Sucheta Dasgupta

Kathmandu

We have seemed to establish earlier that feminists today need a more holistic approach to the scheme of things.

While the world has been focussing on how to improve the lot of women and only women in the judicial, social and government sectors, here are some real issues that malefolk across countries are faced with.

• In a competitive professional environment, women are not required to stay late, work to meet standards, travel, do tough assignments, even learn work in some corporate houses resulting in comparative devaluation of the work of their male colleagues. Often they are allowed to leave early, get much more leave than deserved (not only for maternity reasons) and are even escorted home on office expense whereas their male peers do not get such privileges. (This, however, results in women being excluded from most interesting and challenging jobs owing to employer mistrust. This also results in the glass ceiling.)

• Women not being required to work extra hours or show significant improvement in performance levels to compensate post-maternity for time away (for biological reasons, maternity leave is much longer than paternity leave)

• High-risk employment for men only, but receiving no special honour for engaging

• Men risking their lives in conscripted service (exceptions exist, e.g. Israel, where women are also conscripted but do not serve in combat.)

• Paternity leave does not exist in most south-east Asian countries

• Child custody strongly favouring mothers; belief that children grow better with the mothers only even after they are weaned as infants

• Some men being incarcerated for the inability to pay unrealistic alimony even when the wife earns more than he does

• Some men being incarcerated for the inability to pay unrealistic child support payments

• Children aborted or given up for adoption without fathers’ consent

• Anti-male biased legislation, using the word women in the law title

• Men charged in some domestic violence cases, even when victims

• Men charged in some rape and sexual harassment cases with no evidence beyond the plaintiff’s claim, with greater repercussions as a result

• Hate crimes against men, male rape

• Relative lack of funding for men’s health

• Lack of advocacy for men’s rights and entitlement programmes for women only

• Special government agencies for women’s affairs with no corresponding agencies for men’s affairs

• Earlier age of autonomy for women than men in some countries. (In Nepal, India and other south-east Asian countries, the legal age of marriage for women is 18, for men 21. Women can live autonomously within the groom’s household but men have to defer to parental whims as a result of patrilineal marriages. In some states of the USA, women may legally move out of the house at 17, but men have to wait to be 18.)

• Men being treated as “success” objects resulting in devaluation of their true wishes, goals and aspirations, leaving aside success that is truly meaningful to them even as women are often treated as “sex” objects that results in devaluation of their real sexuality

• Women being given first ‘rights’ as customers in offices, queues, cinema and public transport

• Routine infant male circumcision

• Men being deprived of child care opportunities

• Male caregivers and housekeepers devalued as individuals a little more than their female counterparts Perhaps, to deal with these discrepancies in society, has emerged a philosophy called masculism. The word originally and essentially means the state of being masculine just as postfeminist feminism which has reclaimed the original meaning of the word, which is, to be precise, the state of being feminine. And just as there are many different kinds of women and feminists (not all of them the true or ideal model, but many bearing insights and attributes that are a part of the whole feminine), so also there are different kinds of men and masculists.

Some argue that masculism is the ideological flipside to feminism, like communism is to capitalism, and I believe that they are complementary sides or approaches to a larger philosophy of humanism (?). However, feminism must not exclude masculist observations for its own sake and for the good of both the sexes. In other words, masculist observations are equally feminist observations because their content really hurts the feminist cause and is bad for society, in general, and the individual, in particular, be they male or female, if differently to each, but to the same extent, apart from the fact that they are here being made by a female person. In still other words, the observations are part of feminism, though masculism is not.