Cookies?
Library Header Image
LSE Research Online LSE Library Services

An honourable MENtion to being a man about International Women’s Day

Watson, Callum (2016) An honourable MENtion to being a man about International Women’s Day. Engenderings (16 Mar 2016). Website.

[img]
Preview
PDF - Published Version
Download (231kB) | Preview

Abstract

On 8 March, we celebrated International Women’s Day. To misquote from an often cited statistic, 95% of men immediately think “What about International MEN’s Day?!” when International Women’s Day is mentioned. The other 5% are liars.[2] Many will not have voiced this openly. Those of us working in gender-related fields may have felt guilty about it afterwards. But we have all thought it. Perhaps we could go as far as to define a man as being a male human being who has been subject to the constant stream of sociocultural messages telling him explicitly and implicitly that he is superior to women. Moreover, when we accept and embrace the fact that we are “men”, this necessarily involves some degree of conformity with the social expectations of our gender and thus, it almost inevitably means accepting a privileged position that gives us a degree of power, and notably power over women (at least in the same demographic group). That is not to say that our acceptance of the male gender label is a free choice by any stretch of the imagination – conformity to masculine social norms is enforced through some pretty hefty sticks alongside the carrots of privilege (see for instance Kilmartin & Smiler, 2015).

Item Type: Online resource (Website)
Official URL: http://blogs.lse.ac.uk/gender/
Additional Information: © 2016 The Author(s)
Divisions: LSE
Subjects: H Social Sciences > HQ The family. Marriage. Woman
H Social Sciences > HT Communities. Classes. Races
Date Deposited: 24 May 2017 08:46
Last Modified: 15 Sep 2023 20:43
URI: http://eprints.lse.ac.uk/id/eprint/78556

Actions (login required)

View Item View Item

Downloads

Downloads per month over past year

View more statistics