Masculinity - what is it good for?

Sorry I’ve been a little absent, folks - I promise that once things calm down at school and I realize what I’ve gotten myself into, the regular Monday posting will resume as usual.  In the adjustment period, though, I might be a little more sporadic on account of I’m not sure where I am of what’s going on in the world.

What I do have for you today, though, is a cool site to check out when you have the chance: the masculine mystique rightly blamed.  Here’s a look at the “about” page:

In order to become fully human, men must reject the Masculine Mystique. Men must accept women fully into society as humans who are identical to themselves. Men must give up the entitlement of sexual access to any women they encounter, and take responsibility for the rape and abuse that they have wrought upon the whole of women across the globe.

There’s a lot more there; you should check it out.  It’s unapologetic.  I like the tone.

If you ever find yourself needing a good checklist, too, of privileges that men get in our society, they’ve got a great list for you.

While I just found the site the other night myself, and I need to dive a little more deeply into it, the authors echo a lot of the same sentiments that I’ve written here before (and that many, many, many feminist authors and writers and thinkers have elaborated in the past).  If we want to stop rape, if we want to end it, as opposed to ignore it, reframe it, push it to the side or try to manage it with casework, we need to attack its roots.  One of those pernicious roots is the current construction of masculinity which will by its definition cause rape.  It is unreasonable and unrealistic to expect that roughly half of the human population should create and rest its personal identity on violence, domination, and power without taking those personal identifications into the world with them in the form of actions that promote violence, domination, and unequal power.

There’s a future post somewhere about how one of the ways the current power structure keeps perpetuating itself is by convincing men and women that those same traits (violence, domination, and power) and sexy, but I haven’t put all those thoughts in order yet.