Where are all the men?
June 29 2022 - Orlando Florida
Two and a half years ago, the last thing I attended in person before the pandemic shut everything down was a fellowship for artists to build leadership capacities in responding to the climate and ecological emergency. I noticed that of the roughly two dozen participants - selected from an application and nomination pool that spanned the whole US - only four were men. It provoked a question I had been coming up against ever since my own practice had become one of social engagement and civic/social action - where are the men?
The organizers gave us agency to propose our own little working groups during the fellowship retreat week, and I put one together that we called “Where are all the men?” to ask why male involvement in climate work, activism, and social engagement seemed to lag so significantly behind women and femme identifying people. The four of us, and a handful of the participating women, didn’t come up with much of an answer because, well, we were all already there working, and we couldn’t see into the motives of people who weren’t around. Though everyone I’m sure had their suspicions.
Time has passed, and this week I’m at one of the first in-person large gatherings I’ve been able to be a part of since the pandemic, the NACG National Symposium on Grieving Children. My practice has wound its way down a convoluted road, and this conference is bringing together the national community supporting grieving youth, in a world in which much has been lost and much needs to be grieved. Of the several hundred attendees here, it is safe to estimate that over 90% of them are women or femme identifying. There might be a dozen or so men out of hundreds of people. I found myself wondering again how and why the forms of work that I kept finding myself involved in always seemed to be so predominantly female.
I haven’t been just idly asking this question, of course. I’ve been interested in the problem of masculinity for some time - but it never dulls the startling spectacle of these almost all-female endeavors, and the predominance of female and femme partnership and collaboration that has sprung up for my work.
The question ‘where are all the men’ is, of course, also being facetious. Men, in the US, have been plenty busy in the past few years.
Every significant mass shooting of the past generation has been conducted by a man. Men, in overwhelming majority, stormed the US Capitol in an effort to overthrow the United States government and end whatever’s left of American democracy. And male-led legislative bodies, courts, and administrations have just overturned generations of legal precedent to decimate the basic, fundamental rights of women (lest we think men are only capable of brainless, physically destructive acts - for this one was a long, strategic, orchestrated destruction).
Were women also involved in these things? Of course. There are also a few black Republicans. Simply stated, every form of oppression can be internalized and manifest by the people being oppressed. I bravely admit to the need to paint with broad strokes, because while it is necessary to understand individuals on their own terms, it is equally necessary to understand the patterns upon which each of us is developed into an individual. Masculinity is just such a pattern, in that we each may wear it differently, but it is passed on to all of us by virtue of where and when we came to our own existence.
The climate, human and women’s rights, race, class, democracy - we are confronted with one ‘crisis’ after another, and this crisis mindset fuels whole enormous industries of problem-solving, activism, and ‘humanitarian’ work. It also bombards us on a minute-to-minute basis thanks to the technological engine of our outrage machines. It is only natural that we are overwhelmed with outrage, then with guilt about not being outraged about that other thing for a second… There is so much work to be done, and all of it feels utterly essential. Feeling the need to tackle each one meaningfully and transformatively will surely leave any of us feeling insufficient and stretched thin. It’s worth considering, then, the patterns running through all these individual crises
It sure seems like it’s men. Where the men are, is where we find the epicenter of each of our crises. Of course, we have the ‘not all men’ argument, but what interests me more is what is it about most of these men that have them turn up in one context and not another?
It isn’t a new thing to point out that men, and the masculinity males are acculturated to manifest, deprioritizes care or partnership in favor of domination. (In fact, research points out that it only really does so at a very late, tragic stage of male adolescence.). Rhianne Eisler posits two major modes of social organization - the dominator society, and the partnership society. Ultimately, I’m inclined to believe that this is the pattern we must re-write, because it underpins all the crises. Domination and hierarchy are necessary for gender power differentials, racism, colonialism, and even our broken (hierarchical) relationship to the planet - our inherited belief that we somehow have ‘dominion’ over Nature.
Replace all this domination with a comprehensive sense of partnership, mutuality, and care, and a whole other world becomes possible. (What’s more, Eisler observes, this world existed already, and very likely did so for far longer than the dominator society within which we are presently trapped.). Men (broad brush here) fear anti-patriarchy rhetoric because they think it is anti-men, but it’s important to point out that the opposite of patriarchy doesn’t have to be that women are now the dominators - the opposite may be that there is no dominator.
Women and femmes are acculturated to care, because patriarchy required someone to do it (or else, duh, humanity would die). Of course, patriarchy made sure to build in perceived hierarchies about the importance of that work, so that no one would notice that it is where the real power of survival lay. My hope is that this acculturation toward caregiving may be the Achilles heel of patriarchy, because we are reaching critical points in history where we simply can’t dominate our way out of it. All our disaster movies show us dominating the disaster at the end - nuking the asteroid or blowing up the aliens. But we live in a moment in history in which the disaster movies are real, and there’s no dominant hero to stand astride the dragon. The pandemic, among many disasters, has shown us the need to forge communities and care for one another - this is the only way to go on.
The women and femmes I see showing up for all of these modes and forms of care - from familial care to communal care, care for the planet, care for the sick and young and injured, care for the oppressed and the marginalized, care for human culture - are simply doing what the patriarchy had left them to do, but doing it at larger and larger scales, as need dictates. While the men, and the acculturated dominator masculine ways of being, are becoming utterly irrelevant.
This is what drives a man to shoot up a school. This is what drives a man to puff out his chest and flaunt his aggression. Men fear, rightly, their meaninglessness and irrelevance. The world doesn’t need dominators, and so they are lashing out furiously in the only language they know.
For all the losses and harm that has been passed on to women and femmes in these years, I take some small consolation in the belief that the inevitability of existential crises will make the end of dominator mindsets equally inevitable. The challenge is, I think, to ward off as much harm and hurt along the way as possible - because the men who find themselves and their way of being irrelevant are liable to lash out in frightening ways. I believe this is true of even our ‘nicest guys’ - faced with irrelevance, they have so few tools for reconciling their fear and anger, and so they fall back on dominator patterns. Those patterns run deep.
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All this makes me pleased to be taking on the problem of ‘unhealthy’ masculinity in some more direct way. ALI has been working with Equimundo, the Center for Masculinities and Social Justice, to help them bring their global MenCare campaign to the US. I think this project rightly centers the key question of care, and the need to reacculture men to know how to care, or even to recognize and celebrate the care they already provide. Men are caring - but this care is often invisible and unrecognized, and the recognition that men do receive, in social capital terms, is for the wrong things (domination - whether it be economic or physical, power, and prestige). MenCare is built on extensive and revealing research that undermines so much of our current perceptions of gender, emotion, and care, and represents a model of a very different paradigm for masculinity.
While there is a lot of good work being done by ‘good men’ in fatherhood and gender equality in the US, there is much work needed to grow it into the paradigm shift that we believe is necessary to address all our crises interconnectedly, and effectively allow us as a species to continue our ecological coexistence. ALI is thrilled to be near the heart of this effort. This is what we mean in the frequent use of the term ‘radical’ - literally, at the root. This pattern of dominator thinking, and this male disconnection with the essential necessity of human care, is, in our view, the base pattern beneath which gender oppression, colonialism, racism, economic injustice are set. While we are at it, we must also work in the day to day to address and prevent the harm being caused by the systems now in place. But seeing the pattern beneath the churn of relentless crises also brings a sense of purpose, care, and frankly, hope. Not naive, non-profity hope that we will ‘solve’ this problem, but a more existential kind of hope that the larger ecosystem within which we exist will make it necessary to reimagine ourselves. For now, it is an honor to work among this mostly female community of care; but I choose to ask more and more loudly of the men out there - where are you, and what are you doing to make yourself relevant?