The Men’s Movement: I Get It, Actually

We ignore legitimate men’s issues at democracy’s peril

Image courtesy of The Noun Project

There’s a scene from the 1979 documentary Town Bloody Hall that I think calls the results of the 2024 elections 45 years before its time.

But before I lay it out for you, I want to explain that almost everything about me has been carved into shape by the thrills, chills, and mortifications of becoming a woman in a house full of men and their tavern’s worth of male friends.

In many ways I’m still recovering from a girlhood that took place in a boys’ club, a smoke-filled room. I was routinely written out of the script, and learned to keep my dreams and opinions to myself. If I found my voice it’s because I very much took that project into my own hands.

But I loved those guys. I still do. From them I learned, among other things, to apprehend darkness and engage bombastically with life.

Photo by Stephen Arnold on Unsplash

I’ve also been shaped by losing men in my life to so-called deaths of despair. Maybe that’s why I’m more attuned to the unique struggles of men, to understanding that their quest for dignity and personhood is nothing less than mine just because I don’t understand everything about it. Fighting for things like stronger vocational training in the schools doesn’t in any way mug me personally or politically. But strangely, many on the left seem to think it does.

Back to Town Bloody Hall. The film’s producers, Chris Hegedus and D. A. Pennebaker (a married couple; Pennebaker had shot to fame with the Dylan doc Don’t Look Back), were chronicling a soon-to-be-notorious 1971 public forum called by literary demigod Norman Mailer. His book The Prisoner of Sex, responding to the ascendent women’s liberation movement by declaring that women couldn’t be the equal of men, had triggered such a furore among feminists that the author dared critics and leaders such as Jacqueline Ceballos, Diana Trilling, and Germaine Greer—then 32 years old with a sexily disheveled rock n’ roll look—to take him on in New York’s Town Hall.

After an hour of ruthless, escalating repartee among panel members, they began taking questions from the audience.

MALE AUDIENCE MEMBER: What would it be like to be a woman and to have the initiation and the consummation of a sexual contact … what would it be like after liberation, ideally?

GREER: Why do you ask this question?

[Audience begins laughing.]

MALE AUDIENCE MEMBER: Because I don’t find it anywhere in the literature, I don’t—

GREER: Why do you expect to find it anywhere in the literature? Norman [Mailer] described the state of affairs that exists, namely, where he is at. [exploding] You ask me to describe a state of affairs that doesn’t exist. It’s a perfectly unreasonable demand! What makes you suppose that liberation has happened?

(I should explain that the audience laughter here is not necessarily mocking. It’s the raucous laughter of a collective thrill ride, of people who know they’re witnessing history. This is the first time such intimate matters have had such an open airing in an above-ground agora. The panelists are forging a new language on the fly. Revolution is in the air. Anything can happen, and the filmmakers are there to mint it for posterity. The male audience member himself is kind of laughing, fully expecting to get roasted by Greer. Back to the action.)

MALE AUDIENCE MEMBER: Well, uh, I tried to make my question non-polemical, I’d like to say that I’m—

GREER: Oh, you did?

MALE AUDIENCE MEMBER: All right, perhaps I didn’t succeed. I really don’t know what women are asking for. Now, supposing I wanted to give it to them?

[Audience continues laughing.]

GREER: Listen, you may as well relax, because whatever it is they’re asking for, honey, it is not for you!

[Uproarious, continuing laughter from audience and panel members alike.]

Greer has read the room exquisitely and put her brand on history. Taken as pure sexual innuendo, her response perfectly embodies the raucous theatre of the moment.

She’s also fired a cheap shot and missed a crucial opportunity that will never come again. This man’s question is not in the least unreasonable. There was plenty for men not to understand about all the changes in the air, and what this audience member is really testing (whether he knows it or not) is the imagination of women’s lib. Can it build excitement and speculation about its own vision, or is it just there to complain? Does it have an intellectual core, social courage, and staying power or is it just one more float in the Purple Decades pageant?

Photo by Bob Coyne on Unsplash

I wince every time I watch this scene (which you can do repeatedly on Criterion Channel). I want so badly for Greer to take a moment and respond to this man with some educational brio. They are both amidst hundreds of influencers of the day, plus the documentarians. Imagine the difference it could have made if Greer had said something like: Sex after women’s liberation will be unlike anything humanity has ever experienced. Letting a woman initiate sex with you will make LSD look like TicTacs. We are sexual astronauts on the edge of time. Let all the children boogie!

But no, it’s how-dare-you-even-ask, in the worst tradition of opposition radicalism. I wonder if that same man was laughing five years down the road. I wonder, if he’s still alive, how he voted in this election.

It’s a whole other wince watching the “Kenough” scene in 2023’s Barbie. After hours of (admittedly enjoyable) song and dance, the lost and disillusioned Ken is told that after the feminist revolution he will … get to be who he really is.

Photo by Sandra Gabriel on Unsplash

Well, golly. Where Greer comically silences any inquiry into what the future holds for men after a feminist leveling-up, Barbie presumes to know men better than they know themselves. Anything about them that women find distasteful is reconstructed as a mere mask that will shatter the minute we get President Barbie.

I don’t buy it. It’s not just condescending and naïve; it’s the kind of therapeutic, risk-averse candy-activism that makes me want to scream.

Has feminism ever grasped what men need? (Maybe sometimes; see Susan Faludi’s Stiffed: The Betrayal of the American Man, 1999.) After a stunning Election Day, people in my world are finally waking up to the fact that social media has given nonsense the nuclear codes. With more job insecurity and social disintegration knocking about than ever before, it’s no mystery to me why a men’s movement has been gathering momentum for the last ten-odd years.

Most of it, especially its YouTube dungeons, gives me a profound case of the willies. The haggard, humorless secular priests drawing millions of views from men and boys adrift in a sea of online porn and unemployability make me actually thank God I’m a woman.

And yet this massive heave-up of grievance has uncovered some good eggs. Richard Reeves (author, Of Boys and Men, 2022) is my favorite men’s-issues pundit. He strikes that perfect pitch between personally serene and morally alarmed.

By his lights, the Dems lost the male vote not because of male-voter sexism but the Dems’ neglect of issues crucial to men: domestic manufacturing jobs, more male teachers in the schools, and more male involvement in higher education, the workforce, and arenas such as counseling and therapy, all of which are now dominated in numbers by women.

We ignore common-sense centrists like Reeves at democracy’s peril. Whatever shape the political table takes in the next four years, there had better be a place at it for the men in our lives.

**Thank you, readers, for your patience! I’m four weeks behind my regular publishing schedule due to an uptick in freelance client work. Once I’ve adjusted I’ll be back on my game. In the meantime, why not tell a friend about Spiritual/Skeptical/Classical? Or leave a comment. I love to hear from you!