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Private Men, Public Anger: The
Men's Rights Movement in Australia
Sarah Maddison
Department of Writing, Social and Cultural Studies, University of Technology, Sydney
The men's rights movement has an increasing presence in Australia's cultural and political
landscape. This paper provides a feminist analysis of the processes of men's rights
collective identity, focussing on constructions of masculinity and fatherhood, and the
ways in which these constructions circulate between the public and private spheres.
These processes also involve the re-figuring of discourses of power and equality and a
rejection of the notion of patriarchy, thus allowing men's rights men to identify as part of
a collectivity and, in some cases, become politically active.
INTRODUCTION
The men's rights movement was in the news again during 1999 following the trial and
sentencing of Robert Clive Parsons for the murder of his estranged wife, Angela, outside
the Dandenong Family Court. The murder occurred during a custodial and maintenance
hearing involving the couple's two children. During the attack, in which Angela Parsons
was stabbed repeatedly, Robert Parsons yelled "it's over bitch, it's over." Giving evidence
for Parsons a forensic psychologist said that Parsons had been "seduced" by the men's
rights group Parent Without Rights, and had "found solace" at their weekly meetings
(Towers 1999, 3).
This most recent case is one of several incidents over the past few years in which
men have murdered their wives, former wives or partners during Family Court hearings.
In general, these crimes have been defended in the media by spokesmen for men's rights
groups, such as the Men's Rights Agency and The Men's Confraternity, who argue that
such actions are provoked by what they term the "raw deal" that most men get before the
Family Court, primarily because this institution has been "taken over" by feminists. Put
in its crudest form, men within these organisations argue that the gender equity pendulum
has swung too far and, as a result, men are now disadvantaged and discriminated against.
Feminists find the arguments of the men's movement difficult to accept, and maintain
that their essentialist claims about male and female power demand the same level of
scrutiny that has been applied to those made by the women's movement in the same
contested arena. In particular, the claim that women have become the true power holders
in our society seems contestable since it seems clear that, at least in terms of institutional
power, men are still holding most of the cards. And yet what has been seen over the past
few years in Australia is that the discourses of men's rights are increasingly flowing into
the social and symbolic worlds, and finding voice in the media and amongst social
commentators as a part of the ongoing backlash against feminism.
Journal of Interdisciplinary Gender Studies 4.2 (December 1999)
39
40 Sarah Maddison
At this point there has been little or no work that directly explores the connections
between these cultural rumblings about men and masculinity and the formation of social
movements, and as a result there is an inadequate understanding of these processes.
There are certainly assumptions, and there is dismissal of men's activism as "backlash"
and misogyny and while there is no doubt that these elements are there, what is of greater
theoretical significance is how they came to be.
If an essentialist hatred of women is not being assumed, how is it that these men
have come to take up and inhabit a men's rights identity? Developing this knowledge
seems crucial if feminists, and others interested in gender equity, are to respond in ways
that are constructive, dialogical and allow for the possibility of greater understanding
between genders. If the processes of collective identity for social movement activists
are not understood then it remains difficult to respond to their rhetoric, their processes of
meaning making remain unknowable and take on a reified appearance as empirical object.
THE MEN'S MOVEMENT
Broadly speaking, the men's movement can be understood as being organised into four
strands: mythopoetry, men's liberation, pro-feminism and men's rights. When most people
speak of a "men's movement," it is the mythopoetic or spiritual strand that they are
thinking of: the popular image of "wildman weekends" at which men are encouraged to
get in touch with their "deep masculine".
Linked to mythopoetry is Men's Liberation; a broad movement based on support
groups in which men are helped to break out of the alienating "male sex role" by
getting in touch with their emotionality and recognising the possibilities for men beyond
traditional masculinity. Pro-feminism stands in opposition to these other strands and
pro-feminist men believe that they can work as allies with women in a struggle to
transform traditional masculinity and our patriarchal society (Flood 1996, 21 - 23,
Mudge 1997).
Men's rights is widely understood as being the "backlash" strand of the men's
movement. That is to say there is a widespread belief amongst men's rights activists that
the women's movement has "gone too far" and has harmed men in profound and
fundamental ways. Men's rights men "deny any idea of men's power and argue that men
are now the real victims" (Flood 1996, 22). Men's rights activists, whilst adopting the
self-help strategies common to other strands of the men's movement are also specifically
active around issues of men's health, the education of boys and men, and perceived
injustices and anti-male biases in family law.
My research focus has been on the arena of family law, in part because this has
been the most significant and heated site of activism and debate in recent years. More
importantly, however, and as will be argued below, it appears that the distress and
anger following marriage and relationship breakdowns, and the subsequent impact on
men's relationships with their children, is a primary motivation for many men involved
with men's rights organisations. In this sense then, men's rights and father's rights
become interchangeable terms, as almost all men's rights activism in the family law
area is centred on issues to do with children whether it be contact, child support or
other relationship issues.
Private Men, Public Anger 41
Other research has demonstrated that the men's movement is made up, almost
entirely, of white, heterosexual, middle-class men in their forties and fifties (Rood 1997),
and that much of the energy of the movement in fact comes from this identity. As a
whole (with the exception of pro-feminism) there is a failure within the men's movement
to adequately acknowledge the privilege that comes with this identity and, indeed, there
is a certain amount of refiguring involved that sees heterosexual, middle-class masculinity
reconstructed as culturally disadvantaged (Flood 1997, Connell 1995).
RESEARCHING MEN'S RIGHTS
In researching men's rights activism, my central research problem was the process of
mobilisation of personal angst into collective identity and political activism. For men's
rights men this process entails a set of sequential experiences and interactions, beginning
usually with a crisis in the personal life space of the man, which is then explored and
understood by them as an example of powerful external social forces impacting on
men and masculinities. The interaction with other men and the consumption of public,
cultural examinations of the "crisis of masculinity" provide an arena for the
transformation to develop. These processes form the basis for common action, which
emerges in small men's rights groups organising politically around specific dimensions
of the "masculinity crisis".
The theoretical framework in which these experiences are placed in this paper is a
small part of that developed by Alberto Melucci (1995; 1996), which seeks to explore
the processes of collective identity for social movement activists. This lens allows me to
step a little outside the usual bounds of gender studies in order to examine an aspect of
gender relations from a new and different standpoint.
Melucci's framework allows for a focus not only on the political agenda of the
movement but also on the cultural agenda of men's rights activism as well as the processes
by which collective identity is formed. There is an important distinction between old
and new social movements. Touraine (1985) points out that "[n]ew social movements
are less sociopolitical and more sociocultural" (1985, 780) than the older social
movements such as the trade union movement. Melucci argues that:
In the past twenty years emerging social conflicts in advanced societies have not expressed
themselves through political action, but rather have raised cultural challenges to the
dominant language, to the codes that organize information and shape social practices.
The crucial dimensions of daily life (time, space, inter-personal relations, individual and
group identity) have been involved in these conflicts, and new actors have laid claim to
their autonomy in making sense of their lives (Melucci 1995, 41).
Melucci further points out that the term "movement" has itself become inadequate
to describe the kind of "systems of action" and "collective phenomena" that are
contemporary social movements, taking the form of "solidarity networks with potent
cultural meanings" easily distinguishable from more formal and political
organisations (1995, 52-53).
The empirical research that provided the data for this analysis took the form of six
in-depth interviews with men in the men's movement. This small number is due to the
42 Sarah Maddison
fact that gaining access to my interview subjects was not always easy. My initial
approaches were met with a fairly high level of suspicion. This was, in part, due to the
recent publication of the Kaye and Tolmie (1998, further references in text) article, which
several organisations felt had betrayed the trust that they had placed in the researchers
for that article. All of the registered political patties (The Australian Men's Party and
The Abolish Child Support/ Family Court Party to name but two) refused to speak with
me at all. Other interstate organisations agreed to answer questions via the mail but
failed to return their responses. The men who did agree to participate were mostly middle-
class, highly literate and had been involved in the movement in some way for quite
some time. With the exception of the one subject who rejected the men's rights position,
all the men interviewed were divorced with children.
This is a feminist analysis of the processes of men's rights collective identity,
focussing on constructions of masculinity and fatherhood, and the ways in which these
constructions circulate between the public and private spheres. These processes also
involve the refiguring of discourses of power and equality and a rejection of the notion
of patriarchy, thus allowing men's rights men to identify as part of a collectivity and, in
some cases, become politically active.
THE "RIGHT" MASCULINITY?
Masculinity has become increasingly contested as a meaningful category, and in a very
real sense men's rights activism serves to expose what is at stake within dominant
discourses of gender and masculinity, in what Melucci (1985) describes as a social
movement's "prophetic function" (1985, 797). In other words, when the symbolic
meanings that men attach to discourses and practices of masculinity have been revealed
there is an initial insight into the processes of collective identity that are at work in the
men's rights movement.
There is a general agreement among the various strands of the men's movement in
Australia (and elsewhere) that traditional masculinity is restricting, damaging and limiting
to masculine identity and possibility (Flood 1996). Indeed, it has been argued that
dominant representations of masculinity are now more in line with notions of "Sensitive
New Age Guys" who are in touch with their own feelings as well as those of their
partners and children (Lupton and Barclay 1997). Much of the newer collection of men's
self-help books, for example, promote these representations and "interpellate men as
maimed or incomplete subjects" (Buchbinder 1998, 46).
Questions have certainly arisen from critics of these movements about whether the
representations they circulate are anything more than an expression of their desires to
return to an idealised and "authentic" masculinity (Messner 1995). Nevertheless, a new,
and increasingly, dominant masculinity has emerged and been taken up in the process of
collective identity formation for men in the men's rights movement: that is the man,
wounded by an aggressive feminism and the loss of his place in the world, yearning for
a "true" masculinity in which he is both in touch with his feelings and in control.
What is clear from my research is the depth of the conviction among many men in
the groups that my subjects represented that they (and all men) are being damaged by
Private Men, Public Anger 43
"the culture's" resistance to this "new masculinity." There is a high level of resentment
for what they perceive as a cultural, or social, desire to maintain traditional masculinity
through the expectations which are still held of men; that is that they be strong, that they
be stoic and that they continue in their roles as provider and defender of the intact nuclear
family unit. They see women as reaping many rewards from the incremental changes
wrought to society's structures and institutions, whereas men have not only remained
constrained by cultural expectations they have also been damaged and disadvantaged by
what they see as a cultural acceptance of criticising men or "male bashing." This
resentment is a key factor in their formulation of collective identity as men's rights
activists, as illustrated below:
[T]here's been this thing about valuing women, putting women into their role in history
and that sort of stuff as well. But at the same time there's been a denigration of men
going on. So it's been like, instead of just women gaining status, there's been a move to
sort of take that status, you know, as if there's only a certain pool of status and you have
to take it away from men more to have a bigger stock to build on. And so at the same
time that this is happening men are feeling put down, not just because women's status is
rising, but because there's been an active sort of campaign of gender vilification... If you
want to denigrate just about anything you call it male or masculine, and I think that's
what everything else comes down to. ("Neville")
Warren Farrell (1986, 1993) articulates the fundamentals of men's rights discourse,
particularly in his canonical text The Myth of Male Power, as do others such as Herb
Goldberg in The Hazards of Being Male: Surviving the Myth of Masculine Privile ge
(Goldberg 1976). This discourse relates directly to the processes by which men's rights
men come to form what they perceive as an oppressed collectivity. There is general
agreement that society and the state have been effectively "feminized," or at least captured,
by the women's movement. This belief is articulated as something of a misandrist
conspiracy theory that can be used to explain everything from men's shorter life
expectancy to low levels of father custody after divorce. These writers believe that men
(all men) are disadvantaged, discriminated against and oppressed by systems that ignore
this situation and therefore ensure its continuation. Again, what is missing in these texts
is an analysis of male power and privilege. Indeed they go so far as to argue that, for
most men, power is an illusion, and that women are the true power holders in society
through their roles as the primary carers and nurturers of children. For example:
[E] ven if you go back to, like, the Dick van Dyke show, sort of back then... women were
really the power brokers in that structure. I mean the man may have gone out to work or
whatever, but they had nothing to do with power making or decisions. It was, in particular
women, who formed the children and that really is a position of enormous power. ("Terry")
Men's rights men mobilize discourses of power as relating purely to individual
experience, with little conceptualization of social structures or spaces beyond those
involved in daily personal and family life (although even within the family gendered
power relationships are often invisible or denied (Smart 1989). Collier (1995) points out
that for many men there is a genuine "disjunction between the very real experience of
44 Sarah Maddison
personal dis-empowerment ...and the/acts of power" (1995,35). The importance of this
must be stressed, and as Brod (1995) makes clear:
We serve no one, we advance no just causes if the only message we bring is that these
men are simply wrong about their experience of power, or that they're not being honest,
or that they suffer false consciousness. (Brod 1995,92)
Williams (1998) drawing on Samuels, provides a clue about how, or why, these men
may be experiencing dis-empowerment at an individual level. Samuels has argued that
men's identities have indeed been undermined by social and economic changes, and it is
this experience which they encounter as a lack of power (in Williams 1998, 89). This
notion of powerlessness forms a part of the collective identity process that is decidedly
circular in nature, that is, as men experience feelings of powerlessness they seek out
other men to validate this experience and in this process reinforce an ideological standpoint
that interprets men as vulnerable and suffering, thereby authenticating their feelings of
powerlessness.
Contained in this discourse is an interesting theoretical shift in the ways in which
masculinity is understood and represented. Historically, masculinity has been conceived
as a "monolithic unproblematic entity" (Mac an Ghaill 1996, 1) sexually neutral and
universal, and in this way avoided "the need to define its own specificity" (Threadgold
and Cranny-Francis 1990, 20). Feminist scholarship has pointed to the ways in which
this has, in turn, led to the construction of the feminine in terms of, and as dependant
upon, the masculine universal, and has critiqued the claims of masculinity to represent
an idealised version of human existence (Poole 1990). Early gender relations studies did
little to disrupt the dominance of this discourse, and early feminist scholarship
concentrated primarily on naming and making visible the experience of women and
girls. The discursive shift at this moment is an echo of this feminist strategy. In the
process of constructing a collective identity as men's rights men there is a new concern
with the specificity of male experience and the significance of these experiences in the
construction of masculine discourse, representation and subjectivity.
A key (and highly contested) site in which this specificity is being dragged into the
light is around discourses and experiences of fatherhood. From my research it has become
clear that no other issue or concern carries as much weight in the process of collective
identity formation for these men than the ways in which they experience fatherhood,
and the ways in which they perceive fatherhood to be understood in the cultural and
social realm.
FATHERHOOD
Fatherhood is a site of primary significance both to discourses and practices of masculinity
and as a focal point for tensions in gender relations (Lupton and Barclay 1997, 3). This
significance has, however, been overlooked, or at least underestimated, in most academic
writing on masculinities in the past decade, which has chosen instead to focus on "bodily
power and action, physical strength and engagement in education and paid labour"
(Lupton and Barclay 1997, 4). As a consequence, the ways in which men constitute their
Private Men, Public Anger 45
identities as men (and in this context as members of a social movement) in relation to
their roles and identities as fathers has been largely ignored. Fatherhood needs to be
made central to further studies of masculinities as it is clearly at the heart of questions of
"new" masculinities, and is functioning interdiscursively to call into question notions of
power, rights and equality.
Williams (1998) points to the fact that there has been such a dramatic shift from
historical constructions of paternal masculinity to the current discourses of the "new
fatherhood" that fatherhood has, to some extent, "become a lens through which other
[male] roles [such as worker, citizen, husband/partner etc.] are now signified" (Williams
1998,63). Indeed, the extent to which masculine identities are constituted by (among
other things) this "activation of familial commitment" (Collier 1995, 25) is little
understood, a point further underscored by research from the Family Court which
highlights the fact that "the significance of the parent-child relationship for men has not
been clearly understood" (Bordow 1992, 75). The focus until very recently has been on
the public representations of masculinity at the expense of more private, but no less
important, familial relationships.
Smart (1989) points to the ways in which the three quite separate discourses of the
"new fatherhood," father's rights and the New Right have become entangled in this
debate over the meaning and significance of fatherhood as a cultural category. The "new
fatherhood" is closely related to the emerging "new masculine" as discussed above, and
can be seen in the many representations of fathering that currently abound in popular
culture: on television, in advertising, and so on. "New fathers" can be seen to be enjoying
close and loving relationships with their children and sharing their care in ways which
depart dramatically from the traditional and distant pater familias. However, as Smart
(1989) points out, it remains questionable whether these men represent any real change
in the ways fatherhood is understood and practised at a social and cultural level.
Nevertheless the discourses of father's rights and the New Right both rely to some extent
on the symbolic capital generated by images of the "new fatherhood," and while the
three discourses part company over issues of economic dependence, they can be seen to
be enjoying a symbiotic relationship with one another that is allowing fatherhood a new
discursive space based upon political and moral grounds (Smart 1989,10-18). In terms
of collective identity men's rights men clearly see themselves as "new fathers," or at
least believe that this is the type of paternal relationship they would enjoy were they not
denied access to their children.
It is inadequate to speak of fatherhood as if it were yet another unified entity. Clearly
men and women participate in the production and reproduction of discourses of parenting
and it is also clear that these discourses are taken up by men in multiple and varying
ways that express multiple and varying modes of masculinity (Lupton and Barclay 1997,
16). The most significant point to come out of my research is the particular ways in
which fatherhood becomes a focal point of men's lives at the time of a marriage or
relationship breakdown where there are children of the relationship. It is at this time that
the investment men have in their masculine identities as fathers becomes clear, and for
them becomes the focus of enormous pain and anger. For example:
46 Sarah Maddison
I vowed that I wouldn't be like my father, and I fortunately had the opportunity, being
young enough - a middle-aged dad retiring - financially secure, I was able as an older
dad to be financially secure and found that I wanted to have input into my children. I
think a lot of other fathers are wanting to do that more. Yet the system pushes them
away... I think this is an important point, fathers these days, they're more of the sensitive
new-age guy or whatever you want to call it, they are trying to get away from the macho
image, they want to be more involved yet the system pushes them away. "Once a fortnight
sir, that's your lot." And it's a very destructive, heart-breaking thing for a father. ("Wayne")
It is in quotes like this that the seeds of the men's rights discourse become evident. There
are elements in this quote both of traditional notions of paternal control, contemporary,
modernized "new" fatherhood, as well as anger and resentment at the ways in which
institutions have responded to their hurt. It is these factors, and how they relate to men's
understanding of themselves as men, that form the emotional base for their collective
identity as men's rights men.
There is a belief within the men's rights movement (that is shared by other strands
of the broader men's movement) that fatherhood is not valued in the same way
that motherhood is valued. This is seen as having two components, one being the idea
that men are simply not as competent when it come to parenting, and the other being
that fathering is not seen as being as significant as mothering to the welfare and wellbeing
of children:
I've heard a Magistrate say, "Well a kid doesn't really need a father to grow up and
survive and to be a good person, they don't need a father any more." That's a ridiculous
statement, because kids need both parents. And I'm a great fighter for this. ("Bill")
There is an argument here that is expressed in a discourse that relies heavily upon
the three discussed above, that is, the "children need fathers" argument. Within the
men's rights movement this is a discourse which "shall not be challenged," and is a
large part of the appeal behind the success of men's movement writers such as Steve
Biddulph (1994, 1997) who particularly stresses the importance of fathering, and
Robert Ely (1990) who also emphasises the damage done by "father hunger,"
particularly in the lives of male children. The men who participated in my research
have clearly taken up this belief:
Boys, when they are growing up for instance, desperately need a father. It makes no
sense to separate those boys from their father. And so there's a lot of pain that men feel
about that, and that is exacerbated by the assumption of the Family Court that, for the
most part, it's okay to sideline men from their children's lives. ("John")
This idea that fathers are essential to children's emotional development contains an
implicit and "normative, functional male gender role" (Collier 1995, 56-57) or the idea that
the primary function of a father is to model for their sons "the way men are." Collier (1995)
points out that this "abstraction and de-politicising of masculinity" (1995, 57) in terms of a
male sex role does not take account of the power relations in which masculinity is itself
constructed. Smart (1989) argues further that this claim dis-empowers mothers by "placing
father's rights closer to the interests of children than mothers' claims" (1989, 9-10).
Private Men, Public Anger 47
The new discourses and debates that are emerging around fatherhood serve to expose
what can be termed the "patrifocal" core within the processes of collective identity of
the men's rights movement. This emotional base of men's rights collective identity,
which is fuelled primarily by hurt, anger and a sense of injustice, is active in forming a
collective identity that incorporates ideas of a damaged masculinity and unappreciated
fatherhood and which serves to make fatherhood a public issue (Williams 1998, 92) as
the impetus and focus for political action. Yet what is missing is both an analysis of
paternal masculinity which has an understanding of power at its centre, and the theoretical
framework to make sense of the ways in which fatherhood circulates between the private
and the public spheres.
PUBLIC/ PRIVATE
There are two main points that need to be made about the public/private divide in
relation to men's rights. The first speaks directly to collective identity and was discussed
above in terms of fatherhood. The interviewed men all stressed the primary importance
of their family relationships, particularly with their wives/partners and children. At no
point did these men define themselves in terms of their occupation or public status. In
terms of their own identities and the collectivity they had formed with other men the
focus was entirely on their private lives: the breakdown of their relationships, their roles
as fathers and their hurt and sorrow at not having the full time relationships with their
children that they desired. In this sense their masculine and paternal identities were
almost wholly constituted in the private rather than the public sphere. Further, they
expressed resentment at the ways in which society still defined them by their public
roles and economic capacities.
Following from this is the second point. The boundaries between public and private
have become far more blurred, particularly in the past two decades. As a part of the
feminist project/s women have been "making the invisible visible, speaking of problems
that have no name, making voices, decentering the centre, recentering the other, making
the private public..." (Hearn 1992,17). Previously "private" concerns such as domestic
violence, incest, and even child custody and child support have become "public" issues
in which the state has a role as arbiter and watchdog. Lupton and Barclay (1997) argue
that the distinction between private and public in relation to parenthood is now "somewhat
arbitrary" (1997, 150) and for men's rights men this is perceived as having had a
destructive effect on their families and subsequently in the control they have over their
lives, particularly after a separation or divorce:
You've got to remember that in a lot of marriages there's constant conflict and children
are exposed to that all the time, and do we rush out and arbitrarily pull one of the parents
out of the family? There's all sorts of strange things that happen once families are separated
that you wouldn't dream of happening while the parents are still together, it just seems a
very arbitrary sort of thing. ("Neville")
It is here that men's rights men express much of their anti-feminist sentiment, as they
perceive that what has occurred historically through the women's movement's claims
48 Sarah Maddison
for citizenship, and the exposure of previously private concerns, is the feminization of
public institutions with the result that these institutions now discriminate against men.
Williams (1998) argues that within this discourse is the argument that "men's loss of
rights and privileges in the public sphere require compensation through enhanced rights
in the private sphere" (1998, 92) and that making fatherhood a public (and political)
issue "repositions mothers within a new form of relations of domination" (1998, 92)
based on the rights of fathers. This is the point at which men's rights discourse shifts
from concerns about the constitutive nature of the public / private divide in terms of
gendered identities to their concerns about the ways in which overlaps between public
and private serve to regulate and control men's lives. In other words, it is the discursive
space opened up by their patrifocal processes of collective identity that enable men's
rights men to locate their private experiences in the public world and thereby to construct
their political agenda.
CONCLUSION
In his "State of the Court" address at last year's National Family Court Conference the
Chief Justice of the Family Court, the Honourable Alastair Nicholson, aired his opinion
on the men's rights movement, which he described as a "sinister element" who "have an
agenda to change the law to the disadvantage of women" (Nicholson 1998, 8). His speech
marked a point of escalation in tensions between the Family Court and the men's rights
movement, who responded angrily in letters to the editor after an extract of Nicholson's
address was reprinted in the Sydney Morning Herald. The concluding section of the
reprinted text is, however, worthy of consideration:
These people [men's rights activists] do themselves and their children a great disservice.
There are issues relating to men and families that deserve to be aired. There are people
who could receive better and more caring results from the system. More could no doubt
be done but these people actually stand as an obstruction to change. Their own bitterness
and their inability to look beyond their own cases and the supposed injustices that they
have suffered stand in the way of any sensible dialogue (Nicholson 1998, 8).
In a sense Nicholson has identified the core of the problem with men's rights activism:
in coming from anger and bitterness men's rights men have misidentified the problem
and therefore seek change in the wrong direction. In continuing to blame women and
feminism, men's rights men fail to recognise the cultural and social factors that are
central to their own processes of collective identity, and towards which they may more
productively work for change.
As political actors men's rights men rely heavily on the discourse of equality, in the
tradition of liberalism and individual rights. In claiming their rights as fathers before the
Family Court the men's rights movement demands joint custody as the presumed starting
point for all custody decisions on the basis of fairness and equality to both parents, and
also calling on the argument that children need fathers. Men's rights men are highly
vocal in accusing the Family Court of a bias against men despite the fact that in the mere
ten per cent of custody cases that are actually contested, men are successful in 37 to 44
Private Men, Public Anger 49
per cent of cases (Kaye and Tolmie 1998, Alexander 1997). These percentages are
surprisingly high given that, before separation or divorce, it is women who remain the
primary carers of children in the vast majority of families. To accuse the Family Court of
a feminist inspired bias, however, seems to fundamentally miss the point. It is liberal
legal discourse, with its continued reliance on more traditional notions of masculinity
and femininity, and the role of mothers and fathers, that may be responsible for the
direction of custody decisions. It is here that there may be some genuine common ground
between feminist and masculinist movements, in terms of working toward a cultural
change in gendered attitudes to parenting.
In examining the discursive space created by the processes of collective identity I
have identified the key areas in which men's rights men construct their subjectivities - as
private men, as loving fathers and as angry activists. The risk now, however, is seeing
that space remain occupied, and become dominated by, "those who would seek to retain,
but constitute in new ways, a hierarchical, heterosexual gender order" (Williams 1998,
91). Men's rights discourse is not the only viewpoint on fatherhood, family relations and
family law (Kaye and Tolmie 1998), but there is a significant risk that unless those with
other viewpoints can find a way to engage with men's rights, the men's rights position
will become dominant, at considerable cost to women and children. The importance of
this research is that it serves to clarify the workings of collective identity formation for
men's rights men, revealing a core of emotional anguish that is not widely validated
outside the men's movement. There is enormous possibility that in validating men's
emotional experiences of paternal masculinity, particularly following separation and
divorce, some men may reject the subsequent processes of men's rights collective identity
that locate power only in the personal, and construct feminism as the enemy.
For those who are concerned with this issue understanding the processes of collective
identity is a critical step. It is in their collective identity that we can conceptualise men's
rights as something beyond anti-feminism and misogyny, and find other ways of
responding to the hurt and pain in men's lives that men's rights men articulate. As Flood
(1997), an active pro-feminist and former editor of xy magazine, argues:
We need to take up the issues about which men's rights men are vocal, offering an
alternative analysis of their character and causes. We have to try to reach the men who
otherwise might join men's rights organisations and in some cases who have their pain
turned into anti-woman backlash. Doing so will be challenging, and it may involve
questioning aspects of the feminist-informed analyses we have held so far. I believe
that recognition of areas of men's pain and even disadvantage is compatible with a
feminist understanding...but it may take some reworking for this compatibility to be
realised (Flood 1997, 38).
So far it has been argued that, for many men, the importance of their private family
lives in constituting their masculine and paternal subjectivities is underestimated. When
their private lives are altered through a marriage or relationship breakdown these men
must search for a language and a discourse that articulates and validates their distress. At
present the men's rights movement offers the most visible alternative identity, and thus
they have had measurable success in terms of claiming space in the symbolic and material
50 Sarah Maddison
worlds where collective identities are produced. The challenge for feminists, and for
pro-feminist men, is to offer an alternative that speaks just as effectively to the areas of
men's lives that may be damaged, whilst maintaining an analysis of power that recognises
many men's advantage. In this way the theoretical concern of this paper, that is
understanding the processes of collective identity for men's rights men, becomes a tool
for political effectiveness that can challenge and resist a backlash movement.
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