History of Feminism

It is clear from DU that a number of men do not want to look at what is actually masculine, and what is part of cultural masculinity. There are biological differences between men and women - male and female sex characteristics, as it were. Most female's breasts are larger - but how we see them is cultural, to use an example from Melissa McEwan. In some cultures, breasts are not considered sexually arousing at all, and women don't cover them up anymore than men do their own chests. But when it comes to what we as a culture think of as masculine and feminine - well, the women have challenged and looked at and are discussing what is feminine, it is how we got the right to vote, how we got any and all of the gains to equality we have achieved in the last 125 years, but many men refuse to do the same. And they refuse to acknowledge that the refusal to even look at what is masculine and what is part of patriarchal power structure is harming men, it is harming women, it is harming society.

Men grow up in a society designed for them. There have been challenges and mods to the design, but still, for the most part, society is designed for men. They are the default, even more so in the case of white men. They think their privileges is inherent to masculinity because, like a person who only speaks one language cannot grasp a meta perspective of language, they do not know anything but their own experience. Women and other gender minorities have had to learn the language of masculinity as well as their own by necessity - for survival. They can see that what many men think is masculine isn't - it is just cultural. Many men are like a person in a sensory deprivation tank, or a fish in water - they cannot even grasp that their environment can change, or rather, that their masculinity isn't natural, but a construct. When the fish is thrown on land, it flails around because it does not know what to do, and because it is not equipped to do what is necessary because it hasn't had to develop any such skills in its protected previous existence.

Well, we are challenging men to get a masculine culture where men knows how to use their opposable thumbs to deal with being both in water and on land, to see that there are more than one power structure possible, and that contrary to what some men are saying, men can change what it means to be a man so that they get a better life, so that people of other genders get a better life, solving a lot of societal ills, and maybe even deal with the suicide statistics. But what do I know? The die-hards will probably rebut with because apes.