Abstract
This paper explores feminism as a site of explicit struggle and implicit sense-making for young men. Through an analysis of interviews with twenty young people at two Australian universities, it considers how popularised feminist (and anti-feminist) discourses shape discussions of men, boys and masculinity. Actively grappling with the place of boys and men in certain high-profile feminist debates, participants’ responses revealed core sites of tension around their collective and individual responsibility for gendered harms, tensions reflective of those present within feminist debates themselves. The impact of feminism could also be seen in the gendered analysis so many participants produced to make sense of limiting emotional norms, even though they did not recognise this analysis as a feminist inheritance. Moving beyond an approach seeking to categorise young men’s responses as either pro- or anti-feminist, this paper highlights the entanglement of feminism in young men’s sensemaking around gendered issues.
Introduction
Men and boys in Australia are experiencing unprecedented exposure to debates about (and within) feminism. These debates increasingly focus on the role of masculinity in shaping and resisting gender equality, drawing boys and men into the centre of the discussion. Men and boys position themselves in a variety of ways in response to these debates. While a growing body of masculinities research attends to anti- and pro-feminist spaces and identities, it tends not to focus on the impact of these debates on men and boys outside of these polarities. And yet, this middle ground is arguably the space most men and boys occupy. 1
In this paper we analyse interviews with young people at two Australian universities in order to consider how popularised feminist (and anti-feminist) discourses shape young men’s meaning-making around boys and masculinity. At times our participants explicitly struggle with feminism, while at other times they draw on it implicitly as a way to make sense of their own gendered experiences. Most participants were acutely aware of feminism’s address, and actively wrestling with how to position themselves discursively and affectively in relation to anti/feminist ideas about men and boys. While some clearly embraced or rejected what they understood to be ‘feminist’ ideals, most demonstrated a more conflicted stance, drawing on feminist ideas as a resource even as they expressed ambivalence towards ‘feminism’ per say. In this paper, we explore these subtler entanglements with feminist discourse, highlighting its impact on participants’ understanding of their gendered experience.
In the context of increasingly polarised discussion of gender, and the tendency in some men and masculinities studies towards typologisation (Waling 2019a) and dualistic constructions of boys and men (Hoel 2015), we believe it is important to tell this more nuanced story - especially if feminist analyses hope to engage boys and men outside the polarities.
In this paper we consider two key ways feminism is taken up by our participants. First, we examine feminism as a site of explicit struggle, showcasing the complex ways participants orient themselves in relation to high-profile feminist discussions about the (bad) behaviour of men and boys. We show how participants grapple with the relationship between individual responsibility for gendered harms and those collective patterns and practices feminists often call ‘gender’, a tension we argue echoes tensions in feminist debates themselves. Second, we examine how participants draw on feminism as an implicit sense-making resource through discussions about limiting norms of emotional display, arguing this is a site in which feminism’s impact on meaning-making can be seen, even when they do not explicitly recognise or acknowledge that impact.
Literature Review
Feminism and Men
No longer the sole domain of activists, academics, and ‘femocrats’, feminism has a growing presence in a wide range of cultural spaces (Gill 2016). Major celebrities (Gill 2016), along with politicians and policy makers (Yates 2018) across the political spectrum, have vocally embraced feminist perspectives, although their embrace tends to extend more readily to liberal and white feminisms than others (Phipps 2020). New forms of ‘social news’ (Waling 2023) and professionalised feminist news commentators (Buiten 2020) have amplified decades-long feminist discussions about gendered harm through the circulation of feminist movements like #MeToo (Boyle 2019), alongside terms like ‘victim-blaming’ (Buiten 2020), ‘toxic masculinity’ (Harrington 2021), and ‘mansplaining’ (Joyce et al. 2021). These newly visible feminist projects feature men and masculinity as key sites of interest (Harrington 2021), especially in the context of the #MeToo movement’s “renewed spotlight on masculinity as an object of debate” (de Maricourt and Burrell 2021, 49). Feminist commentators often imagine boys as ‘future men’, seeing them as intervention points in public campaigns around domestic violence (Kean and Steains 2022), consent education (Hayes, Burns, and Egan 2022), and popular feminist books on raising boys (for example, Wegner 2021).
The presence of these feminist projects is also potently marked by that which seeks to erase them. Anti-feminist media commentators (Evans and Riley 2022) and misogynist online communities (Ging 2019) who ridicule or otherwise undermine feminist projects, have popularised what Jordan (2016) describes as ‘backlash’ ideologies. Many of these public backlash figures see boys and men as victims of gender discrimination perpetrated by feminists, or as in crisis due to changes in the gender order (Jordan and Chandler 2019), central themes in contemporary Western anti-feminisms (Ging 2019; Sharkey 2022). Boys and men thus learn to think about gender against a backdrop of polarised and popularised debate about boys, men and gender equality.
These anti/feminist projects pivot around longstanding debates about the extent of gendered harms by and to men, and between essentialist and socially situated notions of gender. Indeed, these debates were also key to ideological schisms within men’s liberation movements. While early men’s liberation movements sought to deal with the synergies and antagonisms between men’s and women’s interests under patriarchy - acknowledging men’s privilege and harms done by men to women while addressing gendered harms to men by masculine norms that impoverish men’s emotional and relational lives (Messner 2016a) - men’s liberation movements soon diverged. On the one hand, the profeminist men’s movement centred men’s privileges under patriarchy, while groups associated with the ‘men’s rights movements’ tended to emphasize the costs of masculinity to men, increasingly attributing these to feminism itself (Messner 2016a). The latter groups tended to espouse an essential masculine nature and assume an inherent antagonism between men and feminism (De Boise and Hearn 2017). This essentialist notion of masculinity, however, was in many ways at odds with the socially contextual analysis of the harms of patriarchy to boys and men advanced within the men’s liberation movement in the 1970s (Messner 2016a).
Public debates about masculinity today mirror these historical tensions in the men’s liberation movement. For instance, while #MeToo places men’s power and harmful patterns of behaviour under the spotlight, anti-feminist discourses assert a narrative of men’s victimisation (Venäläinen 2022). These historical tensions are also reflected in two very different contemporary uses of the term ‘toxic masculinity’; while some commentators apply it to point to social norms shaping masculinity, others appeal to essentialist notions of ‘good’ and ‘bad’ expressions of inherent masculinity (Waling 2019a, 2023). 2
Such debates are pervasive aspects of the cultural environment in which boys and men in Anglophone contexts come to learn about gender. As Laurie et al. (2021) observe, “all boyhood today is lived in relation to the influence of feminist projects (including social contexts where feminism has actively been rejected)” (77). However, while scholars have long positioned boys and young men as objects of feminism – especially as future problems or assets requiring intervention (Sharkey 2022; Waling 2023) - they have not engaged with them as complex contemporary “subjects of and participants in feminist knowledge” (Driscoll and Grealy 2022, 18). Though numerous studies consider the way boys and men embrace explicitly pro- or anti-feminist positions (for example, Burrell and Flood 2019; de Maricourt and Burrell 2021), they seldom explore the tacit impact of anti/feminisms on boys’ and men’s understandings of gender.
Intersectionality
Anti/feminist debates are also contoured by race, class and other social forces. Intersectional analyses provided by Black feminist scholars (for example Davis 1981; Crenshaw 1989) to illuminate the complexities of gender and critique inattention to race and class in (white) feminist work have influenced calls from within and beyond the academy to address intersectionality in relation to men and masculinity (for example Connell and Messerschmidt 2005). While some high-profile political movements have highlighted the impact of race on experiences of masculinity (for example #BlackLivesMatter), popularised feminist debates tend to flatten differences between men, even where they (occasionally) acknowledge differences between women. This is despite a growing recognition that men’s relation to anti/feminism is cultivated at the intersection of gender, race and class (see Dragiewizc 2018). Anti-feminist Incel communities, for example, often grapple indirectly with racism and ableism through discussions of ‘lookism’ and the social success of so-called ‘Chads’ (Sharkey 2022), while the appeal of anti-feminism among white men can be seen as an outcome of racialised and gendered aggrieved entitlement (Dragiewizc 2018).
The context of more local gender dynamics also shapes the specific anti/feminist discussions men and boys are immersed in. In Australia, discourses around masculinity reflect both specific histories - of colonisation and national identity, for example (Waling 2019b) - as well as continuities owing to ongoing geopolitical ties and transnational flows of popular culture, particularly with Great Britain and the United States. Waling’s (2019b) analysis of white Australian masculinity, for instance, highlights localised features (such as notions of mateship) as well as those influenced by globalised forms of dominant masculinity (for example, corporate, cosmopolitan visions of manhood). Her work shows the continuation, in some ways, and devaluation, in others, of traditional notions of ideal Australian masculinity, for instance with physical fitness and participation in sport continuing to be prized, while overt sexism, toughness, and racism are increasingly devalued (Waling 2019b).
Ideal constructions of Australian masculinity, as in other Anglophone contexts, remain considerably racialised and classed: implicitly white and, as Waling’s (2019b) research shows, increasingly middle-class or ‘respectable’ working-class (rather than the previously valorised notions of tough, working-class Australian masculinity). The way men and boys are positioned in relation to these specific cultural ideals will shape their experience of anti/feminism. Scholarship clearly points to the value of exploring how this particular moment in anti/feminist discourse is experienced by particular men and boys. A qualitative exploration of how broader gendered discourses are taken up or critiqued in the stories individuals tell about themselves refuses easy assumptions about men or boys as a unified group.
Approaches to Men and Feminism
Our research sits within rich ongoing conversations about the best way to approach men’s relationship to gender and feminism. First, while masculinities research has aimed to capture variations among men through the propagation of numerous ‘types’ of masculinities, this tendency has been criticised for reducing masculinity to categorisation (Waling 2019a). Although we acknowledge diverse masculinities typologies are a means to highlight themes in men’s relationship to gender, they risk over-simplifying complex lived experiences (Elliot and Roberts 2020) - which are spatially and temporally fluid and not easily reducible - and ignoring men’s reflexive agency (Waling 2019a). In this vein, our research seeks to avoid categorisation (for example of participants as pro- or anti-feminist), moving away from thinking primarily through categorical difference and towards rendering the complexity or “messiness” of young men’s entanglements with feminism more “intelligible” (Hoel 2015, 7). We hold that much of the richness and complexity of the data would be lost by reducing it to a story of men-who-embrace feminism and men-who-reject it. Attending to this nuance is particularly important as gender does not operate in isolation, but is inextricably cut through with other crucial aspects of social experience and identity.
Second, there is a standing tension in masculinities scholarship between approaches that centre patriarchal power in their analysis (including the ways it can be reproduced while appearing more transformative) and approaches that focus more on the lived, affective experiences of boys and men and how they grapple with gender (Elliot and Roberts 2020). As Elliot and Roberts point out, however, it is important to recognise men’s investment in patriarchy without “reducing the lives and experiences of young men to little more than strategies for hegemony” (779) - to “balance generosity and critique” (776). We approach the study of men and masculinity in a way that does not narrowly assume an inherent or primary antagonism between men, boys, and feminism (Laurie et al. 2021) nor “reduce [them] to an obstacle to improvements in gender equality” (Driscoll 2019, 235). Instead, we wish to trace the contours of gender and feminism in the narratives of men to reveal the “‘sticky’ impressions” (Berggren 2014, 245) feminism has left on their experience of boyhood and young adulthood - impressions that can be tense, ambivalent, and/or productive for them. We approach this work with an understanding that feminism is and could be ‘sensible’ (Ahmed 2017) for men; that is, like women and other gendered subjects, men and boys may encounter gender in ways that do not always feel ‘right’ and may find feminism a resource through which to unpack these experiences.
Methodology
Our study began with the desire to explore how young men perceived social attitudes towards boys and men. Motivated in part by our role as educators in Australian Universities who regularly teach content on gender, we wanted to know more about young men’s perspectives on contemporary discussions about masculinity - perspectives that invariably shape discussions in our classrooms. Ethics clearance was granted by the University of Notre Dame Australia’s Human Research Ethics Committee. We applied a combination of purposive and snowball sampling to recruit participants from two Sydney-based university campuses who identified as men, were aged 18 to 23 years of age and who had gone through high school in Australia. Recruitment yielded 20 responses: 19 from participants who identified as men and one trans woman who identified as having experience as a boy and young man (although she now identified as a woman and as trans) and wished to participate in the study to share her knowledge and reflections on these experiences. Participants undertook semi-structured interviews between October 2020 and October 2021.
Participants ranged from 18 to 23 years and were studying in various academic disciplines, including arts and humanities, education, science and law. While all attended high school in Australia, they went to a range of school types (Catholic, Anglican and secular; ‘same-sex’ 3 and co-educational). We allowed demographic information to emerge organically in the flow of the interviews, driven by a desire to observe how the participants themselves articulated their identities as relevant to the questions at hand. Seven actively raised their experience of cultural or racial diversity within white Australia as significant to both the explicit lessons they learnt about masculinity and their experience of masculinity itself. Seven of the twenty participants actively raised their family or school’s religion as significant to the lessons they learned about masculinity. Four raised identities as queer/bisexual, gay, or trans.
We do not assume the reflections we have gathered to be ‘representative’ of participant demographics: the data instead should be understood as providing insight into a range of ways people who experienced boyhood made sense of social messages about men and boys, where details of participants’ social locations may help us ground our understanding of these, but do not position us to make claims about wider populations. For this reason, we do not make direct overall comparisons, for instance, between the trans and cis participants’ perspectives, nor make direct claims as to trends correlating to other demographic differences.
We limited the sample to participants who attended High School in Australia, so their observations could be interpreted against the backdrop of a similar political, media, and social landscape. We are aware that the participants’ status as university students speaks to a particular social and educational location that is common but not universal for Australians this age. As the interviewees themselves made clear, however, their perspectives were also profoundly shaped by factors including school type, religious and cultural background, gender, sexuality and racialisation. Many explored the way race, sexuality, and religion shaped their relationship to gendered norms, especially insofar as they felt those norms excluded them
The interviews lasted 45-60 minutes and questions were deliberately broad and open-ended to allow for unexpected insights to emerge. The interviewers invited the participants to focus on attitudes and ideas about men and boys they encountered in their homes, schools, and mediascapes. Each interview was transcribed. Following immersion in the data, we identified broad themes as recurring across a number of interviews, and collated interview material relevant to these themes in order to examine each in greater detail, observing points of tension and resonance across and within themes initially identified. We decided to focus on two themes identified as conceptually connected by their articulation young men’s immersion within anti/feminisms: feminism as a site of struggle (including sub-themes of collective/individual responsibility, and men/masculinity in feminist debates) and feminism as an implicit resource (focusing on discussions of emotional stoicism).
Our analysis was informed by feminist work on men and masculinities that takes seriously the lived experiences and subjectivities of men and boys while situating them within the material and discursive conditions of patriarchy (Berggren 2014; Waling 2019a). This involved honouring the richness and complexity of participants’ subjective accounts of gender without imagining these as ‘outside’ broader questions of context or power and how these mediate discourse (Elliot and Roberts 2020). Like Berggren (2014) drawing on Ahmed (2004), we approach gender as both discursive and embodied in ways that are deeply enmeshed; men and boys carry with them “a history of ‘sticky’ impressions” (245) rendered by the gendered social contexts in which they move, contexts that ‘gather’ onto and become part of subjective experience. We considered the ‘sticky impressions’ of feminist discourse in how participants interpreted their experiences (and how they believe they are viewed within cultural spaces), and highlighted the complex ways this was intellectually and affectively grappled with, recognising the gendered and racialised situatedness of these negotiations.
In the following section, we provide an aerial view of how ‘feminism’ emerged in the interviews, including the patterned ways anti/feminist projects were indexed by participants, outlining the references to feminist projects that justified this paper’s focus on interview material related to men and feminism. In the second section, we zoom in on the first of the two main themes, offering a more detailed reading of how particular participants grappled with and responded to feminism, with a focus on discussions of personal and collective responsibility, and the role of ‘men’ and ‘masculinity, in relation to harmful gendered practices. In the final section, we examine the second theme, the way feminist ideas were at times positioned as an implicit resource to participants, particularly when participants were narrating the damage done by what they experienced as limiting norms about emotional display for men and boys.
Anti/feminism in the Data
We did not ask participants directly about feminism. Yet, participants demonstrated their immersion in anti/feminist projects by directly exploring talking-points of (mediated) anti/feminisms, or by describing their gendered experiences in ways indebted to long-standing feminist critiques.
The influence of recent popularised feminist debates was palpable. Participants were in High School when #MeToo erupted into mainstream media coverage with the extensive commentary - both supportive and critical - that followed in Australia as elsewhere (Boyle 2019; Waling 2023). They thus came of age against the backdrop of mainstream discussion of (some) women’s experience of sexual harassment and violence (Phipps 2020) and the role of men in its perpetration (Harrington 2021). Participants raised not only “feminism/ists” (10 participants), but “toxic masculinity” (13 participants), “sexism” (6 participants), “violence” (8 participants), “assault” (7 participants), and “harassment” (4 participants). Many participants’ keen engagement with the term ‘toxic masculinity’ - which was often connected in their narratives to issues of violence against women - in many ways reflects the popular feminist context they have been immersed in, including feminist work within and beyond the academy and how these are shaping public lexicons around gender (Waling 2023).
When participants raised feminism directly, it was always a point of provocation: something to be defended, debated, or rejected. As Ahmed (2017) suggests, feminism is often encountered as “sensational” (21) – a site of disturbance and tension. As one participant observed, “a lot of guys, especially my age, you meet them and they’ll hear the word feminism [...] and they’ll go ‘arggh’. you know what I mean?” (Participant 9). Some introduced specific examples of anti-feminism in popular culture, such as Jordan Peterson as a popular men’s rights figure and “feminist wrecks” (Participant 6), a genre of videos aimed at ridiculing feminists.
Feminism also arose indirectly through almost ubiquitous reflections on the emotional lives of boys and men elicited in discussions about masculinity, with most participants articulating some gendered analyses of “feelings” (11 participants), “emotions”, and the capacity/right to be “emotional” (16 participants).Whereas participants drew more directly on popularised feminist vernaculars to discuss sexual violence, they did not explicitly frame men and boys’ emotional struggles as a feminist issue, though their observations about gendered patterns in emotional display can be contextualised against the impact of feminist analyses of gender norms on personal wellbeing (de Boise and Hearn 2017; Messner 2016a). Here, a gendered analysis was offered even among those participants’ who expressed reservations about ‘feminism’ per se.
Feminism as a Site of Struggle
Between the Individual and the Collective
Feminist scholars have raised concerns that contemporary popular feminisms - including those articulated through #MeToo - individualise responsibility for gendered harms (De Benedictis, Orgad, and Rottenberg 2019). While some scholars recognise #MeToo as having the potential for collective critique, many - including those who highlight this potential - argue it too often devolves into a focus on individual perpetrators rather than wider systems of gendered power (Green 2022). It is interesting, then, that participants by and large understood popular feminist movements as making collective rather than individual claims. With varying degrees of approval, participants had a strong sense that #MeToo and terms like ‘toxic masculinity’ and ‘mansplaining’ held men and/or masculinity responsible for gendered harms, alongside individual bad actors. In this context, many participants believed men as a group, and/or masculinity as a practice, are currently objects of sustained and serious critique, and they positioned themselves explicitly in relation to those charges.
Whether (and how) men, boys, or masculinity should bear responsibility for sexism and violence against women was a hotly contested topic in the interviews. While most conceded there were some (even many) men who needed to change harmful behaviours, there was far less agreement about whether they saw themselves (and other men they deemed ‘good’) as individually or collectively responsible for that harm. The following two quotes can be seen as distilling two key polls of this debate: It actually doesn’t matter what they say after ‘All men…’ I think it’s always coming from some place where they have issues with masculinity, you know? It’s not all men (Participant 7). We need everyone to get onboard. [...] Because if you can effectively look about how you are promoting toxic attitudes and [...] say, ‘well I’m going to do better because I can be better’ (Participant 15).
Both perspectives are compatible with an acknowledgement of gendered harms. Indeed, all participants who raised sexual or intimate partner violence accepted the idea that too many women experience violence at the hands of men (and some also raised and acknowledged violence perpetrated by men against other men 4 ). What they could not agree upon was the extent to which these harms should be attributed to masculine cultures or men as a group, rather than individual men.
Similar tensions are seen in popular culture, with feminist and anti-feminist movements questioning whether the range of harms committed mostly by men are best understood as random acts of unethical (and/or criminal) behaviour by individuals, or as part of a broader gendered pattern (Boyle 2019). Among our participants, both sets of arguments emerged - sometimes side-by-side in ways that reflected a complex wrestling with the question of individual/collective responsibility.
Rather than seeing these varying positions solely as a matter of whether individual participants accept or reject feminist accounts of gendered violence, we read these disputed narratives as reflective of some complex tensions within feminist discourses regarding individual, collective, and structural responsibility for gendered harms (Waling 2023). For instance, while much feminist theory and practice has emphasised men’s accountability for the violence they commit, some have argued that assertions of personal responsibility reinforce liberal individualism to the “neglect of the structural” (Hearn 2013, 160). Some scholars have also criticised a focus on structural dimensions of gender inequality - and on men as a collective group interpellated into masculine norms and structures - for excluding considerations of boys’ and men’s reflexive agency and the roles they can individually play in transforming gender relations (Waling 2023). In short: the same tensions we observe in our data exist within feminist scholarship and activism.
Participants who raised experiences of racism and racialisation also voiced a specific form of hesitation towards the collective address of feminism. Narrating experiences of racialised exclusion from masculine ideals, these participants communicated an amplified awareness of the differences within the categories ‘boys’ and ‘men’. As one Asian participant explained, “not once actually have I ever seen like a portrayal of a properly masculine Asian man on TV [...] Asian blokes really, like, generally [are] emasculated” (Participant 1). Further, a number of participants were particularly aware of the heteronormativity of masculine ideals, either through their own experiences of marginalisation as a result of sexuality or gender identity, or through their observations about that of other boys they knew. For men and boys who have felt marginalised as a result of their race, sexuality, or non-normative gender presentation, feminist notions of collective masculine power and responsibility for gendered harms was in uncomfortable tension with their individual experiences. Similarly, our trans participant recalled a tense personal relationship with feminist discourses that positioned white men as powerful, given the complexity of interlocking identities and experiences. Reflecting on a period of her life when, in her words, she “thought I was a dude”, she recalled: They were telling me I had all these …like as a white man, I was just more advantaged than everyone else, and I didn’t feel that way. I was like, I am depressed; I am sad; I am smart, sure, but it’s not because I’m a man. And this caused a lot of reactions towards feminism. I identified as a men’s rights activist; I have very nuanced opinions on men’s rights activism now.
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While some participants highlighted these complexities around questions of men’s power, some also welcomed the idea that men as a group might be the object of increased scrutiny. While they were happy for responsibility for gendered harms to be collectivised, their acceptance of this collective address was shaped by a few competing logics. Some were happy to take responsibility as members of a group that needed to police their own – a model of collective responsibility centred on an ‘ethical bystander’ imperative. Others were willing to take responsibility insofar as they (and all men) pick up on potentially harmful masculine traits or participated in masculine culture – a model of collective responsibility that saw violence, emotional invulnerability, and sexism circulate systemically, rather than by exception.
Although these are two quite different narratives, they are not necessarily at odds with each other, and in some interviews hovered side by side. Take one participant’s reflections on ‘toxic masculinity’: There are features [of toxic masculinity] literally in all men that we’ll just pick up. But I think that the way that it’s come out now, which to some men seems like an attack on them, I think I see it more as a positive thing, because it always made me feel isolated. Now people are actually talking about the things that men do to other men and to women that are unacceptable, or even social pressures of trying to be a man… a lot of those traits are actually quite harmful, like aggression and not showing emotion (Participant 8).
In this quote, ‘toxic’ masculine traits are seen as something that all men ‘pick up’ one way or another. At the same time, this participant sees it as something that impacts men differently – “toxic” masculinity made him feel “isolated” from other boys or men. He talks about “unacceptable” things “that men do to other men and to women”, acknowledging that individual men can be either (or both) perpetrators and victims of these “toxic” behaviours. Intriguingly, this connects the critique of behaviour that clearly harms other people with potential harm to the self that results from the “social pressures of trying to be a man”. In this short passage, Participant 8 sketched quite a complex picture of collective responsibility for gendered harm: some responsibility lies at the feet of all men to interrogate the toxic ideas or behaviours they have ‘picked up’ through their enculturation, some at the feet of particular men who harm women and other men, and some at the feet of masculinity or social pressures, which he believes cause harms in their own right.
Later in the interview, the same participant sketched a somewhat different sense of collective “responsibility”: the responsibility of the group (of men) to hold its members to account. Rather than seeing group dynamics among men or cultures of masculinity as responsible, he positioned men as individually responsible for the behaviour of other men through their role as bystanders: If 9 out of 10 are good men and one is a shit man, if those 9 men do nothing then they might as well all be shit men. (…) That is one thing that makes me feel really emotional about it and really angry when it comes to how men are and how men do things. Because if they are so strong and they are so tough then they should be (...) the ones who are stopping the other men from doing that and saying, ‘That is not okay’. (..) Because if you let it slide you are just as bad as the person doing it in my eyes (Participant 8).
This participant is grappling with a fittingly complex picture of gendered harms and their remedies, which reflects a range of circulating discourses. Narratives of individual responsibility are clearly at play: not only for the so-called “shit” men but also for men whose silence he sees as complicity. In the first quote, Participant 8 suggests practices of masculinity are changeable and linked to cultural context. Yet, in this second quote, he invokes traditionally ‘masculine’ virtues like ‘strength’ to incorporate and essentialise the notion of the ethical bystander (Messner 2016b).
At the same time, the participant’s personal narrative suggests an awareness of the heterogeneity of men as a group. Interestingly, he does not use this appeal to differences to undermine feminist critiques, but to bolster them, seeing criticisms of ‘toxic masculinity’ as pointing to the exact patterns of behaviour that can harm those ‘other’ men, including him. Layered in with the more individualising narratives about gendered harms are moments where the pressures of the gendered order itself are seen as responsible for harm.
Another participant discussed a lesser-known hashtag at some length. #AllMen emerged largely as a tool to reassert the collective responsibility of men in the face of #NotAllMen’s individualising stance.
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Participant 18 narrated his evolving reactions to the logics of #AllMen: I think back to like the, the #MeToo and the #AllMen thing. And #AllMen on its own (...) it just sort of blames men and when I first saw that I was like ‘what the hell what have I done wrong?!’ But when actually speaking about [it to people] there is a lot more to it (...) It’s like the responsibility of all men to fix these issues. (...) [but] I would see it presented as like the fault of all men (....) seeing it as a blame thing, its like… yeah, it sort of upset me (Participant 18, emphasis ours).
The participant makes an interesting distinction between “responsibility” and “fault” or “blame”. While accepting that “all men” have the responsibility for “fixing the issue” of gendered harms, he expresses this as an abstract responsibility to stand up to injustice rather than a more acute form of “responsible” which might be synonymous with “fault”. In this way of thinking, there are too many men behaving badly, but neither men as a group nor masculine cultures should bear fault for those harms. “Blame” belonged to individuals, even if “responsibility” to stop wrongdoing when they see it might belong to the collective. Participant 18 was chiefly willing to embrace responsibility in the role of bystander, and he was not alone. Other participants, while eager to condemn specific harmful gendered behaviours, strongly objected to attempts to hold men as a group or masculinity as a pattern of practice responsible for them: I’ve been kind of overwhelmed by the perception of men on social media, especially by a lot of my female peers (…) I just don’t like how men are stereotyped as a whole, instead of individuals being solely responsible. (...) you can’t hold a whole gender responsible for the actions of those people (…) obviously the behaviour is not acceptable (Participant 6).
Men - or Masculinity?
One striking thing about the above quote is how the participant frames ‘gender’ in categorical terms. While participants were uniformly eager to condemn the violence they saw as the core concern for contemporary feminist movements, many saw violence as the unacceptable behaviour of individual men, rejecting analyses locating the aetiology of this violence within broader patterns in masculine cultures. Participants often understood critiques of masculinity (as a social practice) as critiques of men (as an essentialised social category). Occasionally the concept of toxic masculinity bothers me. Because I don’t think all the traits that are referred to as like “toxic masculinity” are exclusively masculine (...). The idea of toxic masculinity tends to inflate [sic] negative traits with masculine traits and there is like some cases where it’s absolutely true and there is others where it’s not. I think tying them together under masculinity analytically doesn’t really benefit because it (...) sort of implies that it’s, I don’t know, men’s thing (Participant 18).
It is worth tuning in to both the content and tone in this passage. The participant’s objections are voiced gently, with modifiers scattered throughout: he is bothered “occasionally”, he thinks discussions about toxic masculine traits are true in “some cases”, but it is clearly the “other” times he is troubled by. We can speculate about the extent to which this cautious framing is a reflection of the participant’s intellectual position or his attempt to navigate the feminist position he might (rightly) assume the research team personally holds. What he advances with confidence, however, is the idea that grouping objectionable traits together under the rubric ‘masculinity’ and thus making it “men’s thing” is not beneficial. Even on a topic where he believes there is evidence to suggest a gendered pattern, he questions the value of naming it as gendered: The inability to talk about mental health stuff could be considered a ‘toxic masculine’ trait that is harming to individuals. (...) I think it’s proven that men are less likely to talk about mental health issues. But again I don’t think it’s, like, exclusively men (Participant 18).
For this participant, patterns are not enough; traits or behaviours worth tying to ‘masculinity’ would be those that are exclusively demonstrated by men, or perhaps by all men, suggesting an understanding of ‘masculinity’ as something only/all men do. In this regard, our participant and the feminist analyses he is objecting to may be speaking at cross-purposes. On the topic of mental health, he appears in agreement with core insights of the feminist lens he is otherwise objecting to: he recognises a harmful pattern correlating with gender. However, unless something applies exclusively or solely to men, the relevance of ‘masculinity’ is questioned.
Public discourse and some masculinities scholarship also reflect categorical understandings of gender as “more fixed than fluid” - as “the state of being male or female” (Yates 2018, 269; see also Waling, 2019a). As in Participant 18’s account, categorical constructions of gender fortify resistance to feminist engagement (Yates 2018). Indeed, some participants perceived feminist movements and analyses, in their collective address, as essentialising masculinity in ways that were not only inaccurate but harmful to them. Participant 1, for instance, levelled a critique not only at what he called “really hard-core feminist types” but at attitudes in “society” which he saw as shaped by contemporary feminist ideas. “Always there are going to be blokes that are like that, but when generalisations like that are made, we’re kind of victimising men just for being men” (Participant 1). Here and elsewhere in the interview, he used the charged vocabulary of violence (“victimisation”, “attack” and “targeting”’) to describe the impact of feminist-informed ideas on men and masculinity. For Participant 1, objectionable behaviours are tied to individuals, or groups of individuals, rendering broader gendered observations of men and masculinity circulating in the public sphere unreasonable and unfair: Society views boys as a little bit, like, immature and malleable. (…) a little bit probably, you know, I wouldn’t say sexist, but like they have a little bit of that animalistic tribe in them. So they think, okay, we’re going to prevent it before it even happens, right? (...) So they take on the mentality that every one, every single boy or young man, has that potential in them and we’re just going to cull it before it has a chance to happen (Participant 1).
This participant recounted a 2019 Gillette advertisement joining conversations about ‘toxic masculinity’, in which ‘everyday’ masculine cultures and practices were juxtaposed with violence perpetrated by men to signal these gendered connections. He questioned the value of what he saw as a feminist rejection, in the advertisement, of all things coded masculine. Attempting to connect the everyday with the abhorrent (Kelly 1988) was repudiated as totalising of masculinity and, therefore, ultimately anti-male. I’m not discounting the fact that domestic violence or abuse is [no] laughing matter. (...) It’s very serious and I think it needs to be addressed, but the way that it kind of just targeted all men… and I still remember, [the advert] was, like, a bunch of dads, like, standing in front of the barbeques, right? I just thought (...) it’s just kind of attacking men and boys in general. And if you do that, then, yeah, you know, maybe you’ll raise awareness (..) but you’re also sort of having a go at other aspects of what it stereotypically means to be a man. (…) There’s nothing wrong with, you know, the stereotypical aspects of being a man. You shouldn’t just, like, attack everything (Participant 1).
Letting Boys Cry: Feminism as Implicit Resource
While participants’ discussions of sexual violence and misogyny were shaped by a direct wrestling with anti/feminist discourses, discussions of men and boys’ emotional worlds - especially social norms encouraging emotional stoicism - were much less controversial in the sample. All participants who raised emotions saw this as a site where broad gendered patterns require disrupting. However, unlike sexual violence, participants did not identify this as a feminist issue per say, though the logic of feminist work shaped these discussions. Only one participant, our trans participant, hinted that cultural requirements for men to restrain themselves from ‘emoting’ or otherwise expressing themselves in gender-non-normative ways was a feminist project - even as she expressed ambivalence to feminism in other ways. In discussing the perception that feminism is anti-men, she noted: “I saw feminists talking about men’s issues way before I saw my own peers talking about it” (Participant 16). On the whole, however, participants discussed feminism and men’s emotional struggles as separate topics.
While some participants noted what they saw as changes in gender norms - enhancing women’s access to full citizenship and some men of colour’s increasing access to dominant masculinity (e.g. Participant 3) - when it came to men and emotions it seemed little had changed. Many participants used the interview to discuss their dissatisfaction with limiting gendered rules around emotions and emotional display. While they often saw sexism and gendered violence as the fault of individual bad men and the responsibility of men as ethical bystanders, the pressure to achieve emotional stoicism was seen as something that could be traced to a range of sources - specific individuals (especially fathers and teachers); groups (friendship circles, sporting teams or schools); the pursuit of “masculine identity” (e.g. Participant 19) or “toxic masculinity” (e.g. Participant 5 and 8); and the “deeply embedded” views and ideas about men that receive “general acceptance” (Participant 9), that “we actually normalise” (Participant 15).
Emotional restraint, particularly in response to painful experiences, was a feature of normative masculinity many participants were eager to critique. Participants were generally keen to support boys’ and men’s uptake of emotional expressions historically associated with femininity - demonstrating vulnerability, the ability to cry, or sharing one’s inner world with others. This reflects Australian research that shows a wider embrace of ‘feminised’ emotions (Hayes, Burns, and Egan 2022) and of distancing from some traditional expressions of stolid toughness among white, middle-class men (Waling 2019b).
At the same time, participants clearly recognised disparate contemporary discourses around men’s emotional expression. In particular, they identified that expressing some emotions coded as ‘masculine’, such as stoicism and anger, was going “out of fashion” (Participant 8) and that there was generally greater “acceptance” of emotional vulnerability (Participant 9) over the past “5-10 years” (Participant 19). However, many emphasised that gendered expectations are still pervasive, with some suggesting that “girls”/women continue to prefer stoic masculinity despite explicit support of men expressing vulnerability. As much as anyone campaigns for men being able to express themselves and all that, and I think that’s good, it means society accepts that, but they don’t exactly embrace it, if you know what I mean? Like they’ll say, it’s okay to be like that but we won’t really look up to you for being like that (Participant 1).
For some, this double bind of expectations was something they recognised as ‘deeply embedded’: I would want to see (..) just more general acceptance of boys crying. (…) Even though like, in society I think we’re actively trying to encourage it more, I think it’s quite a deeply embedded one (Participant 9).
This participant went on to narrate an experience in which he had witnessed an injured man crying out in pain, to which he responded for “a split second” with a “really weird pang [of] annoyance”. Reflecting critically on his response, he said, “and then I kind of realised: this man just snapped his leg; it’s like - why am I being so unfair?” (Participant 9).
How emotions were discussed can be contextualised, at least in part, in the cultural dispersion of feminist analyses around the gendering of emotions (de Boise and Hearn 2017) and how they have been taken up in public men’s health narratives (Waling 2023). While participants did not directly recognise the language and lens of feminism as something with utility to address these concerns, we suggest an immersion in mediated feminism has been part of what renders these conversations about masculinity, stoicism, and men’s mental health possible; they reflect an implicit feminism at work, the way public health discourses around mental health and ‘toxic masculinity’ (Waling 2023) draw on early feminist analyses of the harms of masculine norms (Messner 2016a). In this sense, while participants seemed to associate the word ‘feminism’ with specific contemporary struggles over the behaviour of men, especially toward women, in considering their own experiences they produced the kind of multi-layered, thoughtful gendered critique that we would argue is in many ways feminist.
Conclusion: Young Men as Subjects of Feminism
Though much work examines how popularised forms of contemporary feminism are impacting girls’ and women’s everyday understanding of gender, far less considers how feminism actively, often subtly, shapes this for boys and men. Work on men and feminism largely focuses on the influence of anti-feminism
Participants wrestled with complex questions around the attributions of gendered harms, suggesting that (some) feminisms have already deeply shaped the way many young people interpret their experiences of boyhood and young adulthood. Contemporary feminist movements have successfully carved out some behaviours (sexism, harassment, and gendered violence) as more unacceptable
What appears only by exception in this sample, however, is the sense that there might be a relationship between those masculine cultures and ideals that are identified as impeding the broader flourishing of boys and men and what they largely acknowledged are significant issues in the treatment of women. While participants talked about ‘toxic’ ideas about women and girls, when it came to violence and harassment, they looked for a more concrete perpetrator. This underscores the importance, in engaging boys and men, of thoughtfully reckoning with the complex relationship between individual and collective harms, of disrupting categorical thinking through explorations of the complex relationship between ‘men’ and ‘masculinity’, and of acknowledging the way intersecting social experiences and identities relate to how gender is felt. Conversations with and about boys and young men would benefit from making the ‘messiness’ of gender and how it is lived - and feminism as a resource - more ‘intelligible’ (Hoel 2015).
Footnotes
Declaration of Conflicting Interests
The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Funding
The author(s) disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article: This work was supported by the University of Johannesburg (G00267 Men, Masculinity and Gender Equality: Young men's perceptions, responses and negotiations), University of Sydney (Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences - COVID Research Kickstarter) and Australian Research Council Special Research Initiative (Australian Boys: Beyond the Boy Problem).
