West Coast University When Men Experience Sexism Essay

Read the article When Men Experience Sexism – The Atlantic

Berlatsky, N. (2013, May). When men experience sexism. The Atlantic. Retrieved from https://www.theatlantic.com/sexes/archive/2013/05/when-men-experience-sexism/276355/.

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Cite specific examples from the article to support your conclusions.

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When Men Experience Sexism – The Atlantic

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When Men Experience Sexism
There are some practices and policies that are unfair to men. But this fact should unite
men with feminists, not drive them apart.
By Noah Berlatsky
MAY 29, 2013
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Posters encouraging men to fight in World War I and World War II
(Library of Congress)
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Can men be victims of sexism?
An NPR Morning Edition report this week suggests strongly that the answer is “yes.”
As Jennifer Ludden reports, after divorce men can face burdensome alimony payments
even in situations where their ex-wives are capable of working and earning a substantial
income. Even in cases where temporary alimony makes sense—as when a spouse has
quit a job to raise the children—it’s hard to understand the need for lifetime alimony
payments, given women’s current levels of workforce participation. As one alimonypaying ex-husband says, “The theory behind this was fine back in the ’50s, when
everybody was a housewife and stayed home.” But today, it looks like an antiquated
perpetuation of retrograde gender roles—a perpetuation which, disproportionately,
harms men.
This isn’t the only case in which men can suffer from gender discrimination. David
Benatar, in his 2012 monograph The Second Sexism discusses a whole range of other
ways in which men as men are disadvantaged. Men, for example, receive custody of
children in only about 10 percent of divorce cases in the United States. Men also, as
Benatar writes, are subject to “a long history of social and legal pressure…to fight in
war” —pressures which women do not generally experience in the same way. Along the
same lines, physical violence against men is often minimized or seen as normal.
Benatar refers to the history of corporal punishment, which has much more often been
inflicted on boys than girls. Society’s scandalous tolerance of rape in prison seems like
it is also related to a general indifference to, or even amusement at, sexual violence
committed against men.
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Perhaps most hideously, men through history have been subject to genocidal, or
gendercidal, violence targeted at them specifically because they are men. Writers
like Susan Brownmiller have over the last decades helped to show how mass rape and
sexual violence against women are often a deliberate part of genocide; similarly, there
has been increasing awareness in recent years of the gendercidal results of sex-selective
abortion and infanticide in places like India and China. But the way gendercide can be
directed against men is much less discussed. One of the worst recent examples of this
was in the Balkans war, where, according to genocide researcher Adam Jones, ” All of
the largest atrocities… target[ed] males almost exclusively, and for the most part “battleage” males. ” Similarly, in Rwanda according to Judy El-Bushra (as quoted by Jones):
it was principally the men of the targeted populations who lost their lives or fled
to other countries in fear. … This targeting of men for slaughter was not confined
to adults: boys were similarly decimated, raising the possibility that the
demographic imbalance will continue for generations. Large numbers of women
also lost their lives; however, mutilation and rape were the principal strategies
used against women, and these did not necessarily result in death.
Many of these examples—particularly the points about custody inequities and
conscription—are popular with men’s rights activists. MRAs tend to deploy the
arguments as evidence that men are oppressed by women and, especially, by feminists.
Yet, what’s striking about instances of sexism against men is how often the perpetrators
are not women but other men. The gendercides in Serbia and Rwanda were committed
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against men, not by feminists, but by other men. Prison rape is, again, overwhelmingly
committed by men against other men—with (often male) prison officials sitting by and
shrugging. Conscription in the U.S. was implemented overwhelmingly by male civilian
politicians and military authorities, not by women.
Even in cases where women clearly benefit from sexism, it’s generally not the case that
women, as a class, are the ones doing the discriminating. Neither alimony nor custody
discussions are central to current feminist theory or current feminist pop cultural
discussions. Thereis no ideological feminist commitment to either of these discussions
in the way there is to, say, abortion rights, or workplace equity. On the contrary, the
alimony and custody inequities we have at the moment seem mostly based, not on
progressive feminism, but rather on the reactionary image of female domesticity that
feminism has spent most of the last 60-odd years fighting against.
When men suffer from sexism, then, they do so in much the same way women do. That
is, they suffer not because women rule the world and are targeting men, nor because
feminism has somehow triumphed and brainwashed all of our elected officials (most of
them still men) into ideological misandry. Rather, men suffer because of the same
gender role stereotypes that hurt and restrict women—though men, being of a different
gender, fall afoul of those stereotypes in different ways. Women are supposed to be
passive and domestic and sexual—so their employment options and autonomy are
restricted and they are fetishized and targeted for sexual assault and exploitation. Men
are supposed to be active and violent—so their claims to domestic rights are denigrated
and violence directed against them is shrugged off as natural or non-notable.
“For me,” Heather McRobie wrote in an excellent 2008 article about genercide,
“feminism has always been about how rigid gender roles harm everyone, albeit
primarily women.” Talking about sexism against men is often seen—by MRAs and
feminists alike—as an attack on feminism. But it shouldn’t be. Rather, recognizing how,
say, stereotypical ideas about domesticity hurt men in custody disputes as well as
women in the job market should be a spur to creating alliances, not fissures. Women
have been fighting against sexism for a long time. If men can learn from them, it will be
to everyone’s benefit.
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