Abstract
Reviewed by: Tal Davidson, York University, Toronto, ON, Canada
Is the patriarchy still alive? Or does manhood now occupy the social status of a doorstop? On 15 November 2013, four feminists set out to resolve these questions in a public debate, the transcript of which was published as Are Men Obsolete? The Munk Debate on Gender. The debaters cover a range of thoughts on the changing role of manhood in contemporary Western society. The debate portion of the book is followed by interviews with its four participants, and finally, in commentary by two additional feminist public figures. If the debate format proves too niche for a popular readership or lacks the rigor expected of scholarly writing, it is at the very least a delightful record of a currently important debate and I am pleased to have the opportunity to bring it to wider attention.
The event was held at the Roy Thompson Hall in Toronto, Canada. The Munk Debates organizer and moderator Rudyard Griffiths kept discussions geared to answering the title question. Hanna Rosin, author of the best-seller The End of Men, sided with Pulitzer Prize-winning New York Times journalist Maureen Dowd to represent the affirmative. Against them were Caitlin Moran, BBC broadcaster and author of How to Be a Woman, and Camille Paglia, the literary critic of gender and culture who has become a go-to scholar in public discourses on feminism. The initial poll was in Moran and Paglia’s favour: 82% of the 3000 attendees voted against the motion that men were obsolete. Although they approached the discussions from different perspectives on the function of manhood as a life-organizing schema, the group engaged in a fluid conversation about changing gender dynamics in the wake of new economic, social and geopolitical realities. They focused on several problems that cornered post-industrial men into broadening their behavioural palettes lest they suffer the consequences of dysfunctional masculine narratives. The problems included male youths’ disproportionate educational and disciplinary difficulties, working class males’ slipping identities as labourers and providers, and male leaders’ failure to use their power in congruence with the masculine stereotypes of rationality and impartialness that self-select males to leadership positions in the first place. By the end of the debate, the motion was overturned, as Rosin and Dowd convinced 44% of the audience that men are, in fact, obsolete.
There is no explicit theoretical content in this text. It is instead the product of each debater’s implicit practice of her own orientation to feminism. Rosin explores men’s waning social thrust in relation to women’s rise as an economic force. She contends that masculine signifiers such as flannel shirts originated in divisions of labour that disadvantaged women, and that the growing dissociation between occupation and masculinity is rendering these signifiers more ornamental than powerful. To Rosin, men are obsolete because they can cultivate aesthetic impressions of masculinity, but will inevitably become distressed if they expect these impressions to confer any degree of social influence. Dowd destabilizes the notion that nature has placed power in the hands of men by citing examples of non-human species that display opposite patterns of gender dominance. She implies that the innate male claim on leadership traits such as equanimity and reason is illusory, and that men are now on probation for their exposed corruption, vindictive motives and irreconcilability in positions of power. Dowd and Rosin suggest that manhood grows obsolete as we recognize and rectify the ways in which men enjoy unearned, privileged access to economic and political power. As the semiotics of power transition into the domain of womanhood, men are left mired in an involuntary search for the new boundaries of masculinity, and these boundaries will necessarily be more humble.
Conversely, Paglia argues that men’s power endures on the basis of existential conditions that she judges to be inherent results of biological sex differences: Women, able to conceive a child, are gifted with at least one preordained purpose in life; men, with a looser biological tether to their offspring, find footing in their existential freefall by creating the stuff of civilization. I would argue that this account is founded on a reductionistic misapplication of biology to the complexities of desire and consciousness. However, though her reasoning is specious, Paglia raises important concerns regarding the taboo of domesticity in feminist discourse. Feminists have spent decades fighting for gender equality in the workplace. To Paglia, their work has become a spectre that haunts women who prefer to fulfil family-oriented desires, but feel compelled to conform to a new careerist model of womanhood. Whether women who choose a domestic lifestyle are currently more oppressed than women who prefer to develop their careers is debatable and is very likely a factor of culture and economic class. Nevertheless, a prominent project in contemporary feminism involves unmasking the oppressive function of the career–family dichotomy itself and adjusting career cultures so that balancing career and family becomes independent of gender.
Whereas Paglia argues that men are not obsolete because their masculinity emerges from its own set of biological drives, Moran seems to be on Paglia’s side only by default. Moran does not propose ontologically distinct domains of manhood and womanhood but instead calls for a collaborative effort to redraw gender boundaries in a way that makes access to power non-dual. Women’s collective effort to empower themselves, Moran contends, is to men’s benefit and is in fact just as close a pursuit of the obsolescence of womanhood. In this way, men are not obsolete because women subsume their power; gender itself becomes an obsolete metric of power distribution. I find that her position best expresses the end game of feminism. The debate format sets up the discussion topic as inherently dialectical and examining the gendering of power dynamics serves to address many real sources of oppression. However, Moran importantly reminds that such debates can tend to presuppose essentialized notions of gender. I am most persuaded by feminist theories that examine how essentialized discourses preserve oppressive power dynamics, and how deconstructing these discourses allows us to resist them with more pragmatic, conscientious and compassionate ones.
The debate portion of the text is followed by Griffiths’ interviews with each of the four participants. Although the interviews were too brief to expand on the debaters’ theses with any more insight than they already offered in the main debate, they nevertheless provided good opportunities to continue indulging in the personalities I felt bonded to over the course of the book. The post-debate guest commentary varied in insight as well: Christina Hoff Sommers, a popular critic of contemporary feminism, provided more summary than evaluation. The historian Stephanie Coontz, however, dug into the material purposefully. In roughly three pages, she identified specific areas of misleading rhetoric, corrected disingenuous facts and contributed another dimension to the multiple voices represented in this book. For this, I considered her chapter in the book just as critical as the debate itself.
Overall, I found the short book enjoyable and informative largely in its entirety. Unfortunately, I think its audience might be limited to enthusiastic followers of the debate participants or to academic courses that teach perspectives on gender contemporaneous to the book’s publication (for disclosure, I fall in the former camp, harbouring a deeply ambivalent fascination with Camille Paglia). Its facts are not supported strongly enough to qualify for citation, geographic and cultural boundaries of relevance are ill defined to a fault, and no debater has the platform to express her own stance on the status of manhood in full. To be fair, these criticisms are largely conditions of the book’s parent medium, the oral debate. But even though this medium is limited in breadth of coverage or scholarliness of content, it does have a unique educational edge that is also inherent to it. The inclusion of four contrasting voices (five, if you count Coontz’s short contribution) creates a dialogic fabric that is decidedly not an echo chamber. All four women share a feminist stance but diverge in their styles of argumentation, and the result is better than a debate between pure opposites: It is an index of the recent perspectives that have been taken on contemporary issues of masculinity where each new interjection is made not for winning an argument, but for widening the view of the whole. If the book does not receive wider academic or popular appreciation, then maybe it is enough for it to exist as an archival souvenir of an interesting conversation that once engaged the wit of four clever minds.