.
My guess right now is that gender should be like a moiety system. In a culture with a moiety system, everyone belongs to one of two groups, like clans. Members of one moiety can only marry people of another clan. In most of these cultures, children take on one parent’s moiety. The two moieties have some special role to play in the society, and the two moieties are equally valued.
For example, the Tlingit people of the Pacific Northwest have two moieties, Raven and Eagle. Each moiety is composed of many clans, so every marriage is across clans. Every clan has its own songs, traditions, and religious symbols. Children take on their mother’s clan. A child’s father is a kind and friendly figure but not part of their moral upbringing. The mother’s brother, who is in the same clan as the child, is the powerful, disciplinarian figure we associate with fatherhood in the West.
In Tlingit culture, the moieties make the clan structure reciprocal and cohesive. When clans fight, they are drawn back together by the father-child relationships that cross clans. When someone dies, their own clan is too beset by grief to prepare the funeral, so funerals are arranged by the father’s clan.
In the culture I grew up in, gender is like a moiety. At birth, you are assigned to one of two moieties. In day-to-day life, the moieties intermix and go about their business, but the closest platonic relationships tend to be within moieties. At critical moments, the two separate. During coming of age, boys and girls are separated to be initiated into sexual secrets. (When my fifth grade class was separated into boys and girls by our health teachers, the purpose was to learn about anatomy, but they did the separation by gender and not by anatomy.) You marry across moieties, that is, in opposite-sex couples. Bachelor and bachelorette parties are separate. Before birth, baby showers include only one moiety, women. The fact that men don’t typically have a separate event parallel to the baby shower is a sign of my overall point, that we don’t have a positive, affirmative view of what men should be in our new world.
This system, as it exists, has problems. It associates one moiety with childbearing and childrearing, which produces a crucial imbalance. It also doesn’t answer my crucial question: what does it mean to be a man? The best example of post-patriarchy fatherhood identity I’ve seen is that mom is nurturing and serious while dad is care-free and fun. If this meant an equal division of labor, I would go for it. Personally, I think I would fall more on the nurturing and serious side, but for me that’s OK. Moieties and shared meanings mean that not everyone will feel perfectly comfortable in the role that’s been assigned to you. I’m not exactly sure of the line between discomfort and oppression, but for me, emphasizing my serious and nurturing characteristics isn’t a deep violation.
Of course, this problem isn’t only about gender. The president of Iceland recently gave a talk at my college (which I’m fairly proud of, and I’m pretty sure not in a way that’s oppressive) about how Icelanders are trying to find ways to be proud of being Icelandic without being nationalistic, that is, oppressive. A claimant to the throne of Albania wants to reinstate the monarchy as a way for Albanians to have a sense of identity that isn’t strictly political or nationalistic.
I am hopeful that we can have a future without oppression but with meaning. A purely relativist and individualist society has no common center or goal. If and when we achieve an equitable society free from oppression, then what will we want to do? If we knew our answer now, I think we might be able to get more people on board.
Scott! Finally getting around to leaving obnoxious rambling comments on your Substack.
Obviously I am not a gender anything expert so throwing some largely uninformed takes your way. Interested to discuss if you'd like.
On this section:
"The typical framing is that, for men and women to have equal power, men must surrender some of their power. Resistance to feminism arises because men want to keep all the power. As a man sympathetic to the fight against oppression, I propose an additional possibility: that feminism makes it unclear what it means to be a man."
I'm interested in that last bit. My take would be something more like this:
* One of the main differences between men-writ-large and women-writ-large (glossing over a lot of nuance here) is just average physical strength. That's my layperson take anyway.
* There used to be loads of work/jobs where that difference in physical strength mattered. Plowing fields with oxen. Almost anything construction-related before machines. Fighting other people (tho it seems a little unclear to me whether the prevalence of war/fighting has actually fallen over time. I know there's been some pushback on the Stephen-Pinker-type "war is less common today" narrative. Way outside my knowledge base here).
* Anyway now there are just fewer jobs where brute physical strength matters. Check out this cool BLS data, for example (I wish they had a timeseries of this): https://www.bls.gov/opub/ted/2017/physical-strength-required-for-jobs-in-different-occupations-in-2016.htm. If you refer to the definition of each category, even the "medium work" category doesn't involve a ton of super heavy lifting. And just in general, many common job types involve endurance (e.g. standing for long periods) but not tons of muscle: https://www.bls.gov/spotlight/2014/occupations/images/chart_01_large.png (Don't get me wrong, some common jobs like nursing involve literally picking people up. But making a point about general trends here)
* And even for jobs that used to require tons of physical strength, less strength is now required. We have tractors that plow fields and machines that assist warehouse workers. Basically anyone can kill other people with 4 pounds of pull force in their index finger, which seems like maybe partly why many modern armies have opened the ranks to women in combat roles. (https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/worldviews/wp/2013/01/25/map-which-countries-allow-women-in-front-line-combat-roles/).
* As an aside I think it's fun to notice how traditional gender roles get jumbled in office jobs, where things often revolve around collaboration & diplomacy (I have female co-workers with "traditionally male" traits like "decisiveness" and male coworkers who are especially emotionally competent, which people often to code as "feminine").
Anyway assuming we believe that:
* one of the hallmarks of this gender split is/has been brute physical strength
* there is less need in society for brute physical strength now, as a proportion of all jobs
I'm not sure I would say "feminism" has made it unclear what it means to be a man. Seems more like the world / technology has just changed the relative value of lifting/pushing heavy things?
And yeah that's tricky. If the old narrative was "I'm a man bc I can physically dominate other people and keep an ox-driven plow in the ground", we probably need a new narrative here. Both because the old one had problems (pervasive threat of violence = bad) and because I'm not sure the old one could even be successfully resurrected (tho some ppl will try; i guess never underestimate our ability to backslide into raw impulsive bloodlust). But it's hard to imagine brute strength becoming as important to society at large as it was 400 or 1000 years ago (right?).**
Anyway on the question you pose: "in a world where men and women are equal, what does it mean to be a man or a woman? Are these categories to be simply abolished?"
IDT they need to be abolished (what would that even mean), but in a way the fact that they're less relevant in some contexts is not a bad thing. When gender differences feel relevant something is often wrong (e.g. someone is feeling physically threatened). Or else we're in a context (oil drilling, pipefitting, etc) where men predominate because physical strength is important.****
Sort of related: I'm reading this interesting book by Jonathan Lear called "Radical Hope: Ethics in the Face of Cultural Devastation" that's about the near-collapse of traditional Crow culture in the late 1800s. The book asks some of these questions around "what do you do when the things that gave your culture meaning vanish?"
Also sort of related: Have you read this: https://otherfutures.nl/uploads/documents/le-guin-the-carrier-bag-theory-of-fiction.pdf
I think about this essay all the freaking time. Like, this is the problem to me in a nutshell. Men had a traditional story about manhood. It doesn't always make sense anymore. Many men don't think maintenance and care ("gathering berries") constitutes a compelling story. So some men are like, kind of drifting.
On this bit: "For better or worse, womanliness seems to be associated with globally positive qualities like being nice to children. By contrast, manliness seems to be associated either with globally positive virtues that we think should belong equally to men and women, like strength and ambition, or to wholly negative traits, like being mean to children."
Who cares? I mean that as an honest question haha. Like I don't think these kinds of lazy generalizations (which I agree, people sometimes make) mean much. Gendered violence is obviously a real problem. We should restructure society so women don't fear for their lives. But people who say stuff like "men are the weaker sex" or "men are terrible" (assuming they are not just voicing general frustration, which is understandable, but making some kind of social science hypothesis)--like that is just a little silly, entering sloppily-written think piece territory. Not saying you're doing that here! But the people that write stuff like that--I just don't think that's especially useful or thoughtful or interesting. (It's not hard to frame "manhood" as terrible; you can find the statistics to support a 1000-word essay w/ that thesis. But coming up w/ a novel, productive formulation of "manhood" is actually interesting and difficult).
**I wanna be careful with this "how important is physical strength to society today" stuff. I think it's easy to underestimate how important strength is as a person who has a desk job now. Like amazon warehouse jobs are exhausting. Being a nurse is exhausting. And plenty of extractive industry & primary energy jobs (the basis of modernity) are freaking brutal. Even my own, short-term manual jobs (landscaping, demolition, construction, kitchen prep) were pretty taxing. Sometimes I think this "what does it mean to be a man" stuff is really a question limited to men who have desk jobs now (or are struggling to find stability & employment) not the men out there welding 10 hours a day. Although sometimes you hear people talk about how we don't collectively value manual labor enough anymore, and how men in manual jobs don't feel valued. IDK if there's merit to that. Again, having had manual jobs, I have some appreciation for how taxing they can be and how important they are. Curious what you think on this.
(Also I know in large coastal cities traditional gender roles are often morphed/remixed. But I don't think we should underestimate where most cis, hetero Americans are on this stuff. Most American men and women still hold pretty traditional views on gender roles).
**** I'm not saying men's higher average physical strength is the only reason (or even the main reason) there are more male oil rig workers. I know relatively little about oil drilling. I'm sure it's a constellation of factors. I am guessing that physical strength is one of those factors. I could be wrong.
Final thought: I'm not sure sports are, like, a replacement for oppression or violence. Having grown up playing sports in Texas (albeit a commie sport like soccer), my experience was more that sports are a simulation or a taste of violence. A kind of training in (semi) controlled violence. One way to view this is "we're channeling boy's inherently violent tendencies into something mostly harmless." Another is "we're training boys to value violence and being physically dominant over other people." I'd tend towards the latter, although I had some pretty shitty soccer coaches (e.g. outright abusive coaches that were later fired for their behavior) and didn't especially enjoy their overt homophobia. The first perspective also tends to assume boys are inherently violent and I'm not sure that's right. Reading a couple books on this by primatologists right now. Will lyk if there's anything interesting in those.
Sports also adopt this inherently "insider group" / "outsider group" mentality. IDK if that makes for a good basis for masculinity, or needs to be central to a conception of masculinity. There are plenty of problems in the world--arguably the most important problems--that threaten us all (death, disease, environmental degradation, poverty, hunger) that don't require inside/outside group frameworks. (The universe wants to kill us all haha). That said I'm a big believer in unit cohesion and there are definitely ways to create group identities without falling into in/out group frameworks. Which you say above.
Anyway that was a lot of words! Curious to discuss. Hope you're well.