Workplace Oppression: Kevin's Story

            Kevin Tait knows the realities of workplace oppression very well.  He is single, thirty-two, and works freelance as a graphic designer.  Tait has dark red hair, stunning blue eyes and his thin frame tops out at 6"4'. 

            "I had to turn freelance after I lost my job," he explains.  "Three years ago, I was working for an advertising agency and I was seriously involved with my then girlfriend, Bethany."

            He tells me he still finds it hard to talk about what happened to him. "I was accused of sleeping my way into a promotion," he says softly, his eyes downcast.  "It wasn't true" he adds finally.  "I don't know why," he continues, "but my supervisor never liked me.  She made a point of constantly rejecting my work, sending it back for revisions and, then rejecting the corrections I made because she said I missed this and this and that. She nitpicked me for minor mistakes. She was constantly riding me for everything I did. If I left my desk to go to the bathroom, when I returned she was there, telling me I was not allowed to take unscheduled breaks.  She yelled. She fumed. She made my life Hell.

            According to legal documents, there were four men working in Tait's department, all of whom were called out in their performance reviews for "producing unsatisfactory work."  Tait, however, was also cited for excessive tardiness, an uncooperative attitude, aggressive tendencies, and not finishing his projects on time.

            "I did run late," Tait admits, "but my attitude was based on the fact that, according to this woman, my work was never good enough. The other guys in the department didn't have their work rejected seven or eight times before it was completed.  I could never get any work done because she forced me to do it over and over.  Because of that, it took me three weeks to finish every project."

            Despite the problems and the poor reviews, Tait landed a promotion to lead the team assigned to a major account. 

            "My supervisor didn't promote me," he says. "The CEO did.  She liked my work, and when she was involved in my projects, they were accepted immediately, which only angered my supervisor because the boss took control of my work out of her hands. Whenever the CEO did that, my supervisor took it out on me. It was miserable. I dreaded getting out of bed in the morning."

            After enduring the toxic environment created by his supervisor for over two years, Tait's girlfriend convinced him to file a complaint. "Bethany is a wonderful woman, but after I lodged the complaint, suddenly, the rumors began. Before I could prove my supervisor started them, someone called Beth and told her I was unfaithful. All I know about the caller is that it was a woman. My lawyer could never prove my supervisor made the call, but it didn't matter, Bethany left me."

            The downward spiral continued. "Men are always judged by their private lives in the workplace. It's patently unfair. Women's private lives are their own, but for men, never. When the CEO heard about the complaint, she called me to her office and grilled me for half an hour about my private life, trying to blame my 'aggression' for the problems I experienced at work. This woman, who had previously been so supportive of my work, stood by the supervisor. She never asked me one question about how I was being treated. She never asked me to explain the complaint. She just kept asking me personal questions. Did I live with a woman? How many women had I been intimate with? How do I handle my aggression outside the workplace? She told me the supervisor had complained to her on several occasions that I was 'overly aggressive' and 'uncooperative'. She asked me what steps I had taken to express my anger positively. It was very insulting, dehumanizing, and offensive to have my private life investigated because of a problem at work. That's when I got a lawyer and sued the company."

            According to court documents, Tait sued the company for defamation of character, and sued both the CEO and his supervisor for harassment and creating a hostile work environment. 

            "Two weeks after the filing date, I was fired for 'excessive aggression and unwillingness to compromise,'" Tait says. His lawyer added "termination without cause" to the lawsuit and argued Tait's dismissal was retribution for filing the case, but because both offenses meet the standard for just cause under the law, the Judge dismissed the additional charge.

             During the testimony of Tait's CEO, she admitted she subjected Tait to questions about how he behaved during his personal time, but did not ask the same questions of the supervisor.

            "I thought the Judge would see the obvious injustice of it, but, of course, she didn't."

            The woman with whom Tait was accused of having the affair testified for the defense, claiming Tait seduced her over a period of weeks and that the affair lasted two months. When questioned by Tait's lawyer, she admitted the CEO had recently given her a large pay raise, but the defense objected to the question, calling it immaterial to the case. The Judge granted the objection and informed the jury the pay raise was not a factor in the case.

            Though Bethany testified that Tait was the least aggressive man she had ever dated and that, despite his alleged affair with a co-worker, she still cared for him, Tait lost the case.

            "At every turn, the Judge ruled against me. I mean, here we have a female judge, a female-owned company, two female defendants and a female witness to the affair. Three-quarters of the jury was female.  In civil cases, you only need a majority to decide the disposition of the case. The whole system is stacked against men."

            After that, Tait says, no one else would hire him. "The case received a lot of attention, everyone knew my name.  I couldn't get work anywhere.  Hiring managers kept telling me, 'Well, you're very talented, but we can run the risk of hiring a trouble-maker with uncontrollable, aggressive tendencies.'

            "The problem," Tait concludes, "is that women have all the power. Women are in all the power positions, and women stick together. It's divide and conquer, in the workplace, in the courtroom, everywhere."

            I ask Tait how his experiences have affected him financially. "I live on half of what I used to make," he tells me. "I had to move because I couldn't afford my apartment. I had to sell my car and buy a smaller, cheaper one because I couldn't afford the payments. Because of the internet, everyone in the country knows my name, and I've been universally blackballed. There's a website that lists men who have been ruled 'aggressive' by the courts. They added my name to the list. 

           "All the work I do now is for online companies, who are only willing to work with me because I'm freelance, work on specific projects through a specific contract and, therefore, the company isn't responsible for my behavior. I work far more hours than I used to, and still just barely get by, and because I'm freelance, I have no paid time off.  I have no vacation days, no sick days, no personal time."

            Has this experience caused any other changes in his life?  "Oh, yeah," he says.  "The cops keep an eye on me.  They pull me over for no reason. I have trouble finding women willing to go out with me. A lot of people recognize me when I'm out. Clerks at the grocery store are rude because they've read articles about me in the media. My mother won't talk to me because she's ashamed of me."

            I ask how men treat him. "In public, they're as rude as women, but in private, they feel sorry for me.  Every man I know shakes his head in despair over what happened to me, but at the same time, they are now more aware of how easily it could happen to them. They tell me how terrible it is, and then tell me how they have to distance themselves from me or find themselves accused of guilt by association. The only men who will openly associate with me are the ones active in the masculinist movement because they've been through similar experiences or they empathize with what I've been through and want the workplace, and society, to change.  I hope it does."

Categories of Oppression: Labor and Economics

            For men, working is difficult, socially unrewarding, and unfair at every level.  The institutionalized matriarchy men encounter in the work place is fraught with discrimination, and there is little chance for advancement.  Men in the corporate world face challenges no matter the industry.  Across the board, men have to work harder for less pay and have more education to compete with women.  Overall, women ignore male complaints about "the pink ceiling."  Despite the economic benefit equality would have for individual women, as a group they are resistant to change and often berate men, challenge their ideas and suggestions, and engage in sexist behavior meant to keep men from fulfilling their full potential in the workplace.

            This culture of sexism exists from the highest level down to the most menial of jobs.  Federal funding for social welfare programs that primarily benefit men are common targets of conservatives aiming to “trim the fat from the budget” while simultaneously generous tax credits are offered to the richest one percent of the population, a startling 72 percent of whom are female.

            Although it is no longer necessary for a man to depend on a woman for financial support, Federal research based on tax filings prove it is still true that a man of equal qualifications with comparable job titles earns less than $0.74 for every $1 a woman earns.  According to studies done by the Hercules Institute, a masculinist think tank that studies the professional world, on average men earn 39 percent less than woman over the course of their professional life.  This inequality over the course of a professional career can amount to hundreds of thousands of dollars.  Furthermore, to gain access to a professional career with a middle-class salary, a man competing against women with a high school diploma must have at least a Bachelor’s degree.  For this reason, female graduates dominate high paying fields while men dominate low paying fields.  Not only that, but women who earn a Bachelor degree in low-paying fields such as engineering still earn the same as men in high paying fields such as visual arts.     

            While men have made great strides breaking into various professions – such as medicine, the arts, advertising, and design careers – they have still not made inroads into most jobs that require handling or working around toxic chemicals.  These careers range from professions in all areas of science to those in manufacturing.  When men are able to obtain employment in one of these jobs, they must submit to harsher restrictions and severe mandatory safety precautions aimed at protecting their exposed genitalia from harm.

            Women hold 87 percent of all executive positions primarily because of the benefits they receive from the bias of gender stereotypes.  Hercules Institute studies show women benefit from deeply held social attitudes and gender stereotypes.  The belief that women are better able to manage stress and the subtle emotional complexities of the leadership position is common.  Women are perceived as being more competent and worthy of advancement into the upper echelons of the corporate world due to the accepted belief that they posses a natural ability to deftly navigate the difficult and often tricky professional terrain.  In the world of business, where success relies on the harmonious cooperation of a team often rife with personality conflicts, gender stereotypes insist women are more adept, more astute, and more willing to engage in creative interpersonal problem solving.  Women, believed to be more trustworthy, honest and dedicated than men, and less aggressive and competitive, are better suited to executive positions.

            Studies of articles in five newspapers in the major metropolitan markets of New York City, Chicago, Los Angeles, Miami and Dallas expose that men who are successful in leadership roles are less liked and less likely to have their efforts acknowledged or rewarded.  For men who engage in assertive and direct approaches in the workplace penalization of these exhibitions of aggression come through such indirect measures as being asked to perform menial additional jobs that do not within fall within the parameters of the positions they were hired to perform and through direct measures such as being socially ostracized, labeled a “problem employee,” and denied advancement. 

            The benefits for female employees do not end there.  Under the 1997 Family Medical Leave Act, women have 24 paid sick days a year for “pain, distress and suffering caused by their moonstruation.”  There is no such allowance for men.  The same act allows for eight weeks of unpaid leave for a man and six months of paid leave for a woman following the birth or adoption of a child. With a doctor's certification, that working will cause undue stress on the mother or the baby, a woman has paid leave from the moment she finds out she is pregnant.   

            Due to their primary obligation as fathers, women and men have an unequal relationship to paid employment.  From the age of three years on, men are primarily responsible for the health, well-being, protection, and care-taking of their children.  Data from the esteemed Carter Research Center show that men miss more days of work, work fewer hours in a day, and are less willing to travel for work than are women.  If a parent is required to miss work to care for a child, most employers are more willing to make domestic allowances for men.  It is important to note, however, that men permitted to work fewer hours to care for their children, suffer penalties in the workplace for these absences. 

            Men who remain primarily responsible for their children cannot dedicate themselves to their jobs or their employers, and yet, find themselves accused of beings lazier and less cooperative in the work environment.  Men who miss work because their child is ill or who have to leave early to take a child to the dentist are resented by women in the workplace because they do not put in an equal effort and do not perform their fair share of work.  Moreover, recent articles in Mr. Magazine indicate in many companies -- large or small --a woman who needs to leave work to take her daughter to a ballet lesson not only suffers no consequences for the absence, but also receives praise and adulation for being "such a good mother."

            Men can be legally terminated from work for having multiple sex partners (if provable in court), but women are seldom terminated and instead, often gain social and economic status from sexual prowess.  John Davies signed a morality contract when he went to work for a small Goddess-based university in northern South Carolina.  When he went to work for the university, Davis clearly indicated to his new employer that he fathered a child with one woman.  About a year into his employment, school officials learned he had fathered a second child with a different woman.  Davies lost his job because the university insisted he violated his morality clause.  Davies sued the school, citing the three female employees who had multiple children under different fathers, but lost the case.  In the words of presiding judge, Marta Hernandez, "Fatherhood is a social and legal responsibility that carries with it a higher degree of moral accountability than motherhood.  We cannot allow the future of our children to be compromised by men who do not fully accept the moral obligations of their role as the primary caretakers of children."  According to Hernandez, the mother's Davies cited in his case were meeting their parental obligations by financially providing for their children.  The South Carolina Supreme Court rejected Davies appeal.

"Predatory Behavior" and the Law

Part III:   Categories of Male Oppression

Legal/Legislative

            I meet Lucas Vale at the Mississippi State Prison, just outside of Parchment, a little over two hours north of Jackson, Mississippi.  His shoulder muscles bulge under the orange jumpsuit he is required to wear.  His face is haggard and his mocha brown eyes are tired.

            "It's been a tough day," he confides. 

            Vale is twenty-seven.  One night in 2008, he ran out of cigarettes.  He walked alone to a corner store to buy a pack of Marlboro Reds.

            "It was summer," he tells me.  "I had on a pair of shorts and t-shirt.  I wasn't looking for trouble.  I just wanted some smokes."

            On his way to the corner store, he encountered a woman who was having car trouble.  "It was very simple.  She just needed to tighten the fan belt."  Vale returned home, got some tools and fixed the problem.  When they got the car working again, she gave him a ride to the store.  "I didn't touch her," he insists.  "We had a nice conversation.  She was pretty.  I was trying to be charming.  When she dropped me off at my place, I invited her in for a cup of coffee."

            That, Vale says, is when everything went wrong.  "She turned me down and forty-five minutes later, the cops were at my door."

            Arrested and charged with predatory sexual behavior, Vale spent three years fighting against the belief that he intended to rape her.  "I was just being sociable," he defends.  "I wasn't meaning for anything to happen.  I would've made the coffee and we could have drank it on the front porch.  I didn't have a motive."

            However, that is not what prosecutors believe.  Citing his past conviction for rape, prosecutors classified him as a repeat offender, which under Mississippi law meant his sentence would automatically be determined as fifteen years.

            I ask about the rape conviction.

            "Yes, it's a rape conviction, but it's fourth degree.  I was fifteen.  I lost my virginity to my girlfriend.  Her parents found out and pressed charges.  It was a couple of kids doing what kids do, but I paid the price for it."  Vale spent three years in a juvenile detention center before moving to the same prison he is in now to serve the last two years of his sentence.  "I got five years for losing my virginity."

            Vale's story is not unique.  Of the over four thousand five hundred inmates incarcerated with him, fifty-two percent are here on a conviction of rape in some degree.  "Once they have that on you, you can never escape it," he says.  "Everytime you talk with any women you're a suspect.  In a world where they throw you in prison because a woman is afraid of you, no matter how innocent you are, you end up here. " 

            The legal ramifications of the sexual oppression of men are severe.  The definition of rape as it stands in most states is limited to acts of penile, digital or oral penetration of a woman in any way without her expressed consent.  As it stands now, a man can be charged with rape in the fourth degree if he French kisses a woman against her will.  A bill currently moving through the New York State House of Representatives aims to push this definition even further, and redefine rape as any “unwanted sexual contact.”  Under this definition, if a man standing at a bar next to a woman accidentally brushes his arm against her breast, he could face criminal prosecution, which could result in a jail term ranging from five years in prison to life and in some cases would carry a mandatory punishment of chemical castration.

            Men are especially vulnerable to accusations of violence and charges of rape when they go out at night; the danger is even higher if they do so alone.  While men are still expected to initiate romantic contact, especially in the early stages of a relationship, they must do so carefully.  Men whose approach to women is aggressive or who “come on too strong” or who do not accept a rejection can be accused of stalking or “predatory behavior” a crime in all fifty states that carries a minimum of five years in behind bars and a maximum of twenty-five years.

            "This fight is beginning and long overdue," says Greg Manchet of the American Civil Liberties Union.  "Legally, we are damned if we do and, socially, damned if we don't.  And the laws are just getting worse."

            Congresswoman Maggie Franklin (R-GA) has presented a bill before the House of Representatives that seeks to criminalize any ‘non-reproductive release of semen.’  The bill, which includes nocturnal emissions under the terms of non-reproductive release, aims to end the waste of what Franklin calls, “valuable and irreplaceable biological products that the Goddess deemed for sole use of the creation of human beings.”  Under the bill, a man caught having released semen in any circumstance other than the “righteous and sacred act of male-female communion” would be forced to prove to the legal standard of beyond a reasonable doubt that he played no part in the emission of said semen or face prosecution.  Conviction under this new bill would carry a minimum sentence of life in prison.  Conviction under this new bill would require mandatory chemical castration.

            "This bill is aimed at the morality of men," Manchet argues.  "The purity of male sexual products and their sacredness to the fabric of society is a ruse.  Whenever anyone talks about morality, they’re talking about sex.  As if moral behavior was strictly limited to the bedroom.  Inevitably, whenever someone is talking about morality, they’re talking about men’s sexual behavior, men’s sexual purity.  No one ever expects a woman to be a virgin until she’s married.  No one ever sexually represses women while at the same time dividing them into good girls and bad girls, and using the bad girls to promote a male-centered pornographic industry.  Oh, no.  When the religious right starts talking about morality, chastity, the sacred unmade and unborn child, they’re always talking about men.  The underlying belief is that must be forcibly controlled lest their rabid sexual urges lead to violence against women, but women, who are considered free from any violence whatsoever are allowed to engage in any sordid, immoral, disgusting behavior you can imagine.  This law is just another attack against male sexuality, and that’s all it is.”

            The laws are even harsher for men accused of hurting children.  In most states, judges and juries have the right to levy the death penalty against a person convicted of child sexual abuse, but the sentence is disproportionately applied to men.  It is true that fewer women sexually abuse, and that when they do their actions are considered less severe because in most cases the child is not penetrated, but comparisons of cases in which female and male defendants were charged with identical crimes in the same states show that men were six times more likely to be sentenced to death than were female defendants. 

            The revealing fact is that violence against men exceeds violence against women.  Aside from sexual abuse and rape, most crimes are committed against men by both other men and women.  Because men physical dominate, there is considerable stigma against men who are the victims of violent crimes (including domestic ones) in which a woman was the perpetrator.

            While national statistics show that women are responsible for a full forty percent of all crime and the victims in less than thirty-five percent, there is very little attention paid to crimes against men.  A recent study found of all the criminal news stories run in three major daily newspapers in New York, Los Angeles and Chicago for the period 1990 to 1995, eighty-seven percent involved a crime in which the victim was either a woman or a child.  The same study found that in 97.8 percent of the articles considered the perpetrator was male.  This is a reflection and reinforcement of the skewed perception that women are harmless victims of the dangerous criminal impulses of men.  Only two percent of the articles in the study reported a crime against a woman by a woman.

            "We're fighting against a system that's stacked against us," Manchet argues.  "Of the over four hundred members of the House of Representatives, a scant fifteen percent are men.  Men who meet a diagnosis of a personality disorder are heavily represented in the prison population.  They get you for predatory behavior, then incarcerate you and diagnose with you an anti-social personality disorder, and convict you for a crime that shouldn't even be a crime.  You lose from the moment you interact with a strange woman.  And men receive harsher punishments and stiffer penalties when they are convicted of even non-sexual crimes."

            Manchet continues, "The laws are written by women.  The judges are women.  The prosecuting attorneys are women.  All of these women are raised with belief that all men are predatory.  You're fighting not only against the accusations slung at you, but also against the very social construction of masculinity.  Against that, you have no defense.  The very fact that you're male means you're guilty."

            For Vale, the ramifications are clear.  "I'm here for fifteen years because I invited a woman to coffee.  I never touched her.  I never made any moves on her.  I was looking for friendship, but you can't be friends with women because no matter what you do she can always cry to the police and judges that she was afraid of you."

            "On the one hand," Manchet explains, "men are encouraged to work out, to build their muscles, to be big so that they can protect the family.  On the other, we're punished for that very size because our physical power is threatening to women.  This difficult situation puts many men behind bars for nothing.  And it's just getting worse."

The Origins of the Matriarchy

Part II:  It Begins        

In prehistoric times when we were all grouped together in nomadic tribes, men hunted the woolly mammoth. Killing a woolly mammoth is a difficult job, especially when your only weapons are made from rocks and sticks tied together with vines. Yet, despite the difficulties, men were able to hunt and kill enough large game to account for a full forty percent of the tribe's food. The remaining sixty percent came from women, who hunted small game like rabbits and squirrels, fished in streams, ponds and rivers, and gathered nuts, seeds, and eggs.  Anthropological and archaeological evidence suggest because women and men almost equally provided for the tribe's food, they lived in an egalitarian society, equally dividing food and socializing in cooperative ways for the greater good of all.

How the next development happened no one is sure, but somewhere along the line, women realized if they kept the wild turkeys they caught, instead of eating them, they could breed them, and soon have enough captive turkeys that hunting them would no longer be required. Once this notion was well-set, women further discovered the idea of planting and growing crops. Gardens were born, and small though they were, they were enough to cast aside the need for gathering. Fed on the crops women grew and the meat they raised, men no longer had a need to hunt the woolly mammoth.

It is at this point that history changed. Assuming control of the sources of food gave women power over men. We soon gave up the nomadic life and settled into permanent living arrangements with women as the heads of households. 

Civilization was thus born.

Four thousand years ago, the leaders of society in Mesopotamia realized that for the human race to survive, we needed to bring more people into the world every year than we lost through disease, accident or murder.  The Goddess Code was written at roughly the beginning of civilization as a tool to encourage women to  focus the community effort on making and having babies.  The Goddess Code exalts the role of women, as mothers, aunts, grandmothers and nurturing care-givers.  It embraces female affection and warns against the sexual and aggressive appetites of men.  The Goddess Code enacts the word and the spirit of the One True Goddess, above all others before her and certainly above all previous beliefs in male gods.  In the Goddess Code, she is depicted as the loving mother, who nurtures her daughters and penalizes her sons for wayward actions.

Acceptable male behavior is outlined in the code as an express objection of aggression.  Men are to be women's helpers.  They are to guard the home and the family from other male aggressors.  Men fought to protect the home, fought for their families and waged war with other men.  But as historical evidence shows, as with most wars since, women only fought if they so desired.

The Code accepts female aggression, and indeed has led to the rise of many strong female generals in armies all over the world, but as far the Goddess is concerned, male aggression must be controlled and directed for positive benefits.  In story after story, The Goddess Code warns about the dangers of male lust and men's desire for power, wealth and blood.  It outlines the strategies and tactics women were to use to control men.  First, by their innate physical vulnerabilities; second, by their innate physical strength; and third, by their inferior emotional understanding.

In The Goddess Code, men are treated as mere children who are constantly in need of good mothering.  This is the basis of the matriarchy and though it is enacted differently in myriad parts of the world, the oppressions outlined above rarely vary. Men all over the world still wear the strap.  Men all over the world are seen as no more than sperm donors and bodyguards.  And men all over the world live in societies, however different they are from each other, where their ideas, intelligence, and innovations are wasted purely because they do not have a vagina.

By virtue of creating a female Goddess, the early leaders of civilization ensured that men would be held as inferior not only by the women with whom they lived and worked, but by the Divine Power herself.  This  message of oppression, ordained by the Goddess, has been indoctrinated in billions of men over the last four thousand years.  The belief that women and all things considered feminine are to be prized above all masculinity is the core of the matriarchy, which arose from the simple inequities of food procurement.

Snips and Snails and Puppy Dog Tails

The Social Construction of Masculinity and The Second Wave

Gender theorists argue the ideas and attitudes existing about women and men are the result of the how society socially constructs identity. The social construction of masculinity is composed of beliefs and attitudes about men that are taken as true about all men at all times. Much of the construction of masculinity is built on a foundation of male sexuality, and its connection to male aggression, and the need to prevent men from acting on either.

Men are understood to have a rabid sexual appetite, divorced from romance, care, tenderness and love that they are unable to control through their own will. Social restraints that limit a man’s ability to act on his sexual desires, including criminal punishments for even the slightest sexual transgressions, aim to help men behave in a socially appropriate manner. Despite the fact that children are commonly believed to be asexual until the onset of puberty, prepubescent boys are still held accountable for any expression of sexual curiosity.

Furthermore, it is widely believed that men have an innately propensity for aggressive, violent and dangerous behavior. Not only that, but they lack the emotional depth to fully appreciate the consequences of their actions. The are expected to be easily provoked to anger and to not possess the same high level of empathy and compassion a woman is able to attain.

Men are stronger and bigger, and most believe their physical prowess can be an asset, but only if it is used in socially acceptable ways to protect and safeguard women and children from the brutality of other men. Because of their defenseless, exposed external genitalia and their propensity towards aggression, men must be constrained and their aggressive energy expressed in positive ways. Boys in American society are encouraged to participate in positive activities that will alleviate the internal pressure caused by both their sex drive and their aggressive tendencies. They are introduced to individual sports – such as running and swimming – at a very young age and once they enter puberty, most are encouraged to lift weights and to strengthen their muscles in order to better enable them to act as protectors. Given that they possess greater physical abilities, men are socially pressured into using their strength and force only against other men. There are severe legal and social consequences for any man who uses his strength against a woman or a child, especially those to whom he is related.

This is believed necessary because men are held to be in a retarded state of permanent adolescence, unable to mature to the full emotional capacity of a women. For this reason, they are constrained, controlled and disciplined stringently not only during childhood but throughout their lives. The methods of this limitation and oppression change as a boy grows into a man from the external discipline of being punished for playing rough or acting out pretend scenes of violence to the internalized messages of doubt, insecurity and self-hatred most men spend their entire lives trying to manage and overcome. In the end, most are unsuccessful because even a non-masculinist man, who agrees with the construction of his masculinity and behaves in the socially prescribed manner, will spend a considerable amount of his time in a never-ending cycle of feeling sexual desire, shaming himself for this natural response, becoming frustrated and angry by the inability to act on it and berating himself when his level of frustration produces the urge to resort to violence. That even chemical castration cannot eliminate the biological need for sex means that most men spend their lives ashamed of their bodies and afraid of accidentally stepping out of line. For the man who dares to express his sexuality or aggression in non-acceptable ways, there are swift and unmerciful legal, economic and social reprisals.

More than being sexually repressed, men are physically limited. Most of the restrictions placed on men are based on the need to protect men’s reproductive abilities. Because their sexual organs are external and, therefore unprotected by bone, tendon or muscle, it is believed men are more vulnerable to injuries that would render them sterile. As fatherhood is prized, and a good father will earn social rewards in the form of praise and admiration, the fear of male sterility has forced nearly all men into complete compliance.

As soon as they are potty trained and the protection offered by a diaper is removed, boys are fitted with a genital guard (commonly referred to “the strap.”). This guard resembles female underwear save that it has a plastic-covered metal plate in the front to protect the penis and testicles.

In the late 1960s, youth culture as a whole abandoned the strict sexual mores of the larger conservative society. In 1969, a group of men at the University of Michigan held a protest rally to raise awareness about masculine oppression. Included in almost all of the speeches was a rejection of the notion of the innate male tendency toward violence, of the idea that men are unable to control their sexuality and of the of supposed vulnerability of men’s reproductive organs.

As the speakers vented their frustrations, and the rally grew increasingly more intense, worried University officials called in police to monitor the situation and ensure the men did not act on their anger. The critical moment came during an impassioned speech by one of the organizers of the event, Chris Leevy. Dramatically, in the middle of a rant arguing the strap is the symbol of male oppression, Leevy dropped his pants before the entire crowd and removed it. Several of the men on stage and a number of men in the crowd followed suit.

The police on the scene immediately arrested them for indecent public exposure. Later, Leevy and the other organizers of the rally were charged with a number of violations including disorderly conduct, reckless endangerment, disturbing the peace, unlawful assembly and, most incredibly for a rally that remained peaceful and at no time even threatened to become violent, inciting a riot because prosecutors argued the intent of organizing the rally was to incite a riot. Fourteen men in the audience were charged with indecent public exposure for removing their pants in public. All of them plead guilty, were sentenced to 30 days in jail and paid a fine of $150.

The seven organizers opted for a trial. The trial lasted the entire month of June 1971 and became a media circus. The men argued they were being unlawfully persecuted and that their arrest and subsequent detainment constituted a violation of human rights. During the testimony of several of the key witnesses, the men became unruly and intentionally disrupted the proceedings. At one point, Leevy carried on an open verbal argument with an expert in male pathology whom the prosecution had called to testify that individually the men’s behavior met the medical standard for a diagnosis of “anti-social disorder.”

From the beginning of the trial, Judge Mary Sammuels struggled to maintain order in the courtroom, at first issuing warnings and then proceeding to have two of the men physically restrained with handcuffs and gags. The men persisted and Sammuels ultimately removed from the courtroom.

Meanwhile, lawyers for the men presented evidence documenting the inequalities in the laws under which the men were charged and in the police and prosecutors application of them. They grilled prosecution witnesses on the lack of scientific evidence proving a causal relationship between biology and behavior. After the men were removed, their counsel held a press conference declaring the trial “a mockery” and insisting that because of the attitudes and prejudices against men that were prevalent in society and recreated in the courtroom their clients were unable to obtain a fair trial. They verbally attacked Judge Sammuels, holding her personally responsible for failing to remain and insist on the ideals of objectivity and “innocent until prove guilty” in the proceedings before her. Holding court before the press, they catalogued evidence of what they called the “obvious and undeniable sexism” of Judge Sammuels, the prosecuting attorney and several key witnesses.

Judge Sammuels responded by holding lead attorney Henry Glass in contempt and sentencing him to thirty days in jail. Immediately following the reading of the verdicts, Glass was arrested and lead out of the courtroom in handcuffs.

As the courtroom spectacle of the men’s behavior was given dramatic press coverage, the trial disseminated the arguments and ideals of positive masculinity and began what is now known as the second wave of the masculinist movement (the first wave having come in the late 1800s when men began to advocate for the right to vote. This wave saw its success in 1920 when Congress granted voting rights to men). Ultimately, all seven of the men were convicted for at least one of their offenses and served prison terms ranging from nine months to twelve years. Only Leevy was convicted on all charges and was sentenced to twenty years behind bars. In 1982, Leevy was murdered by another inmate in a prison yard fight.

In the years after the trial, Glass and his associates went after Judge Sammuels, the prosecutor and arresting officers, as well as the city of Ann Arbor and the State of Michigan by suing them in civil court for damages relating to the violation of their clients’ constitutional right to a fair trial. The case was thrown out of court and, though Glass, his associates and supporters and the American Civil Liberties Union lobbied to have it taken up by federal prosecutors, their efforts were unsuccessful.

Originally, the national debate sparked by these events focused on the question of the necessity of the strap, but soon spread to highlight all areas of male oppression. The second wave won many important social and legal victories for men, but ultimately did not meet Leevy’s prime objective. Despite the fact that there is virtually no scientific data proving that men’s genitals are vulnerable to damage or that the strap will protect them from it, most men today continue to voluntarily wear it on a daily basis.

The ripples of the second wave are still felt in a society struggling between forward progress and
traditional values. Due to the harsh economic realities we live with, most families need two incomes just to be able to provide for themselves. The days when it was expected that a man would stay home to provide protection and security both to the home and to the children have long since passed. However, men still face societal pressures to live up to the ideal of the strong man who anchors his family in a turbulent world. From the time they are very young, men are given two conflicting roles and expected to fill both of them: they must be the home-bound protectors while simultaneously enacting the spirit of the free, unencumbered and independent New Man.

The ideals of the New Man are founded in the belief of equality. The New Man is supposed to be able to do it all: work, care for his children, and participate in a society that both limits and persecutes him. Individually struggling to embrace both home and public life, men are caught at the vortex of family pressure and social and legal expectation. With the advent of blogs like Jeff's and the raising public debate about gender, some have called for an end of the War On Men. The third wave has begun.

Introduction

Jeff Raynard has wavy black hair, light blue eyes and a broad, masculine face.  He is six-foot-two, with a strong body and seemingly limitless physical power.  He can bench press two hundred pounds, run a mile in  five minutes, and is medically and socially in top physical form.  He is thirty-eight, married, and a father of two children, a 10-year-old boy and a seven-year-old girl, for whom he is the primary caretaker.  Jeff arranges doctor appointments, makes breakfast, plans snacks, organizes extra-curricular activities, and is responsible for almost all of his children's needs -- travel, caretaking, and socialization.  His wife is the president of a bank and for their children, though he has a master's degree in engineering, Jeff and his wife, Christy, decided he forgo work to be a stay-at-home dad..  For him, this was a simple decision.

            "My kids come first," he explains simply.  We meet in his comfortable living room, which his wife has decorated in a Southwestern theme.  The walls are sienna, the couch is multi-colored with triangles of deep green and purple and a rich, warm terra-cotta.  The art on the walls is of cacti and desert scenes.  The carpet is a muted coffee brown.  While we talk, Jeff tells me he decided none of this.

            "As a man, my responsibilities are clear -- to tend to our children.  My wife decides our social calendar, our decorations, how and where we live.  My job is follow through on her plans.  She makes the decisions and I follow them through.  It's that way for all men."

            For Jeff, the arrangement feels natural, but some years back, he began to question why that is.  "Do I really enjoy this way of living or do I think this is the way it should be because all marriages are like this?" 

            The answer came one morning shortly after his daughter was born.  "When Laura was born, I had responsibility for Drake, but as a nursing mother, Christy took total control over Laura.  I barely got to hold my newborn daughter.  Christy was frantic whenever I watched her, thinking I wouldn't know what to do if she cried or that I wouldn't understand how to nurture her if she fussed.  That morning, she was taking a break from the pressures of having a newborn and went to have brunch with some friends.  In three hours, she called me twenty-two times, supposedly to check on Laura, but really checking on me.  The level of trust she had in my ability to care for a female infant was nil."

            When Jeff and Christy talked about it, it became clear the problem was not that she didn't trust him, it was that she didn't believe a man could have a strong emotional connection with a baby, especially a girl-baby.

            "That was an eye-opener.  That's when I started questioning everything.  That's when I started talking to other men, other fathers," Jeff tells me, his voice soft, but laced with determination.  "I realized that at a basic level, women, even my wife with whom I have devoted myself and with whom I have made this life, believe all men -- all men -- incapable of deep emotional responses.  On a basic level, we're not as human as they are."

            Now, a leader in the fast-growing masculinist movement, Jeff says the realization came as a shock to both him and Christy.  "We felt driven to make sure our son would be viewed and accepted as a full human being, capable of the entire range of feeling, and able to communicate, to nurture and to love as deeply as any woman.  The more we got into it though, the more we realized how intrinsic the belief that men are incomplete human beings goes."

            For Jeff, the social ramifications of male oppression are ever-present, and the more he struggled with them, the more he realized how omnipotent these beliefs are in our institutions, in our systems, and in our daily lives.  "The fabric of life is based on this idea that men are less than," he tells me.  "We see it in our social lives very clearly, but it's also very easy to see in legal, health and educational systems.  It's easy to see in the differing ways we raise girls and boys.  It's everywhere.  It's in our advertisements and our TV shows.  It's in the plot of every movie.  It's in the choices we make individually and institutionally.  It's so pervasive that even now, until you point it out, most people -- men and women -- are unaware of it.  We have accepted it as a fundamental fact of life and we neither see it nor question it."

            Through his blog, which has thousands of hits everyday, Jeff has been "lifting the veil" and asking the questions, "that plague (me)."  He blogs about his son's participation in sports, in school, and in play.  He writes about our legal system, in which men are presumed guilty and have to be proven innocent.  He writes about our educational system, in which boys are shoved to the back, continually under-performing girls in every grade until college.  He writes about the work force in which he does not participate, but through which male oppression is fully woven.  He writes about the cost of oppression on men -- financially, medically and psychologically.

            "Why should my son accept less from life than my daughter?  Why should his choices and opportunities be limited?  Why should he be thought of as forever potentially dangerous because he has the misfortune of having a penis -- which society views as both a weapon and a toy.  Why should the fact that he's a man circumscribe his entire life?"

            It's a question that's being asked more and more.  On blogs, on Twitter, in books and in articles, men are challenging the notion that they are less than women, less able to achieve the emotional range of a woman, less able to communicate effectively, less able to participate fully in society.

            Jeff's questions raise important issues in American society and galvanize the public.  While he does have support, some readers of his blog accuse him of betraying traditional American values.  The notion that American society is upheld and functions through the act of depriving men of financial, social, legal, educational and sexual power is so basic to us that the mere questioning of it threatens the status quo and rocks the foundation of all we hold near and dear.

            "While some people hold me up as a leader, I am the recipient of a lot of anger, from women and men, who find my questions, who find my quest to ensure equality for my son, challenging at best, and downright unpatriotic at the extreme.  The only thing that protects me is the First Amendment, but even still there are those who try to silence me.  We've had death threats.  We've had to move four times in the last seven years.  We've come to accept the constant stream of hate mail, of harassment, of abuse from those who feel threatened by my demand for equality.  The level of rage I encounter, just for asking questions, just for writing a daily blog, for making people aware of the fundamental oppression they both live with and enact themselves, is dangerous.  But for our son and for our daughter, Christy and I are dedicated to this mission.  Nothing can sway us from it."

            Jeff's voice in the emerging masculinist movement is clear and, though he is among the first to openly challenge male oppression as it works in American society, he is far from alone.  Growing discontent with the status quo can be seen in the emerging national gender debate we hear from politicians, from judges, from doctors, from teachers and read on the editorial pages of our newspapers.  Gender equality is an rising issue, and one central to the fabric of our lives.

            For me, the question of gender equality is academic and, of course, personal.  As a journalist, I was shocked to discover that nearly every story I covered in my ten years on the metro desk at a major metropolitan newspaper had an element of gender oppression.  The realization that every story my paper printed could have been written with an eye toward male oppression prompted me to research and write this book.  My aim is not only to document the emerging masculinist movement, but to support the validity of Jeff's questions. 

            "Change is coming," Jeff says.  "Everyday, more and more people become involved in this discussion.  The lines of division were formed long ago.  Most surprising to me is that there are -- in my experience -- equal numbers of men and women on each side.  Though this is a gender issue, it is not divided down gender lines.  This is not men against women.  It's conservatives against liberals.  The political is personal."