Gatekeeping Oppression is Missing The Point
Responding to Devon Price's "Transmisandry is Not Real"
TL;DR: Being a person is plenty difficult. When we silence men trying to talk about their experiences of personal discrimination and rejection due to their gender, we make the emotional wounding of gender bigger rather than bridging it.
Recently Devon Price put out an article titled, “Transmisandry is Not Real”. I agree with the finer details about intersectional oppression that he outlines. Yet, I remain concerned by the foundational premise: "There is no systemic “misandry”; men are not oppressed for being men". Now, Price also wrote, "We can hold power while also being oppressed". Devon, you're holding the truth, yet from where I'm standing it seems like you've forgotten to apply that truth to the whole picture.
I’m inherently uncomfortable with any statement that claims a form of oppression doesn’t exist. Oppression doesn’t need gatekeeping. In these years after Everything Everywhere All At Once, I’m resisting accepting simple and absolute beliefs about society. Where is the kindness in telling someone that their experience doesn’t exist? I offer an alternative statement: "The Empire1 has oppressed people of all genders, including men, by limiting how we are expected to live and behave”. The constraints of gendered expectations harm everyone.
Price also put forward the importance of holding dual truths. Ironically, I learnt how to hold dual truths from my Christian upbringing. The dual truth is that men, both trans and cis, can have power in society, and also be oppressed. There are plenty of men who have experienced discrimination and hurt specifically because they are men. My father was never able to teach me self-compassion because no one taught it to him.
Masculinity has been boxed into strict roles, choose from protective patriarch, breadwinner, or warmonger. Masculinity has been body-shamed. Masculinity has been infantilised and dismissed of self-responsibility. Masculinity has been pushed towards apathy and ‘manning up’. Masculinity has become emotionally lonely. Masculinity has been severed from his softness. Masculinity has locked his hips. Masculinity has been laughed out of the room. Masculinity is often unwelcome at the table of abundance that the progressive community is trying to set for our future selves. Masculinity keeps hearing people say ‘stop talking over everyone else’ while masculinity also has wounds that need tending.
Audre Lorde, a black lesbian feminist said, "There can be no hierarchies of oppression" (1983). Ongoing suffering and discrimination are generally an experience of systemic oppression. Insisting that men cannot experience oppression for being men erases the ways that men experience discrimination and suffering because they are men. We need to stop ranking suffering by what does or doesn’t qualify for the Oppression Olympics if we want a chance to collectively heal.
Recently, I attended a delightfully queer picnic in Naarm. A man approached our gathering from the children’s birthday party nearby. He politely asked if we had a lighter he could borrow. The smokers had left so we were fresh out of lighters and told him as much. He happily accepted this as truth and returned to his gathering. Some of the people I was with didn’t seem to care whether he was out of earshot before they openly joked about being misandrists, and they wouldn’t lend a lighter even if they had one.
That guy was probably a committed father. Based on our postcode at the time, chances were damn high that he voted for the same progressive politicians we did. The lighter was definitely requested to light a child’s birthday candles. Are we all so caught up in our own wounding that we must push away every man? That man was undoubtedly discriminated against simply because he was a man.
Post-2020 is a fascinating era. Our society is changing every day. The gender pay gap is closing faster than ever (even if that info is still hidden behind a javascript-controlled paywall *wink wink nudge nudge*). Part of the reason the pay-gap is closing is because men are taking more time away from their jobs to do more housework and childcare. Men are trying to show up for their families.
On the flip side, young Gen Z men are more likely than Baby Boomer men to believe that feminism has done more harm than good. This is unsurprising when conversations around gender equality have slid into a zero-sum game. If women win, men lose out; or so right-wing celebrity men tell their followers.
These pockets of radicalisation are getting more common as we rely on social media’s echo chamber for our self-conceptualisation. The reality is that character-limited social media conversation can suck the nuance out of anything. Sensationalist media reporting isn’t helping either. It’s easy to lose sight of how feminism also desires to help men. Thankfully, the majority of young men do support feminism, even while they struggle with apathy.
Polling in the US found “there was not a single issue that young men cared about significantly more than young women”. A fifth of young men feel like feminism is bad because they feel apathetically lost, and feminism has yet to compassionately offer them better narratives to live. Men need representation of men playing a wider range of roles. What movies have you seen about guys becoming meaningfully close platonic friends without a background of violence?
I recently read "The Flowering Wand: Rewilding the Sacred Masculine" by Sophie Strand. If you love mythology, mycology, densely academic language and speculative fiction, then it might be the book for you. I loved the flowering wand because it offers masculinity many roles - by reawakening the narratives that were already present in mythology. Teachers, healers, tricksters, agitators, jokers, musicians, carers, nature guardians, magicians, organisers, rebels. Today’s men need new narratives and roads forward. Men need a place at the table.
I didn’t write this to underplay the violence in the world committed by men. That violence is real, the statistics are gory. I wrote this to point out that the patriarchy is failing the very men it claims to empower. Men are also murdered by men, and themselves, at horrid rates. Price speaks to that grotesque truth when he writes that men’s “relative social and physical power leads to them being viewed as a more “acceptable” target for violence in some situations”.
I wrote this to say that it is okay if your past makes it difficult to hold onto empathy for men right now. Could you try for neutrality? Plenty of people have experienced harm from a man, or men. I’m not here to climb aboard the #NotAllMen bandwagon. All men are responsible for holding each other accountable and healing masculinity's wounding, but they can’t do it in a vacuum. Bell Hooks wrote, “To create loving men, we must love males." Men need to heal their wounds and scars from the Empire just as much as the rest of us.
The limited behaviours expected of masculinity is a systemic oppression specific to men. The Empire demands specific behaviours of men because they are men. The Empire expects men to maintain its power structure. I won’t even begin to unpack the complex grief of knowing that people who share your gender have been the driving force behind the world’s violent oppressive structures. Today’s men didn’t establish the patriarchy. Those of us with capacity, let us try to offer men more people to turn to than only hateful alt-right celebrities yeah?
We’re all just people trying to make sense of a system that has been tumbling downhill long before any of us arrived. The point is that while billionaires can willy-nilly commit ecocide and genocide, every person outside of that tax bracket is being oppressed by the systems that allow this to happen. They hope we’ll keep arguing over identity and intersections instead of banding together.
Silencing men and pushing them away isn’t going to bring healing for inequalities. Claiming that men cannot experience oppression for being men erases the confusingly lonesome experience of being a man who witnesses how his presence disturbs the nervous systems of people he’s hoping to connect with. In this unprecedented era, let’s try to offer each other more love and more kindness. Masculinity, please come in from the cold, I refuse to see you martyred over and over again. Men have roles to play in the better future we’re growing. A world with less oppression has more spacious expectations for everyone, including men.
TL;DR: Being a person is plenty difficult. When we silence men trying to talk about their experiences of personal discrimination and rejection due to their gender, we make the emotional wounding of gender bigger rather than bridging it.
And Devon? Thank you for prompting me to ponder so deeply. This has helped me overcome eons of nervous system freeze to instead sit down and write with my whole heart. You have my gratitude.
Cover Photo by Francesco Ungaro
For clarity, ‘The Empire’ is the systemic white supremacist capitalist patriarchy that currently holds the majority of money, and is using its power to dictate genocides and ecocide.
Very well-said, thank you for writing this. The oppressive systems of "the empire" affect us all, and men do not experience that oppression as The Default Type Of Human, but as men. It's extremely frustrating to repeatedly see feminist-minded folks repeating the rhetoric of antifeminism, that men's problems and pains are merely the result of women's successes and feminism is ultimately *bad* for men at a societal scale-- that seems like a bad sell at best, and a willful misinterpretation of feminism at worst. I also have many times experienced the kind of anecdote you mentioned, where progressive lady friends delight in being dismissive and cruel to random men because they see it as "punching up." Price's idea seems to be that this kind of cruelty doesn't really count as cruel because it isn't physically violent, while inflicting the same on women bears the same oppressive weight as any other misogyny, which just doesn't make sense to me. I'm glad to see other folks writing about a more unified vision of liberation.