van der Gaag - Feminism and men : Nikki van der Gaag

About the author

Nikki van der Gaag is an independent writer and consultant based in the UK. She has been involved in feminism and development for more than 20 years and has held senior editorial and communications posts in the non-profit sector, including at Oxfam, the New Internationalist and the Panos Institute. She specializes in writing about gender, in particular girls issues, and men and gender equality. She is the principal author of six of the eight State of the Worlds Girls reports and has written nine other books, including The No-nonsense Guide to Womens Rights .

FEMINISM AND MEN

Nikki van der Gaag

Feminism and Men was first published in 2014 by Zed Books Ltd, 7 Cynthia Street, London N1 9JF, UK

This ebook edition was first published in 2014

www.zedbooks.co.uk

Copyright Nikki van der Gaag 2014

The right of Nikki van der Gaag to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by her in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988

Set in Monotype Plantin and FFKievit by Ewan Smith, London
Index:
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All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying or otherwise, without the prior permission of Zed Books Ltd.

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data available

ISBN 978-1-78032-914-7

CONTENTS

FIGURES

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

This book has been a long time in the making, and is the product of many discussions with many men and women and girls and boys on different continents thanks to all of you.

In particular I would like to thank Ruth Pearson for her support throughout, Gary Barker and Michael Kaufman for commenting on the draft and contributing to so many of the ideas behind it, Tina Wallace for discussions over many years on gender equality, and Sharon Goulds for working with me on the ideas for Plans Because I Am a Girl report on boys and gender equality.

Thanks too to Kat Banyard for discussions on young women and feminism, and to Sandy Ruxton, Kirrily Pells, Emma Wilson and Caroline Knowles; to Rachel Ploem for sharing ideas on balancing feminism and work on masculinities and to Marisa Viana da Silva, Oswaldo Montoya Telleria and Marc Peters, and all those among the unlikely encounter of unusual suspects at the Undressing Patriarchy conference organized by the Institute of Development Studies. And of course to the many hundreds of people who answered my online survey for this book your time and effort were much appreciated.

Thanks to Sarah Lewis for her meticulous research, and to the editors at Zed Books, including Tamsine ORiordan and Jakob Horstmann, who were so enthusiastic about the idea, and to Kim Walker for the process of putting the whole thing together with Ewan Smith, copyeditor Ian Paten and proofreader Chris Parker. To my mother, Mary, for her support, and my late father, Gerth, who would not necessarily have agreed with all the ideas but would have been proud of me for writing this book. And finally to Margaret Mowles, and to my partner Chris for his love, patience and careful comments, and my grown-up children Rosa and George, for listening to my rants for so many years.

1 | INTRODUCTION

Time to change: men and feminism

Women are strong, bold, and brave, but men and boys also have a big role to play in ending gender inequality. Its time to influence change in society. (Phumzile Mlambo-Ngcuka, United Nations under-secretary-general, March 2014)

Phumzile Mlambo-Ngcukas open letter to men asking them to support womens struggle for gender equality comes at just the right time.

For the last few decades, there have been fundamental changes to the way that many women all over the world live their lives. They have moved into paid work in unprecedented numbers. They have challenged sexism and discrimination and gender inequality and violence. In many countries, girls are not only going to school but doing as well as or better than boys and young men. A raft of new laws have been enacted at international and national level to protect womens rights.

At the same time, social and economic inequalities have been growing, and together with increasing religious and cultural conservatism threaten to undermine many of the gains women have made. A recent United Nations report notes that the progress made in the past twenty years towards reducing global poverty is at risk of being reversed because of a failure to combat widening inequality and strengthen womens rights.

But some things have not changed. Men still hold the majority of positions of power. Mens violence against women, which cuts across race, class and geography, shows no sign of decreasing. And women and girls in many countries continue to be seen as second-class citizens, especially if they are poor, or come from a black or minority ethnic group.

However, one of the consequences of the changes in womens lives is that the traditional model of being a man the strong leader and main provider of the household is slowly beginning to be questioned, not just by the bold and brave women invoked by Phumzile Mlambo-Ngcuka, but by some men as well. Men like Anthony, or Pascal, both of whom we meet later in this book. Anthony had to learn how to move beyond the belief that his wife Janine should do as she was told. And Pascal found that he was becoming a violent man just like his father and didnt know what to do about it.

This growing group of men in many parts of the world dont want to react as they see some other men do, with violence bred of frustration. They experience power over women, but they find that does not necessarily make them happy.

And while, in many countries, girls and women, despite many setbacks, continue to have an increasing number of choices about who they can be and how they can express themselves, men and boys generally have more restrictive models of what it means to be a man. This is partly because, as Todd Minerson, from the White Ribbon campaign

As we will see later in this book, there are alternatives. Men too can change. When shown other ways of thinking and behaving, Anthony and Pascal were able to find a way of being that freed them up to be who they wanted to be and which benefited the women in their lives as well.

There is also growing interest in the ways in which men can support gender equality, for example the recent campaign He for She by UN Women, which asks men to come forward to say that they support womens rights.

But these changes are not straightforward. There are major differences between men like these who support feminism and gender equality, and those who have reacted by becoming part of a mens rights movement. These men feel that their own needs and voices are being ignored in the debates around gender equality and that feminism is to blame. And they want to make those voices heard, and they are generally raging against women.

There is a resurgence of feminism in many parts of the world. But there are tensions among feminists, who feel that the movement of men for gender equality is taking away precious space and scarce resources from womens rights activism.

This book explores these sometimes contradictory trends and ideas. It challenges women and men who share the same vision of gender equality to support the widening of the feminist revolution to include men more broadly, without losing the focus on women that remains at its heart.