Men's Movement

The larger men's movement of the late 20th and early 21st centuries seeks to address the various changing roles of men and boys in Western societies, offer deeper understandings of masculine diversity, and advocate a broad range of male experiences and voices, as men interact with peers and culture. This movement, as well as its tributaries, seeks to establish arenas for expression, research, and definition of males, manhood, and masculinity within existing [Page 940]societal, institutional, familial, and relational settings and structures. Initially, in the 1990s, the movement sprouted in Australia, Great Britain, the United States, and some other Western nations as isolated, grassroots events and theoretical propositions. It took most of that decade for these disconnected events and propositions to begin overlapping and swell to the point that they could be truly called a social activist movement.

The larger movement currently has two primary arms: one which defines itself as anti-feminist in purpose, politics, and nature; the other embracing pro-feminist thought, ideology, and politics. To a great extent, both approaches tend to address needs and experiences of boys and men in response to previous waves of social and political feminism. The former sets itself in opposition to a perceived undue influence of feminism on the culture and status of boys and men that, it is posited, puts males at distinct disadvantage legally, politically, educationally, in the workplace, and in relationship to girls and women. This perceived undermining of traditional Western male roles and expectations is targeted, often brandishing such terms as a war on boys, the battle for fairness, and other combative, oppositional phrases that serve to both create and exploit perceived threatened beliefs, anxieties, and moral panic. At its core, this particular arm of the larger men's movement seeks to return to and reify dominant patriarchy across all strata of society, pitting needs of males against competing needs of females. This perspective tends to define those needs in terms of middle- and upper-class, heterosexual, upwardly mobile WASPish values and norms. This conservative arm tends to present itself through literature that emphasizes boys and backlash politics, championing biodeterminism, under-socialization of boys, and a return to traditional male dominance throughout society as normal gender expression.

The progressive arm of the larger movement continues to establish space for discussion, theoretical development, scholarly research, and educational praxis in research universities, institutions focusing on teacher training, and men's spiritual-health groups. All are connected by a pro-feminist stance in relation to issues of equity in relationships, in schools, and in the workforce. In addition, these pieces tend to promote a better understanding of nondominant male experiences in Western culture while sharing a postmodern constructivist view of gender roles and expression. From this perspective, it can be reasonably stated that the movement views itself as a vital and necessary contributor to next-wave feminism.

For example, these men's spiritual-health groups tend to emphasize a concept of healing men's inner selves through respect for indigenous cultures, medicines, and practices. They also promote a return to varieties of traditional cultural and spiritual ancestral values held by societies that have been overshadowed, neglected, or negated by industrialized, Western WASP dominance. Thus, there is often a central appreciation for ancient religious practices, sweat lodges, and healing circles in which men reclaim abilities to communicate verbally and emotionally with one another through noncompetitive dialogue and physical contact. In these activities, there is an overt attempt to disassemble and examine deeply embedded social norms related to male dominance, body image, patriarchy, combative paradigms, and warrior-predator archetypes. A sidecar of this holistic health movement is a collection of groups dedicated to creative artistic expression that embraces feminine and pro-feminist aspects of men's lives. The Radical Fairies is an example of one such well-established submovement spreading across North America.

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