Faux Feminism: Denying Positive Masculinities
In the Spring of 1993, I came out of the closet as America’s possibly first openly gay high school coach. It was not exactly an enjoyable experience. Although the athletes I coached remained steadfast in their devotion to me, I was the target of homophobic harassment and intimidation from parents, students, administrators, and most commonly, from members of the high school football team. I was prepared for this; I had appropriately read the culture before coming out and knew that this would be the case.
What I was not prepared for, however, was a guilt-by-association process that brought both symbolic and actualized violence against my heterosexual athletes simply for being on my team. The harassment continued unabated, while the school’s administration did nothing until it erupted into a violent assault on one of my players. Here, a football player sat upon my athlete’s body, repeatedly punching him in the skull, breaking four bones including his palate, while calling him a “fucking faggot.”
The event brought national media attention to the situation and thrust me into the unexpected role of media pundit on the issue of gays in sports — something of which I had no real knowledge outside my own limited experience. The media continued to tap me as a source of knowledge on this issue for several years, which eventually influenced me to return to the academy and earn a PhD in sociology. Here I studied the intersection of sports, masculinity, and homophobia. I wanted to be able to speak with data and authority. I just didn’t know that I was entering an ideological warfield over those very straight men I wanted to study.
I was mentored by the leading scholar in the area, though his teachings were less research-informed and more theoretically derived. Given my horrific experience, I had no reason to contest his theorizing on the subject. After all, he had taken his cue from the academic who was, and remains today, the most-cited scholar in the field of masculinity studies. These scholars, and flocks of their followers, operated from the presumption that patriarchy exists, that it exists as all men being culturally privileged over all women all the time, and that masculinity is socially determined, absent of biological influence. More germane to my research, from their perspective, heterosexual males (except for them, of course) are thought to harbor highly homophobic and misogynistic sentiments.
For years I drank the Kool-Aid. Few cracks of doubt ever emerged. When they did, I shut them out. For example, I picked up a used copy of a book titled The Myth of Male Power. Having yet to read it, I mentioned I had bought it to my mentor. His angered reaction suggested to me that it must have been written by a partisan hack, perhaps one of those raving crazy men’s rights activists he talked so frequently about.
RAISING MY PROFILE
The life of a PhD student is a perilous one. Instead of pursuing knowledge without restriction, they exist within tribes of academics camped out in opposition to other tribes of academics. Wise PhD students side with those who have direct power over them, so I didn’t read that book. I proudly wore my feminist badge, and published papers in their tribe’s publication list — which is to say, most all journals related to the sociology of gender or masculinities.
I awkwardly used the leading feminist theory to discuss my findings from the first-ever account of the experiences of openly gay male athletes in high school and colleges at the turn of the millennia. Here, I found gay men accepted on their teams, not stigmatized. I questioned how homophobic heterosexual men could be, or as hyper-masculine as gender scholars claimed, if they were unbothered by the sexuality of their teammates.
This research was followed by multiple studies showing sympathy, not antipathy, toward gay males on the part of straight males in sports. In short, I was showing that whereas homosexuality was stigmatized among adolescent males in the 1980s and 1990s, it was homophobia that was stigmatized in the new millennia.
This was something the leading theory of masculinity could not account for. Hence, over the next few years, I fashioned a new theory that was data-driven, falsifiable, and clearly explicated. It accounted for historical and future epochs concerning the experience of homosexuals and the attitudes toward them in different settings, and with varying levels of cultural belief that homosexuals exist within one’s community. I even described it as a feminist theory.
The theory was explicated with studies of heterosexual males engaging in behaviors inconsistent with behaviors that would exist if the leading theory was accurate: men kissing, cuddling, and loving each other.
I named my theory Inclusive Masculinity Theory, not because I was suggesting that all heterosexual men were inclusive of all people but because the majority were now inclusive of what was once exclusive to masculinity — homosexuality. I showed that when heterosexual men accepted gay men, it softened their masculinity. It made them less inclined to engage in violence, homophobia, and even dangerous sports. It opened them up to skinny jeans and the color pink.
Inclusive Masculinity: The Changing Nature of Masculinities (2009), my book exploring the way modern young men really were, was a shot across the feminist bow to the stakeholders of feminist gender studies. Stuck between his kinship with me and my blasphemous results, my mentor’s endorsement of the book principally described it as “hopeful”, a subtle way of casting doubt onto the multiple studies that informed it.
academic blasphemy
My former mentor and I had our final courteous moment at a conference in which I provided dozens and dozens of photos of my students kissing their fellow classmates, cuddling, and loving them. I produced photographic evidence of straight men in embrace, with other straight and gay men alike; I produced qualitative studies of positive attitudes toward gay males. He was invited to “respond.”
As usual, he came without data. He simply “interpreted” my results as men (my friends, my students) mocking gay men and re-inscribing homophobia. This remains the excuse that academics of this flock give today when their heterophobic assertions are challenged. I was aghast. This is not academia, it’s politics.
It was here that I learned how political, how exclusionary, and how nasty the academy can be. First, I found reviews of my articles rejected from the canon of masculinity journals; most of the reviews used the very familiar language of my mentor and his followers. I was vexed. I needed more than evidence to break the dominant paradigm. I needed the gatekeepers who disliked my findings to accept my articles.
I struggled to publish for a few years until I employed a new strategy. Rather than writing an article and submitting it solely, I wrote several, saved them up, and shot-gunned them to the journals all at once. Not even the most stalwart gatekeeper had enough spare time to review five articles.
My strategy and my persistence paid off. My articles began to be reviewed not by gatekeepers, but by graduate students. They found my theory reflected their own experiences. I began to publish, both inside and outside the canon of journals from which the feminist politics of masculinity are at play. Over the next decade, I produced a dozen PhD students, and dozens of further studies in multiple countries showing that young straight men had left homophobia behind. Thus, a rift in masculinity scholars was born between those wedded to an ideology that views heterosexual men with disdain and those vested in a more impartial, data-driven social-scientific study of men.
I even heard from modern heretics, one of whom took my old mentor’s course on masculinity. He emailed me to inform me that my old mentor provided them a list of 100 top masculinity publications, from which the entire body of my work, or any of those who studied masculinity from my theoretical disposition, was absent. When asked directly “What about Anderson?” his response was, “He’s made a fine career for himself.” Given the stature of my theory, with thousands of citations, this strategy is the academic version of putting one’s head in the sand.
the gender paradox
It’s quite embarrassing when you have a PhD in masculinities, and yet you get schooled by a university student. But that’s what happened to me around 2016. A student asked me what I thought of the “gender paradox”, and I had no clue what that was. I found the answer, not in any of the masculinity textbooks I owned, nor on Google Scholar, but instead on Reddit.
The gender paradox, poorly named, is really nothing of a paradox at all. As reported by the United Nations and other government bodies, it simply plots data across the world on rates of gendered occupational segregation by country. The data shows that the most feminist, Nordic countries have the highest rates of occupational segregation in the world. Calling it a paradox references the fact that this is the opposite of what you might expect.
This occurs, however, not because teaching feminism turns women against Science, Technology, Engineering, and Math, but because those countries provide a living wage for all jobs so that choosing any career path is viable. In other words, when women have the right to choose and are financially rewarded for whatever choice they make, most, on average, still choose different careers from men.
MEN DESERVE RIGHTS TOO
This new information made me angry. How could I have earned a six-year PhD and not been told about this? And what else was I not seeing? As it turns out, there was plenty more.
As explored in Chapter Nine of my book, Men and Masculinities (2018), these included issues related to:
Men’s Increased Rates of Death by Accidental Injury
Chivalry as Women’s Privilege
Men’s Over-Representation in Dirty and Dangerous (DAD) Careers
Men’s Elevated Suicide Rates
Men’s Elevated Deaths by Police
Men’s Brain Trauma from Team Sports
Men’s Cultural and Legal Compulsion to Fight and Die in War
Homelessness as Mostly a Man’s Problem
Discrimination in Criminal Prosecution, Incarceration, and Capital Punishment
Men’s Increased Stigmatized Sexualities
Men’s Cancer Issues
Domestic Violence and the Lack of Men’s Shelters
Circumcision as Men’s Genital Mutilation
Fathers’ Unequal Rights
Less Emotional Support for Men’s Issues
I didn’t readily see these issues before because my attention was focused on where my feminist mentors wanted it to be. For example, they highlighted that when we read about successful people, they are almost always men. This is mostly true. When we read of successful politicians, religious leaders, business people, innovators, scientists, fashion designers, chefs, surgeons, warriors, or virtually any other cultural story of success, we read of men. When we do hear about successful women, it is often in categories where women do not directly compete with men, such as for Gold Medals or Oscars. Thus, if you only examine those issues, it seems to be almost universally true that men are the big winners in life.
But men are the big losers, too.
Our preconceived beliefs about men being the biggest winners usually prevent us from recognizing that men make a significant showing on the list of life’s biggest losers. For example, due to both genetics and lifestyle choices, men die younger. They also experience higher rates of homicide and suicide, receive greater injury from violence, work in more hazardous industries that leave more of them with debilitating injuries, and are less socially “permitted” to complain or seek emotional support for their losses. Men are near-exclusively or highly disproportionately represented in prisons, in homelessness, and as wounded or dead soldiers.
Despite these obvious and glaring examples of unequal civil treatment, poor life outcomes, and lack of empathy for males, feminist scholars of gender mostly continue to see just one side: The Patriarchy, as they call it. If they do recognize these ways in which men suffer from health and life outcome disparities, they tend to blame men: a blame-the-victim mentality.
Highlighting that most feminist scholars of masculinity fail to view men as big losers has made me a pariah to feminist masculinity scholars. That is the way academic tribalism operates. As a target of stigma, numerous, usually ridiculous critiques of my theory have been published; one even criticizing my theory for not explaining patriarchy; another suggesting that homophobia is worse now than it has ever been.
But I’m still here. My theory and my adherents continue to grow. I crested 10,000 citations recently, and my former PhD students are embedded in universities across the UK.
I retain the belief in equality of opportunity that once led me to identify as a feminist in the first place. I also note that fairly examining all inequality between the genders (including those that impact men) is consistent with some moderate, liberal forms of feminism that are thus indistinguishable from my position. However, I personally choose to no longer call myself a feminist because in the West today, it no longer makes strategic sense to use a gendered term to describe a widely accepted belief in gender equality. I do not identify as a men’s rights activist either. Instead, I advocate to both feminists and men’s rights activists that they call themselves gender equality (of opportunity) activists.
Together, we push back against the politics of academic exclusion, effuse writing, data-less conclusions, and sophistry.
One final story
I presented data to a feminist forum in another country a few years back. I showed evidence of straight men kissing each other, and having “bromances” and gay friends. After an invited talk, tradition dictates that the speaker is taken to a pub for dinner and drinks. I was not offered this. Instead, they went to the pub without me. There, as I was told by a graduate student brave enough to email me, they lambasted me and asked why I would fabricate data about straight men kissing. They suggested that I would lose my job for falsifying data. Then, one of them noticed two men sharing a kiss at the bar. The graduate student told me there was a moment of silence, as they watched, but no one admitted that perhaps I was right. I received no apology. I won’t receive one from my old mentor, either. Tribalism doesn’t work that way.
As for me, I apologize to the 10 years of students to whom I falsely taught only half the story. I was wrong. I’ve written the only non-feminist social-scientific book about men and their masculinity, partly as an apology. I tell my graduate students today, if you ever think I’m wrong, I won’t be angry with you for vocalizing your doubts. I’ll be angry with you for not vocalizing them. Being mistaken and correcting those mistakes is an integral part of being a good academic.
Published Jan 5, 2022
Updated Apr 18, 2024
Published in Issue X: Clash of Ideologies
