Feminism Will Not Save Men

And a prominent feminist may have noticed.

Talking about men is surprisingly difficult for liberals. I know this from personal experience.

Little story to start us off:

12 years ago, I was a single guy with a pretty good life. I worked in politics, which gave me a cool thing to talk about at parties, as well as a steady paycheck. I had a riverview bachelor pad, in a nice city. I drove a pickup truck, which I liked doing at the time. I dined out frequently, had friends, owned several nice suits, looked okay in them, and on paper, had things pretty well put together.

But I was struggling. It had been a rough year.

I’d recently had a long (if nebulous and noncommittal) relationship come to an abrupt end. Two actually (it’s a long story). I was swimming through alternating waves of depression and anxiety, and I had no therapist or medical regimen to help tug me along. I said I had friends, and I did. But I had few close ones, fewer male ones, and even fewer any ones who lived anywhere near me. So the stuff I was dealing with, I was dealing with mostly alone.

“Dealing with,” might be a bit charitable, actually. I was drinking too much, smoking too much, getting high too much, and spending too much time in seedy bars. I had also - in true, self-destructive, male fashion - largely abandoned any pretense at observing the practices of safe sex. Which turns out to be kind of a bad move when you’re hanging around in seedy bars and going home with, well…the kinds of people who hang around in seedy bars.

I managed to stay STD-free (somehow) but this unfortunate period of my life initiated what I would later come to think of as my “two year hangover.” The comedown to end all comedowns. It began when a woman I barely knew called me in the middle of an important work trip to tell me that she was pregnant, and that she was pretty sure I was the father.

This was, I regret to say, 100% possible. So much so that I attended more than one doctor’s appointment under the assumption that I was facing 18+ years of coparenting with a woman whose middle name I could not have told you under torture. I looked at the ultrasound. I watched the electric pulse of the pre-heartbeat. I watched the technician take measurements and I listened to her tell us the due date. I did the math. It seemed to add up.*

Any man reading this who’s been in a similar situation will not need to be told what I was going through. Or what this was like for me.

You’re probably expecting me to say here that any woman reading this who’s faced an unexpected pregnancy will also know what I was going through. But as we’re coming to, I’m not at all sure that’s the case.

I’m not competing or downplaying, mind you. I’m not doing a woe-is-me here, and I am not for a second trying to claim that men have it harder than women do in the business of unwanted pregnancy. That would be ridiculous.

But men experience these situations differently to women. Not worse necessarily, just not the same. That should be an obvious statement. And a noncontroversial one, since men and women are not the same.

But as I would come to learn, this observation is not obvious. And it is very controversial. In fact, folks get really testy when you try to make it.

Remember, I was working in politics. I was, and am, a Democrat. My colleagues were all Democrats, all liberals, all pro-choice, all heavily influenced on matters of reproduction by prevailing feminist thought. I believed then, and still do, that while having unsafe sex is a boneheaded move, unwanted parenthood is not an appropriate punishment for it. I did not, and do not, think that “you should’ve kept your legs closed,” is a sufficient (or appropriate) thing to say to a person contending with an unwanted pregnancy.

I believed then, and believe now, in reproductive freedom. And until that time, and until that experience, it would never have occurred to me to modify that statement by tacking “for all” onto the end of it. But that would turn out to be a glaring blind spot.

My wife thinks I might be somewhere on the autism spectrum. I don’t really agree with her, but I guess it’s possible. Autistic people tend to be very rigid in their approach to language and reason. You say what you mean. If you don’t mean something, you shouldn’t say that thing. You should say another thing that you do mean. Seriously, why is this hard?

Whatever’s really going on in my brain, I don’t know. But this is absolutely one of my ticks. And it can be crazy-making when you follow politics, where people lie, and euphemize, and obfuscate all the damn time.

Republicans used to drive me actually insane with this. These wannabe-survivalist types would call my office demanding, “Has your boss even read the 2nd Amendment??” and I would clap back with, “Have you?”

Because if you’re going to get all up in my face about “the right to keep and bear arms,” I’m going to get all up in yours about the “well regulated militia” part you’d rather pretend isn’t in there. I don’t want to fight about gun rights now. I’m just saying, there’s only two things: you care about the text, or you don’t care about the text. If you try telling me you care about the text, and you don’t even know the text - as many of these assholes didn’t - I’m going to snap.

But I digress.

My point is really that, for me, “reproductive freedom” meant what it said on the tin. It was a principle: you should have the freedom to reproduce, or not, as you see fit. I’m really not trying to start an argument about the morality of abortion here either, so if that’s the road you want to go down, please go down it on some other comment thread. I’m also not just talking about abortion.

I’m talking about how I came to learn that the principles of contemporary feminism which had inspired my beliefs about reproductive freedom (and all it entails) were decidedly not for me. They were not for any man.

For all we talk about reproductive freedom, we often miss what should be among its more obvious dimensions: men don’t have it. Any of it. And nobody really wants them to.

Men have exactly the amount of reproductive freedom that Bible-thumping, pulpit-pounding religious fanatics think women should have: the freedom to not have sex. That’s it.

Aww, your condom broke? Tough shit, dude. Time to fork over half your income for 18 years.

Your girl’s birth control failed? Better get painting that crib.

Your girl lied about being on birth control in the first place? Don’t know what to tell ya, bud. Should’ve kept it in your pants.

I wanted - and was actively working to realize - a world in which women faced as few restrictions as possible in the event they ended up pregnant, but did not want to become a parent. I wanted abortion to be legal, safe, and affordable. I wanted birth control to be accessible. I wanted adoption to be easy and streamlined. I wanted single moms to have robust benefits and no social stigma. I wanted every available option to be right there on the table for any woman needing to choose one, and I wanted them to be able to approach family planning without society closing any of those doors.

It never once occurred to me - not until I was facing it myself - that none of those doors are even open to men in the first place.

Men who have caused an unwanted pregnancy have no option but to sit back and wait to be told what’s going to happen by the woman whose pregnancy they caused. I’m not arguing that we should (that would be weird and barbaric) but men have no say in whether or not a woman chooses to terminate a pregnancy or give a baby up for adoption. Even a man wishing to raise a child that the mother wishes to put up for adoption may have to jump through some legal and procedural hoops to prove he should be allowed to do it.

Men have no legal recourse to opt out of a pregnancy, and no legal recourse to opt out of paying for child rearing. This can be true even in cases where the mom is okay flying solo. Accessing public benefits generally requires the mother to disclose her child’s paternity, even if she’d rather not have dad involved. Even a man who’s pretty sure he’s not the father can be compelled by the state to prove he isn’t by way of a DNA test.

And this is before we even get to how men are treated in family court. Years later, when I had just become a step parent, and was having to get permission from the courts to move my daughter out of the country (with her mother, who is my wife!), you would not believe the dirty looks I got from the women in that building. Holy moly. I mean, I’m sure they come by their biases honestly - plenty of men are, in fact, scum, and family court workers probably see more than their share of that type - but again, holy moly. You’d have thought I was there to rob the place.

Anyway, after a two year process of doctor visits, back-and-forth with the mother (with whom I did not ever develop a warm relationship), and the looming specter of court-ordered paternity testing, I found out officially what I had already come to learn: I was not the father. The baby, I am pleased to report, was born healthy, happy, and cute. Mom, last I knew, was happily married, and well looked-after.

*This isn’t really part of our story, but I think I have to tell it anyway, lest I make myself sound like a schmuck. This was a two-year process, right? So why wasn’t I at more doctor appointments? Why wasn’t I there at the birth? Why wasn’t I parenting? Because by appointment #2, I knew I couldn’t be Dad. Remember how I said the math seemed to add up? Well, it actually didn’t. Listen up guys, because this could save your ass someday: pregnancy isn’t dated from conception, it’s dated from the first day of the mother’s last menstrual period (LMP). The LMP can be as many as 2-3 weeks before the sex part even happens, and early pregnancy dating is very precise. I knew I was out of the window. It was that, or my paternity was medically unprecedented, such that somebody was going to write it up for some journal. The only reason the mother didn’t know this was because a) she didn’t really want to, and b) the idiot med student we saw at our second appointment didn’t even know how to read a pregnancy wheel, so couldn’t explain it to her.

Anyway, my saga had a pretty good ending. But a lot of other stories, for a lot of other guys, do not. And there is nothing those guys can do but bum around and wish they’d made different choices.

They can’t even really talk about their experiences because - and I cannot stress this enough - people, women, feminists, do not care. There is no support, and no sympathy extended to them. To even just voice frustration is to be labeled a subhuman, deadbeat garbage-person.

I didn’t talk about this a lot to the people in my life at the time. It’s not really a Thanksgiving dinner topic. One time I tried, I was out for drinks with some work colleagues, and without cluing the group in to what I was personally going through, I made a sideways observation that, for all our movement’s concern about reproductive freedom, it seemed to me that we ought to at least acknowledge the ways in which men were left out of it.

It was one of those record scratch moments.

I wasn’t ranting about this or anything. I was on my first drink! All I’d done was float a one-sentence test balloon on the subject, and everyone turned to me, squinting. The men too. The most outspoken feminist of the bunch, a friend of mine, said in all seriousness, “You should be careful, Dave. You sound like a Men’s Rights Activist.”

For one sentence. So that was a learning.

I wondered if it was just a one-off though. Maybe other feminists were more sympathetic? I went looking, sifting through the publishing histories of feminist writers I liked to see if any of them had addressed the topic. A few had. But the ones who’d touched on it had mostly only done so with the most scornful, begrudging malice you could possibly imagine. It wasn’t, “hey, we should think about the guys too, even if their experience of pregnancy doesn’t feature the same biological realities.” It was more, “ugh, fine, I guess these douchebags have a point, but they’re still douchebags who should mostly just fuck off and stop whining.”

Here’s Jezebel:

Boo fucking hoo. At the end of the day, the only thing the government, and society, requires fathers to do is pay money, which is a hell of a lot easier than raising a child alone, as most mothers who have children out-of-wedlock are forced to do.

Amanda Marcotte, writing for Raw Story, was willing to accept the premise, though not altogether graciously:

I'm sick of this argument, so I propose that feminists go ahead and embrace this "paper abortion" bullshit, even though, unlike real abortion, it's not about bodily autonomy.

So yeah. Liberals do not have an easy time talking about men. But could that be changing?

Governor Gretchen Whitmer of Michigan is getting appropriate praise for a passage in her February State of the State address that drew attention to a serious but overlooked problem: men are not okay.

On important social metrics like home ownership, performance in higher education, and health, men and boys have fallen behind girls and women. Men are not only less likely to own homes, they’re vastly more likely to become homeless. 47% percent of women aged 25-34 have college degrees, compared to only 37% of men. Men are more likely to overdose, get hurt or killed on the job, they tend to die younger, and they’re more likely to commit suicide. And of course, they do not enjoy the protections of reproductive freedom. And there is no serious movement oriented towards changing that.

Since there’s very little reason to think that any of this is zero sum, and every reason to think we can offer help to men without taking anything away from women, this qualifies as a problem we ought to be more interested in solving. So why aren’t we?

A big part of the reason we aren’t is that, as I think my story demonstrates, it can be stiflingly difficult to talk about men’s problems without the zero sum concern haunting the discussion. For observers struggling to update their thinking, the notion that men are worth spending any serious time worrying about is laughable, verging on insulting, in view of history’s treatment of women.

The guys had basically free reign of the entire world until like, 50 years ago. And even then, had to be badgered into sharing it with women. Why exactly should we be shedding tears about women having rocketed past them now? Isn’t that just deserts?

Obviously, I don’t think so. I’ve said it before and will say it again: history is long, but life is short.

Consider Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s famous quip (maybe not a quip?) about the composition of the Supreme Court. And consider it from my my-wife-says-autistic perspective:

Ginsburg: “People ask me sometimes… ‘When will there be enough women on the court?’ And my answer is, ‘When there are nine.’”

Naturally, I admire the shit out of Ruth Bader Ginsburg. Of course I do. I’m a liberal, and she’s a liberal icon. But this statement is logically and morally insane.

What Ginsburg - the second woman ever to serve on the high court - is reacting to here is that, prior to her sole, female predecessor, the court had been made up entirely of men. Since the dawn of the Republic. Presumably, Ginsburg thinks this was wildly unfair, or she wouldn’t want to change it. But what’s her answer? Make it wildly unfair again, just in a different way!

This is actually a very common way for liberals to consider the arc of the moral universe. “Things were bad in the past. To make up for that, we must make sure they are bad in the present, but in a different, better way. And we must set things up to continue being bad into the future, but again, in the right way. Justice!”

In light of this, it’s perfectly understandable that we would struggle so mightily to desnarkify the way we talk about men: a group that, until recently, had it pretty good, at the expense of everyone else.

Just look at how careful Gretchen Whitmer - whose feminist credentials are unimpeachable - has to be when she makes the thoroughly banal point that men are in trouble and could use help:

“My message tonight goes out to all young people, but especially our young men. I know it’s hard to get ahead right now. But I promise you, no matter how hard life might get, there is always a way out and a way up.

The last thing any of us wants is a generation of young men falling behind their fathers and grandfathers. I’ve heard most about this issue from moms, who love their sons and are worried about them.

And to the women out there who are succeeding after decades of having the deck stacked against them, I see your resilience and I want you to know that I will never abandon my commitment to equal opportunity and dignity for everyone.

Generations of our moms and grandmas fought hard for the economic rights and personal freedoms we enjoy today. They made our lives easier, and our responsibility to our sons and daughters is to build a state where they can all succeed. As a mom of 2 smart, driven young women and stepmom to 3 successful young men, I know that their success is connected to the success of their peers… all of their peers.

In Michigan—men and women—want to protect and provide for their families… be financially successful… and be good role models.”

I teach middle and high school, so I recognize classic essay format when I see it. This is a textbook example: intro, three body paragraphs, conclusion. Yeah, some of the body paragraphs are only a sentence or two, so maybe this essay just gets a B, but whatever. Let’s dig into it.

In the Intro, we get, “my message goes out to all young people,” just to ensure that Whitmer won’t be accused of leaving out women in her discussion of men’s issues. I’m not mocking this. It’s a very valid concern. Had she not cleared her throat in this way, you can take it to the bank: somebody would’ve complained, “it’s hard for women to get ahead too.”

In Body 1, we get, “I’ve heard most about this issue from moms.” This is good. Because it lets us know that Whitmer has an acceptable reason for caring about men: some women do also.

In Body 2: “And to the women out there who are succeeding after decades of having the deck stacked against them…” Actually, I could just crop the whole thing here. It’s all about women. Fair enough, I guess, we’ve just spent a whole, perilous paragraph seeming to talk about men and their problems without also talking about women and their problems, so we’d better make sure that nobody thinks we forgot about the ladies.

Phew. That was a close one.

Body 3 opens with, “Generations of our moms and grandmas fought hard,” again, so that nobody is left to worry that in talking about how hard men have it right now, we might forget that before, women had it hard. When we finally get to the word “sons,” it is immediately followed by, “and daughters.” Good - gotta stay inclusive. We then have a classic, “As a mom…and stepmom,” section, because it’s important that we remember why men can sometimes be important: they can sometimes be related to women.

But we’ll come back to men in our conclusion, which begins, “In Michigan - men and women…” Oh. Hmmmm… Okay, maybe we won’t come back to men in our conclusion. But do we need to? Really? I mean, God, they got like two or three full sentences all to themselves in the intro and first body paragraphs. Will it ever be enough for them?

I’m really not trying to take the piss out of Gretchen Whitmer. She gave a good speech. If I’d written it for her, I’d have probably done even more pussyfooting. And she really did go on to lay out some specifics (you can read the whole thing here).

I’m just using this passage to illustrate that even the powerful, popular governor of a major swing state, one of highest profile women (not to mention, feminists) in American politics, considered a serious threat to be the first female president one day, has to tip-toe on piping hot eggshells to even just introduce the idea that men aren’t doing well, and we should care about that, actually.

To an absolute, 100% certainty, if Whitmer had been any less cautious in her approach, feminist individuals and organizations would have grumbled that she had paid them insufficient concern. That she had left them out, ignored their plight, and let them down. That those charges would have been deeply silly is irrelevant. They would have been reflexively and immediately leveled. Whitmer knew this, and so she had to be careful to hold everyone’s hand through her address, lest anyone feel left behind.

Feminism isn’t failing men. It has failed men.

That’s actually okay. Feminism does not need to be for men, and it never did. It was a profound mistake to think that that should have been one of the movement’s functions. I’m not remotely “anti-feminist,” I just think that feminism should stay in its lane, not try to do things it was never designed to do, and not have its existence held up as the reason why men can’t have their own movements when they need them.

And it really is used that way.

When my friend accused me of being a Men’s Rights Activist (MRA), MRAs were considered by the left to be some of the most loathsome creatures stalking the American political landscape. (In fairness, many of them were legitimately awful.) We used “MRA” then the way we use “incel” now, so to get called that was an actual blow. And it taught me, very quickly, to shut up about that stuff in the future.

That was fine. Until I had a son.

I have one daughter and one son. I love them both equally and immeasurably. I want them to enjoy the same advantages in life, and I want the same efforts applied to shielding them from harm. I’m confident, for now, that my daughter will always have hands at her back to support her. I’m less certain of that for my boy, and I’m not fucking okay with it.

It’s not that I don’t care that women two or three generations removed from my daughter had a harder time than men in those generations did. It’s just that there is nothing I can do about that. Or about them. Their time has mostly passed.

It seems just obvious to me that I should worry more about conditions now, and in the immediate future, and for my kids, than about what conditions were like for Betty Friedan and Gloria Steinem. It’s not that I have no interest in rectifying the conditions of their world, it’s just that I fucking can’t.

My time machine’s still in the shop.

History is long. Life is short. Gretchen Whitmer, at least, has recognized this. May more follow suit.