Feminist (wow!)men

Men should embrace these principles [feminism] too, not only for women's sake but also for their own. (...) Yet the state of maleness carries its own burden of expectations and constraints. Contemporary studies of boyhood shed light on what we've always known – what I still remember vividly from my own boyhood – about the disabling and limiting influence of male behaviour conventions, homophobia and general "gender policing" on men in the making and the huge anxieties that inform them.

This is the baggage men drag with them through their lives; the pressure imposed both from without and from within to appear hard and never soft, to make a performance of rejecting anything that smacks of domesticity or femininity, notwithstanding the metrosexual and "new man". Even men who seem to embody and thrive on this stereotype can feel like slaves to it, and are often undone by it. (...) This is not a matter of asking men to forgo[t] every traditional bond (...) but of inviting them to see that such distinctions are limiting and very largely artificial. It's not a matter either of unmanning the alleged essential male, but about men flourishing and developing in all areas of their lives, including as parents and in the home. It's about making modern, dual-earner, heterosexual [?!] relationships work better; more democratically. It's about a chap discovering that he too can be a nurse in the nursery, a cook in the kitchen and a lover in the bedroom and also, should he be so inclined, wrestle grizzly bears and grout the bathroom tiles as well – and be happy for women to enjoy such freedoms, too.

Dave Hill, no Guardian.co.uk
via feministing

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