victor j. seidler, from unreasonable men: masculinity and social theory, 1994
["MEN, EXPERIENCE AND FEMINISM
Why has it taken so long for men to explore their experience of masculinity? In part, the workings of masculinity within modernity have remained invisible as dominant men have learned to speak in the impartial voice of reason. This has been part of an Enlightenment tradition and is deeply embodied in western inherited forms of philosophy and social theory. So a man's voice assumes a pitch of objectivity and impartiality as it becomes an impersonalised voice, a voice that has 'authority' because it belongs to no one in particular while claiming at the same time to respect all.
Thus it is hard to judge men's accounts of their own experience because often these personal accounts are not forthcoming. Traditionally, men have relied on women to provide them with an account and understanding of what they are experiencing in their emotional lives. It is as if men do not have to learn to take responsibility for their relationships, since this can traditionally be left to women within heterosexual relationships. Often men learn to put up with things since they have to learn to identify themselves with an absence of emotional needs, and so to centre their lives around the demands of work where male identity is supposedly constructed. But it also that feminism has sought to account for men's experience in particular ways, most sharply in the radical feminist idea that all men are 'potentially rapists.' This is a challenging but also a damaging notion, for it works to discount differences between men as 'illusory', for as the story goes, all men are fundamentally the same. They 'have to be' because they all occupy the same position in the hierarchy of power. They are not to be trusted.
This creates a difficult and tense silence, for it means that women often stay silent about their relationships with men. They can constantly feel critical, as if assuming blame is a way of assuaging an underlying sense that relationships with men can only be a sign of weakness. For men it creates a silence because it makes them feel that they do not know their own natures, that there is something to fear in them, and that their emotional lives and sexualities are full of danger. This reinforces, rather than challenges, a traditional Kantian conception of masculinity as somehow dominated by an animal nature and as something that can only be curbed by the strong hand of reason. It also reinforces an idea that women somehow know what men are like better than they can know themselves. It does not encourage men to build a different, possibly more trusting relationship, to their own experience. It tends to encourage men to hide further, feeling that somehow they have to be guilty of all the issues and problems emerging in their relationships with women. It can make it easier for women to take the morally high ground and thereby refuse to recognize their own collusions and responsibilities for the way the relationship is going.
Guilt can help explain why it is not uncommon for men to take to heard and identify with this radical feminist vision of themselves. But it is still in many ways a surprising fact that needs explanation. It tends to reinforce a negative vision of masculinity as a form of self-denial, even self-hatred, which is deeply embedded within a Protestant culture, as Nietzsche recognised. It also allows men to talk about masculinity as a relationship of power in relation to women and so it gives men a kind of security in being able to uphold this analysis. It gives men an overarching rationalistic analysis of the situation and somehow allows them to render their own experience invisible.
But this path hardly helps men to reflect upon their own masculinities, and it blocks any vision that men can really change their lives. It resonates with a feeling that men inherit, within a Protestant culture, that they really are not trustworthy themselves, that they do not know what they are feeling, and that what they come to feel cannot really be trusted. It can become a version of 'mother knows best'. But at the same time it allows men to feel that they are 'right' because they have thereby been able to identify with radical feminism. But it is a strange way to identify for it discounts men's own experience of themselves and their relationships, and it often says them men's accounts of their own experiences are never to be trusted. Paradoxically it means that men do not learn to take responsibility for themselves.
Men can assure themselves that they have the 'right analysis' of 'patriarchy' but at some level this then helps produce a form of self-rejection and self-hatred. There might be a feeling of tension between what men feel about themselves from their own experiences, namely that they are not 'potential rapists', and the pull of the culture notion of masculinity which says that men 'should always have a go', that their masculinity is somehow being compromised if they do not make a move sexually. It reinforces a notion that men cannot help themselves and that sexuality is somehow some kind of irresistible animal urge.
If we are to deny this position and argue that sexuality is not 'given' but is socially and historically constructed, then we still have to think clearly about imposing a sharp modernist duality between 'nature' and 'culture' and about the nature and character of this 'construction'. We have to think about the ways men can come to know themselves and develop a different relationship to their emotions, feelings, and sexual desires. We have to recognise the ground opened up by different forms of therapy which make it possible for men to work on their sexualities and so to change. All this is denied if we insist on automatically discounting men's own accounts of their experience and saying that 'in reality' men are always 'potentially rapists'.
This does not men that men will always know best, for we have to acknowledge real differences between men and in the level of self-awareness and in the work men have been ready to do on themselves. But it does mean that we cannot automatically discount their accounts of their experience. We have to recognise this as part of a process, for men's perceptions of themselves, at least in personal and sexual relationships, are likely to be on the skew, defensive, superficial and many other things, because of the disconnections which often exist between inherited forms of masculinity and men's relationships with their emotions, feelings, and desires. Men have for so long within modernity learned to discount the impulses of their emotional lives that it is difficult to forge this relationship simply as a matter of will and determination."]
