Helping Men Get Heard
Sometimes society tunes out boys and men when we shouldn’t.
An admission: I am a longtime reader of Caitlin Flanagan. I find her writing intriguing, and my last three pieces have built on something she has written. Usually that something is about women, but this time the common ground is as mothers of sons. She has twin boys, who are probably college age now. Whether she notices what she does this time because other boy moms are reaching out to her or because she has proven relatively good at hearing uncomfortable truths others refuse to hear, I do not know. Anyway…
For about four years I’ve been involved with Leading Women for Shared Parenting. A few men’s advocates found some of my writing on feminism and saw a woman who engaged the arguments without blindly insulting its adherents. I did not know at the time, but they were looking for such women to help solve a systemic public relations problem.
Child custody is one of many issues in which the assumptions run against men. Education, mental health, domestic violence — each and all have significant structural and cultural problems for men. By structural, I mean things such as an almost complete lack of domestic violence shelters and supports for male victims of domestic violence. By cultural, I mean things like boys who are the victims of statutory rape by much older teachers and the assumption that they probably enjoyed the encounter and should be congratulated rather than counseled.
A few advocates realized that while men had great difficulty effectively speaking on these issues, the public would listen to women. The public is lectured about listening to women. Women are allowed to talk about justice, abuse, fairness, and feelings. We are allowed to be angry.
And, in the case of shared parenting and custody, for every man who has lost his children to unjust court orders or lax enforcement, there was a grandmother who lost her grandchildren, a mother who would watch her son fall apart in despair. Perhaps there was an aunt and sister to join her. Later, there might be a new wife and stepmother trying to help put a broken man back together. Hence, we are Leading Women for Shared Parenting, a network of psychologists, researchers, lawyers, policy makers, and politicians advocating for family law reform. And many of us have personal expereince with the reality of broken parental bonds.
At The Atlantic, Caitlin Flanagan has noticed this force rising in #MeToo. In “The Conversation #MeToo Needs to Have,” she writes:
[W]hen messy hook ups and ill-conceived passes receive the same public shaming and career-damaging punishment as serious crimes, you also get the attention of millions of wives, mothers, and sisters who are not willing to see their loved ones unfairly targeted, and some of them are starting to cool on the movement.
Indeed they are starting to cool. Two years ago, I would usually feel this cooling when talking to mothers of older sons. Moms learned how bad the boy crisis was when reality mugged them.
Thus, the resistance to Title IX overreach that resulted in Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos pulling back the Obama Administration directive on sex invesigations on campus, that was spurred in part by moms of college age sons called to action by Judith Grossman’s 2013 Wall Street Journal op-ed “A Mother, a Feminist, Aghast.” It opened:
I am a feminist. I have marched at the barricades, subscribed to Ms. magazine, and knocked on many a door in support of progressive candidates committed to women’s rights. Until a month ago, I would have expressed unqualified support for Title IX and for the Violence Against Women Act.
But that was before my son, a senior at a small liberal-arts college in New England, was charged — by an ex-girlfriend — with alleged acts of “nonconsensual sex” that supposedly occurred during the course of their relationship a few years earlier.
What followed was a nightmare — a fall through Alice’s looking-glass into a world that I could not possibly have believed existed, least of all behind the ivy-covered walls thought to protect an ostensible dedication to enlightenment and intellectual betterment.
It ended:
I fear that in the current climate the goal of “women’s rights,” with the compliance of politically motivated government policy and the tacit complicity of college administrators, runs the risk of grounding our most cherished institutions in a veritable snake pit of injustice — not unlike the very injustices the movement itself has for so long sought to correct.
Lately, however, even moms of toddler sons seem more aware and skeptical of quick calls for female solidarity. Stories seem to be trickling down, and mothers are connecting the dots. We note the common elements of reasons we drug boys in elementary school, blame them for rape culture in their teens, and berate them for being inadequate husbands and fathers. The emerging picture worries us, because we love our sons. This state of affairs is not fair and breaks our hearts in a million pieces. But that is not the worst of it.
Toxic masculinity isn’t the American man’s natural state — it’s the result of our fear: If from the time they can understand, we tell boys they are troublesome and toxic — while undermining their father because he is an overgrown boy just like them — then what can we expect of adult men? How many times can they hear how horrible they are before they believe it? And once they believe it, why not act on it? It is what they are, right? It is what we expect of them.
Greater society has tasked mothers of sons with raising good men. Another time I will address why that must mean including their fathers in their upbringing whenever possible. For now, I note that I would never let culture tell my daughters they were stupid or that their worth was encompassed in their physical beauty or marriageability because they are female. Nor will I allow culture to tell to my son that he is toxic because he is male.
That used to be a lonelier position to take than it is now.
