Who is the male feminist? Perhaps we should first ask: Does he even exist?
The singer-songwriter and record producer Pharrell, of “Blurred Lines” infamy, thinks not. “I’ve been asked, am I a feminist?” he told an interviewer for Britain’s Channel 4 News. “I don’t think it’s possible for me to be that.” When asked to explain, he replied, “I’m a man.” But he was quick to clarify: “I do support feminists. There are injustices; there are inequalities that need to be addressed.”
Lindy West of Jezebel disagrees. “Good news, Pharrell!” she writes. “Setting aside academic dialogues about whether male-identified humans should identify as feminists or feminist allies (because I don’t think that’s what you were talking about), generally speaking, it IS possible! Question answered! Men can be feminists! Now JOIN OUR LEGION.”
The debate rides in the wake of last month’s rampage in Isla Vista, Calif., which inspired the Twitter hashtag #NotAllMen — an effort by social-media-savvy males to ideologically separate from Elliot Rodger, the killer whose rage at least in part arose from an admitted hatred for women.
“The #NotAllMen replies are never in response to anyone making claims about all men,” tweeted The New Inquiry’s editor in chief, Ayesha A. Siddiqi. She followed up with, “The automatic impulse to defend ‘all men’ when some are challenged betrays identification with male power above empathy for women’s pain.”
In turn, #NotAllMen inspired another hashtag. #YesAllWomen was coined to “illustrate the ubiquity of sexism in women’s lives,” explains Jessica Valenti of The Guardian, linking to standout tweets by feminist writers and thinkers.
Like #NotAllMen, #YesAllWomen had its fair share of critics. On June 4, the Los Angeles Times columnist Meghan Daum said users of the hashtag were piggybacking on a story that wasn’t theirs to tell. “The lesson of Isla Vista, at least so far, may be that there’s not all that much to learn, there’s not all that much that could have been done,” she wrote. “As frustrating as that is, it must be even more frustrating, even infuriating, for the family members of victims to watch their personal tragedy be co-opted into a rallying cry from women who, whatever injustice or violation they’ve suffered at the hands of men, still happen not to have been murdered by one.”
The debate surrounding male feminism did not start with the tragedy at Isla Vista. In a column about the former Pasadena City College gender-studies professor Hugo Schwyzer, once considered America’s most vocal male feminist, The Guardian’s Ally Fogg concluded, “Feminism can cope without me, I’m sure, and will be all the stronger for doing so.” The same goes for Mr. Schwyzer, “a deeply divisive figure within feminism,” he wrote. He blamed a “troubled personal history,” which unfolded in a bizarre series of confessions Mr. Schwyzer tweeted in August and September of 2013.
“I wanted to be THE male feminist,” Mr. Schwyzer wrote. “It was part of my game.” He admitted to sleeping with students and cheating on his wife — and, most notably, writing an article for The Atlantic criticizing age-disparate relationships while sleeping with a 23-year-old.
Shortly before his social-media confessional, Mr. Schwyzer granted an interview to The Cut’s Kat Stoeffel. “Look at me. I mean who would want to be me?” he told her. “If you look at the men who are writing about feminism, they toe the line very carefully. It’s almost like they take their cues from the women around them.”
“I’ve interacted with him enough to know that Schwyzer has a very dry sense of humour,” Mr. Fogg noted in his column. “So I suspect there was an element of ironic self-deprecation at play here, but either way he illustrates the key problem facing any high-profile, self-identifying male feminist.”
That notion has its supporters among women as well. In a post written for Medium, Sarah Ali lays bare what she calls “the myth of the male feminist.” Male feminism requires constant revision and guidance from women, she claims. The male feminist “relies on the labour of women in the same way his non-feminist counterpart does,” she writes. “Is there a major philosophical difference between relying on women for domestic chores and relying on them for call-outs? In both cases, cis-men are using the labour of women to do things that, really, they should be able to do on their own.” And thus, according to Ms. Ali, male feminism is actually a cleverly disguised extension of patriarchy.
XOJane’s Meghan Murphy offers a more nuanced perspective. “Feminism is for everyone,” she wrote last August, but wonders why “those who insist they are ‘good guys’ or self-identify as feminists grate on me?” The reason, Ms. Murphy relays, is that some men use the label “as a means of gaining credibility or avoiding accountability,” without actualizing their so-called feminism. “I want men in this movement, and there are men in this movement. But the men who I see doing the work and changing their own behavior both in their personal and public lives to support women aren’t going around advertising their feminist status and demanding we all recognize. They’re just doing it.”
Ms. Murphy isn’t alone in questioning the motives of certain self-declared male feminists. Even those styled as such acknowledge the label as occasionally problematic. “It’s true that sometimes male feminists, myself not excluded, imagine we’re brave allies, altruistically saving women by standing up for them,” explains The Atlantic’s Noah Berlatsky, who has written extensively about issues of sexism in popular culture. “But dreams about men saving women are just another version of misogyny — and, in this case in particular, totally backwards. Misogyny is a cage for everyone. When I call myself a male feminist, I’m not doing it because I think I’m going to save women. I’m doing it because I think it’s important for men to acknowledge that as long as women aren’t free, men won’t be either.”