Saturday, June 14, 2008

How do you make men join this movement...

the problem as I am beginning to realise is that men will join a movement like this -- in a society which is now sufficiently heterosexualised, like India -- only if the male to male sexuality part is hidden. The moment it becomes visible, the forces of heterosexualisation will promptly tag the whole thing as 'gay' and this is what men are terribly scared of.
So, how do you talk about men's liberation without talking about sexuality between men? If you cover it up, then like so many men's movements, it will fail to address the most important issues, and if you don't it will get stigmatise and may never take off.

1 comment:

genno19 said...

In the united states, in the 1990s, there were several "Men's movements" that got some media coverage. One was a christian group called "Promise Keepers", another centered around a book called "Iron John", by someone whose name I forget. It seemed to involve Urban/suburban men going into the wilderness and beating drums like indigenous peoples, and maybe expressing some vulnerabilites to other men that are normally forbidden. (They all, of course, either assumed complete heterosexuality on the part of their members, or allowed gays in, but recognized them as the "different" sort of men that they are..) For the most part, the groups were midlly ridiculed by comedians and others, and were never very largeI They seemed not to make much impact.
Besides the point that they failed because they didn't speak to the real (sexual) need in men,
I can also tell you that the Anglo/American code of manhood doesn't really allow men to a) admit publicly that they have emotinal/social needs or that b) they need to feel part of a group. Men are supposed to be stiff, cold lonely individualists, who think and live completely on their own. So almost as bad as admitting to being "gay" , is just for a man to admit, "I need friends, I need
to belong." (which also implies that you are some kind of social failure.) This is part of the reason they were ridiculed.

After the 1990s they seemed to fade from view.