It’s easy to claim that men should learn or even understand feminism in today’s day and age, however, it can be a difficult topic to understand for someone who doesn’t experience discrimination based on their gender. We have moved far beyond women needing to fight for basic rights like the right to vote or the right to hold property and without education, many men may not understand that there is still a long way to go before women are truly equal in society.
Let’s look at a basic situation. A man in the corporate world has a boss who is a woman and makes more money than him and a wife who holds a full-time job and doesn’t simply stay home with the kids. On a basic level, to him, women may seem to be equal to men in society. However, what this man is not seeing is the pay gap between his boss and a male that holds the same level position and the second job his full-time working wife holds as a mother. Because of this, feminists need to dedicate time to educating men on the feminist movement and how they can be an ally.
Feminists tend to focus their effort on further educating women on the cause and what they can do to help pursue an end to gender discrimination. While this makes some sense because women are the ones affected by this issue and the most likely to take action, feminism will not ever be fully successful without the allyship of men. Now, when I say allyship of men, I mean that men need to make a conscious effort to change and help ensure that they are not aiding and embedding the issue of gender discrimination. Feminists need to educate men on how to do this because the simple truth is that many men won’t go out of their way to educate themselves on feminism and many others don’t even realize the validity of the problem of sexism.
Feminism advocates for the “equality of the sexes and the establishment of the political, social, and economic rights of the female sex,” according to the definition of the word feminism in the Oxford English Dictionary. Now, what I think some men don’t fully understand is the fact that feminism doesn’t aim to put women above men, it simply aims to ensure that women are equal to men. This idea stems from the fact that men do not understand the gender inequality that women face on a daily basis, and if they don’t understand that this inequality exists, they don’t understand the need for feminism, hence, the reason they need to be educated. The fewer men walking around thinking feminists are aiming to put women above men, the better.
Feminism is full of misconceptions and if men are not educated on what feminism is and how to be an ally, they might fall to some of these misconceptions, like the idea that feminists hate men (not true) and that men can’t be feminists — when, in fact, anyone can be a feminist. So, again, feminists need to educate men on how to be allies. We, as feminists, can’t keep letting men walk around with extremely misconstrued perceptions on feminism — that’s simply not helping the cause.
Now, before you take the route of saying men should work to educate themselves through readings and research — which I am all for — the issue arises that when you do a quick google search on what men can do to be a feminist, a lot of what comes up are what men should not be doing and not what men should be doing. It’s difficult to find a good article on how men can be allies. This creates a bit of a problem. Yes, men should not objectify women, but this is not enough to ensure men are being allies. And, if it’s difficult to find good sources that explain what men should be doing to be an ally, it causes one of two things — either men stop searching and don’t learn or feminists are left with needing to take on the role of educating men.
It is extremely important that feminists begin to educate men and don’t just focus on women because if we, as women, want an end to sexism, men need to change. And men cannot change if they are not educated on the issues of gender inequality. Many men do not understand feminism and many do not make an effort to understand, so it leaves it to feminists to educate these men and, hopefully, one day we’ll reach a point where allies can educate one another, taking the burden of feminists to educate males away altogether.