If you’re going to promote as normal the idea that
masculinity means being strong, aggressive, assertive, and sexual (or the
Christian euphemisms “visual” and “only interesting in one thing”) and then normalize
the idea that “real” men are “masculine” (and straight), then you can’t expect
women to not worry about rape whenever they’re around men.
Feminism is not about hating men. However, it can be about
hating some commonly-accepted forms masculinity, which only translates to
“hating men” if those forms of masculinity are synonymous with being male.
Feminism as a concept does not treat the two as synonymous, only as traits
commonly found together because of the socialization of boys and girls within
our culture’s expectations about gender. This is what is meant when feminists
want to challenge the traditional views of gender roles. How “male” you are is
not determined by how many traits you share with a given concept of
masculinity; likewise for “female” and “femininity”. Generally speaking, feminists
don’t want to “feminize” men or society – they want to get rid of that kind of dichotomous
thinking entirely so people are free to be what they want!
Feminism focuses on the female side of gender because,
historically, that’s where the most attention has been needed. Feminism does
address men’s issues, but more commonly from a theory-based perspective because
as long as society still divides us into separate roles, it’s not possible for women to solve men’s social
problems. Traditionally, society presents gendered problems as a result of conflict between
the genders or against each gender’s supposedly “natural” role, making many men’s
issues the fault of women, or at least feminists, not respecting those norms. But from a feminist perspective, the problems men face come from harmful forms
of masculinity and those restrictive gender norms themselves (ex: the old and
very un-feminist, gendered assumption that “real” men can’t get raped by women because
the expectation that men always want sex means there can’t be any force
or coercion - you can't have been forced if it's something you already wanted). Feminist women alone can’t fix that for men because what needs to
be fixed is that harmful masculine stereotype (ex: of men always wanting sex). We can
go part of the way by not contributing to these harmful ideas, but men
have to go the rest of the way by rejecting these things too. Feminism is not the origin of these harmful gender norms, but the philosophical perspective that exposed them, and it’s up to the people involved to find and act on
solutions. But that can’t be done if the people interested in men’s issues
embrace and defend the harmful, socially constructed concept of what it means
to be male, rather than recognizing that that concept can be rejected without
rejecting being male.
Our gender shapes what we experience in the world, both
because of our biology and the social norms and interactions we develop with,
but we are each still individuals. We still have the ability to question what we’ve
learned about our genders, why we are the way we are, and how that shapes how we
relate to and what we expect from others, and what we actually want for
ourselves, whether it conforms to the social norms or not. The concept of the
“average” man or woman may be interesting when talking about populations, but has
little value for each of us as individuals, except what value we give it. And
we don’t need to give it much - we shouldn’t
give it much if we want to be truly free to be ourselves without restrictions
and still have healthy, respectful relationships with others.
(None of this is to say that all individual feminists uphold
all these ideas all the time or that this is the only form of feminism you’ll
find. There are many forms of feminism, many ways to express them, and many
different degrees of understanding these issues. However, what I give here is my
understanding of a broad form of feminist thinking about gender and gendered
social problems that hopefully can explain the basic perspective many feminists
are working from when they speak out about these issues.)
