A feminist defense of “not all men”
Content warning: In this article, I mention sexual abuse and rape culture, but I will not discuss it at length.
To many — perhaps even most — feminists, “not all men” is a phrase that automatically disqualifies you from possibly saying anything of value. In placing exactly that phrase in the title of this article, I am already taking the risk of disqualifying myself in the eyes of many people. Yet I feel that I need to take this risk to address this problem, if feminism is not to implode. I believe that the discourse which depicts men as toxic, trash, and not capable of any good, supports views which are directly counter to the goals of feminism. In this article, I hope to explain how that works.
But first, let me clarify what I mean by “not all men”. There is a distinction to be made, since there are two kinds of situations in which “not all men” is said. The first is when someone is telling a personal story, or addressing systematic problems among men. Likely the most typical example of this is someone addressing their personal experience of being sexually abused, or addressing rape culture. In such a case, some men are inclined to say “not all men are sexual abusers/rape apologists”. However, such a reply is, of course, nonsensical. Certainly, not all men are sexual abusers or rape apologists, but enough of them are to make this into a systematic problem among men that needs to be addressed. I do not intend to defend the phrase “not all men” in this context.
The second situation in which “not all men” can be uttered is, however, what I do intend to defend. It is situations in which manhood is restricted to toxicity. Think of people saying “men are trash”, or people lamenting that they are attracted to men — jokingly or not. It is harder to find specific examples of this, but I believe it should be clear to anyone who is into feminism that a discourse has been born in which manhood is restricted to toxicity. It is this kind of discourse that I want to end, due to its harmful consequences and implications.
The first reason for this, is that I believe it depicts the patriarchy incorrectly. Underlying the “men are trash” discourse, is the belief that the patriarchy is the oppression of women by men. I do not believe that is what the patriarchy is. Rather, the patriarchy is a system built upon the supposed inferiority of women and, by extension, femininity. The difference between these definitions may seem small, but has large implications. As you can see, the second definition does not make an explicit mention of oppressors and oppressed. This matters, because men, too can suffer under patriarchy, by — for example — not living up to the gender roles that have been set for men. On the other hand, women can be oppressors too. There is nothing stopping women from, on the one hand, internalizing patriarchal thought patterns through which they oppress themselves, and on the other hand, oppressing the men who don’t live up to gender roles. Moreover, when it comes to non-binary people, their oppression and oppressing can, in my definition, be understood with reference to gender roles and perceived femininity and masculinity; in the other definition, non-binary people are simply not a part of the system of oppressors or oppressed at all.
“Men are trash” discourse is not reconcilable with my definition. That discourse presupposes that men are trash by virtue of their oppressor-hood. In my definition, men are not by definition oppressors; rather, the patriarchal system, with all its power structures, influences the thought patterns of us all, and makes us all capable of being an oppressor; and, as mentioned before, the disdain for femininity can make an oppressed person out of anyone. Put even more strongly, we are all oppressed: men are severely restricted in their behavior, lest they fall off their pedestal as a ‘Real Man’ and lose status when they give in to anything that is perceived as feminine, such as having emotions. When the patriarchy is supposed to be simply the oppression of women by men, these problems and power structures are outright overlooked.
The second problem I see with “men are trash” discourse is how it directly affects men. Men don’t often talk about it (likely because it is seen as feminine and therefore bad), but many men struggle with low self-confidence. Hearing it often said that men are trash, only worsens the problem.
It may be objected that the trick is to understand that the phrase “men are trash” does not mean that all men are trash, just that the trashy men are. But this is rarely explicitly said, and frankly, it is simply not how the heart works. You cannot simply decide not to be offended. Grammatically speaking, “men are trash” really does mean “all men are trash”. It is hard to convince your heart to interpret it in any other way than that. Moreover, as mentioned before, the discourse seems to presuppose a definition of the patriarchy in which men are oppressors are trash. This makes it even harder to decouple yourself as a man from negative statements about men in general, because all men are taken as part of the oppressor-trash-group.
For me, this kind of discourse had a second way in which it affected my self-confidence negatively. I was, in the past, identifying as a guy (AMAB), and I found myself attracted to other men. Seeing women lament — jokingly, but still — that they were attracted to men, did not make me feel good. Hearing women talk about how trash men were, did not make me feel good. I’ve spent most of my life repressing and hating my love for men, and “men are trash” discourse only hurt me by reinforcing the idea that, indeed, I should not be loving men, since they are trash. It’s been a process for me to fight against this way of thinking, and eventually go absolutely wild over how amazing men are. Understanding that men are actually great beings that deserve love, that there is no shame in loving creatures as great as them, was needed for me to accept and love myself as gay. It required me to reject all talk of equating manhood with toxicity. This does not mean I do not recognize that there are systematic problems among men, but that I simply that I do not take those systematic problems as constitutive for manhood.
Lastly — and I am indebted to Aria Stewart for this argument — equating manhood with toxicity makes it easier for men to disavow manhood than to disavow toxicity. In my case, this is exhibited extraordinarily clearly. Due to the incessant emphasis on the toxicity of men, my concept of manhood changed in such a way that I found that I simply did not relate to it strongly anymore; that is, I became non-binary (demiguy, to be exact). By equating manhood with the toxicity of the oppressor, in which I did not recognize myself at all, I found myself dissociated from the concept of manhood. This is, of course, ultimately unhelpful. This for two reasons. First, the reason we address systematic problems among men is so that men can look inside themselves and see whether this is a problem that they, themselves contribute to. By being dissociated from manhood (and by extension, toxicity and oppressor-hood) the pressure to look inside myself critically has disappeared. All the while, I may in fact still have toxic traits that I do need to get rid of. I have been raised as a man, have lived as a man, and am still being treated as a man. Some of the systematic problems that exist among men, can have taken root in me, too — even though I am not so toxic as to be able to recognize myself in most of them.
Secondly, what Aria Stewart calls “the evaporative cooling of manhood”, where cooling is toxifying, is a problem. As someone who is (presumably) less toxic than the average man, the fact that I am now dissociated from manhood (I have ‘evaporated’ from manhood, so to speak), makes the average toxicity of man a bit higher than it was before. This only plays further into the “men are trash” discourse, further exacerbating the problems I addressed above.
These are the problems I see with the discourse that limits manhood to toxicity. What we need is a new discourse, one that recognizes that the patriarchal system cannot be reduced to a simple oppressor-oppressed scheme, and that leaves room to see both positive and toxic traits in each gender.
