Men's liberation movement  

From The Art and Popular Culture Encyclopedia

Jump to: navigation, search

Related e

Wikipedia
Wiktionary
Shop


Featured:

The men's liberation movement is a social movement critical of the restraints which society imposes on men. Men's liberation activists are generally sympathetic to feminist standpoints and have been greatly concerned with deconstructing negative aspects of male identity and portions of masculinity which do not serve to promote the stories and lives of all men.

The men's liberation movement is not to be confused with different movements such as the men's rights movement in which some argue that modern feminism has gone too far and additional attention should be placed on men's rights. The men's liberation movement stresses the costs of some negative portions of "traditional" masculinity, whereas the men's rights movement is largely about unequal or unfair treatment of men by modern institutions because of, or in spite of those traits ubiquitous to traditional masculinity.

History

Men in the early portions of the 20th century started to use the battle for worker's rights as a way of examining their own lives as men in a capitalist society. This can be observed as writers like Upton Sinclair exposed the horrendous conditions men worked under in meat packing plants. Unskilled immigrant men did the backbreaking and often dangerous work, laboring in dark and unventilated rooms, hot in summer and unheated in winter. Many stood all day on floors covered with blood, meat scraps, and foul water, wielding sledge-hammers and knives. The extent to which the growth of capital outpaces wages can and does force men to work in dangerous conditions and for others' betterment is often viewed through the lens of Marxism. Thus, it is somewhat difficult to differentiate between men's liberation, men's rights, and labor rights. The rights of labor are often synonymous with the rights of men.

This can also be examined politically in the 1791 treatise The Rights of Man by Thomas Paine. In this work, Paine suggests "The mutual dependence and reciprocal interest which man has upon man, and all the parts of civilised community upon each other, create that great chain of connection which holds it together. The landholder, the farmer, the manufacturer, the merchant, the tradesman, and every occupation, prospers by the aid which each receives from the other, and from the whole. Common interest regulates their concerns, and forms their law; and the laws which common usage ordains, have a greater influence than the laws of government. In fine society performs for itself almost everything which is ascribed to government." In as much as Sinclair and Marx were attempting to empower working men from their capital holding brethren — Paine is shown to be examining the rights of man to be a worker of his own sort, free from a government which does not exist to his betterment.Template:Citation needed

The men's liberation movement, as recognized by feminists and today's gender scholars who are often ignorant and even hostile towards Marxist critique, developed mostly among heterosexual, middle-class men in Britain and North America as a response to the cultural changes of the 1960s and 1970s, including the growth of the feminist movement, counterculture, women's and gay liberation movements, and the sexual revolution.

See also




Unless indicated otherwise, the text in this article is either based on Wikipedia article "Men's liberation movement" or another language Wikipedia page thereof used under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License; or on research by Jahsonic and friends. See Art and Popular Culture's copyright notice.

Personal tools