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Full-Time Dads;
The Magazine for Caregiver Fathers
Issue 24
In an interview with Jeffrey Seeman, published in M.E.N. Magazine, Fredric Hayward said, "I objected to (feminists) presumption in telling me why I'm doing certain things, what I'm feeling...If their experience is so different from mine that I can't understand theirs, then mine is so different from theirs that they can't understand mine." He was speaking about his inspiration for getting involved with men's rights, but his thoughts apply to a much broader problem that arises when women attempt to explain male behavior, or vice versa. It has been said that men need to define their issues on their own terms, and not allow feminists to define them for us. The trouble with The Trouble With Boys is that it views the various issues involved with raising boys into men from a completely feminist perspective, without considering that male experience has complexities that may not be readily understandable to women.
The Trouble With Boys is subtitled, "A Wise and Sympathetic Guide to the Risky Business of Raising Sons." Wise it may be, and sympathetic too, and therein lies another problem. Boys and men are not in need of the sympathy of women. We need women who will listen to us and pay attention to what we say, and accept that we know more about being male than they do, and that they may never understand masculinity.
The whole premise of this book is what got Hayward so angry. Philips starts with the notion that there is something basically wrong with men, and that it requires the direction of women to fix it. She assumes, as many feminists do, that it is only women's experience that has value and truth, and if men would only admit that they are basically oafs, and do as women say, they would be healed.
Another of those wiser-than-I types has said that it is not that men do not have emotions, only that they have very little chance to express them. In her introduction, Philips wonders why men have changed so little in the past 20 years. It is not that men have no capacity for change, but that they have not been given the space, and the social permission, to change. Actually, men have changed a great deal; over the past 20 years and more, men have responded to women's demand that they make themselves more aware of women's issues and work to repair the damage, real or imagined, done to women. All the while, men have been keeping their shoulders to the wheel, continuing to support women and the society at large financially, legally and politically. Men's investment was so complete, that now we even believe that to be male is something that needs to be fixed.
Now that men are attempting to make the same sorts of changes in our culture that women have made-demanding the space and the social permission to fully realize their male-ness-we are met with strong opposition and sympathy, as in the case of this book. Men are told at every turn that they cannot possible hope to be as responsible, as genuine, as wise or as honest as women, and that therefore men must willingly submit to the guidance of women.
Philips assumes that the only choices for boys growing up are to stay with Mother, which she says only prolongs the eventually agony of separation, or to go off into the dangerous and unhealthy world of men. She sees no middle ground. She reduces fathers to "the bearer of pizza, provider of goodies or the threat of violence." She has very little good to say about men, and apparently feels that the world men currently inhabit is entirely of their own making.
I will admit I have not read the entire book. I simply could not. I got far enough into it to get a feel for Philips' stance, and found it not only personally offensive but entirely counter to any kind of understanding between the genders. She is of the "Us or Them" school, which can only see one gender or the other as wise and right. She does not seem to be aware that, as Hayward said, perhaps women will never fully understand what it is to be male, or that male experience has any value.
She wonders why men have changed so little? Men are informed by our feminist culture at every turn that they are irresponsible brutish oafs who have no capacity to nurture children, maintain relationships or understand themselves. They have been coerced into their current roles by the demand, made by women, that their only important contribution to society was to financially support women as they sought their liberation. 20 years ago, when their wives decided they wanted out of the marriage "trap," men were still expected to pay the bills. When their children were taken from them, when fathers were relegated to visitor status, they were expected to pay the bills. 20 years ago, a man who sought custody of his children was laughed out of court. Because these were the women they had devoted their lives to, men accepted and believed, against their better judgment. Everywhere they turned, men were told Mother Knows Best.
Philips makes this point herself. She points out William Julius Wilson's findings that over the past 20 or 30 years, black men have become more likely to be unemployed than black women, and that the decline of the black American family is rooted in this soaring joblessness of black American men. Apparently, black women don't want unemployed husbands. Neither do white women, but as a percentage, there are more unemployed black men than white men. She asks the question, "Without a job, what is a man?" Nothing, in the eyes of a woman. "A boy," Philips writes, "learns that relationships depend on money and power." Those are the things that boys see women put the most value on, and, since boys have been encouraged to respond to the needs of women, that's what they go after. Boys and men pursue the goals of money and power not because it satisfies them, but because, they are told, it satisfies women.
That said, she then goes on to imply that when men work increasingly long hours, it is a "ploy" to cut themselves off from women and children. This was the only way, she says, for men to feel "special," since there was less "man's work" available, and what work there was had been taken over by women, and all men have in their lives that has any meaning is work. Again, she sees men's experience through a women's eyes, rather than assuming that men's experience is fundamentally different.
Another assumption she makes is that men are angry at women because they feel "the rug pulled out from under them...they are frightened and angry...in their rage, they will hit out at women individually and collectively." The reason men are angry at women, Philips asserts, is because women are after men's jobs. It does not occur to her that men could be angry about being belittled and abused by popular culture and the legal system, or because women receive more benefit and shoulder less responsibility, or because so much is expected-demanded-of men with so little being given back. She doesn't consider that men don't like it when women assume they know all about men's lives and attempt to tell men how to live them, and that men resent women's ridicule of their explorations of manhood. She does not allow for men to have any motivation beyond that which she assigns to it.
Her book, she writes at the conclusion of her introduction, "is an attempt to start untying the knot of masculinity." The fact that she sees masculinity as a knot that needs untying in the first place is a sign that she does not understand the nature of the problem. Boys need to realize, she says, "that they don't have to be better than girls in order to be men, and that masculinity can be just as viable as femininity has become." I agree, but the reverse is also true. Girls need to realize that they don't have to be better than boys in order to succeed. The way things stand now, boys are constantly reminded that they are inferior. We work so hard to provide girls with strong role models that we end up doing so at the expense of boys. Boys, and the men who mentor them, need to realize that masculinity already is viable, and does not need to become anything, and certainly not under the guidance of women. It only needs to be realized.
That, I think, is the fundamental problem with this book, and what might be the major stumbling block in this liberation movement business. Just as men at first did not understand what women were so upset about 30 years ago, so too women are missing the point now. Men, at first, didn't listen then, and women are not listening now. And just as men did not like the idea of fully-realized women who defined their gender on their own terms, so too women do not like the idea of men who know who they are, men who define themselves on their own terms, men who do not require women to fulfill them. Our entire culture, some would say, is based on the premise that men need women, and that the way to get and keep a women is to financially support her and at the same time let her do whatever she wants, even if it is destructive to men and families. The flip side is that women have come to expect that they will be supported, whether by a husband, ex-husband or the society at large, no matter what they do. When men begin to grasp the fact that their whole-ness is not dependent upon getting and keeping women, when men begin to invest their energies into things other than women, and begin to teach this to their sons-when in fact men in general fully realize their masculinity-then the whole system will come crashing down and something new can be built in its place.
I did not read most of this book. Perhaps somewhere later in the text Philips redeems herself; I'll never know. Philips own description of her book was enough to tell me this was not a book that I would find any value in. Her premise that men have social, economic and legal power is demonstrably false. Very few men actually have any power over these things. The vast majority of men live at the mercy of their employer, (if they lose their job they will lose their entire worth to society at large), and their wives (women remove men from their homes with frightening ease, speed and frequency), in a society that views violence against men as entertainment and views men as disposable. Men live in a climate of constant anxiety and stress and fear. They have no safety net. These are not expectations men have imposed upon themselves. These are expectations that have been imposed upon men by a culture that seeks to protect women at any cost, and that uses men as its primary means of protection. Men and women need to understand that we all had a hand in creating and accepting this system, and that none of us will be liberated until we all work together in taking it apart.
When Philips laments that men have not changed, is it any wonder? What do you expect from boys raised almost entirely by women? Until men reach the point of full realization, and then reclaim the teaching of their sons what it means to be a man, then we can expect no change in the life, suffering and death of men.
Published by Basic Books
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