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."