Without an Agenda, With a Clue: The New “Male Feminist Network” Contributes to Gender Discourse on Campus

by ERIC WARD

Decem­ber 2009

This fall, Gideon Maus­ner ’11 founded the Male Fem­i­nist Net­work. Unlike the other fem­i­nist orga­ni­za­tions on cam­pus, the group iden­ti­fies with no wave, and has no polit­i­cal, eco­nomic, or activist agenda. Its mis­sion is to cre­ate a safe space on cam­pus where men in the Yale com­mu­nity can meet and dis­cuss their rela­tion­ship to mas­culin­ity, women, and each other.

Maus­ner took inspi­ra­tion from Michael Kauf­man, author of Crack­ing the Armor: Power, Pain, and the Lives of Men. Orig­i­nally pub­lished by Viking in 1993, and re-released as a Pen­guin paper­back in 1994, the book in now freely avail­able for down­load from Kaufman’s per­sonal web­site. The book’s mis­sion as set out in its intro­duc­tion, is as follows:

“The real prob­lem is that the ways we have defined male power over sev­eral thou­sand years has brought not only power and priv­i­lege to the lives of men, but tremen­dous pain and inse­cu­rity as well.  That pain remained largely buried until the rise of fem­i­nism. As women have chal­lenged men’s power, we’ve been left feel­ing increas­ingly vul­ner­a­ble and empty, and full of ques­tions.  Bereft of the socially cre­ated power on which we had come to depend, we have lost sight of our innate human capac­i­ties and poten­tial. […] We have to rede­fine what it means to be men, but to do so we need to reshape our world in a design of equal­ity, diver­sity and shared strength between women and men.”

Like Kaufman—who moves flu­idly between pornog­ra­phy, vio­lence, and bro­mance— the Male Fem­i­nist Net­work enter­tains a wide vari­ety of top­ics. By design, the meet­ings have no set itin­er­ary; usu­ally, mem­bers share chal­leng­ing expe­ri­ences from the pre­vi­ous week, one of which is taken up for dis­cus­sion. Men’s rela­tion­ships to women—as friends or as lovers—are a com­mon topic.

Accord­ing to Maus­ner, men who iden­tify as fem­i­nists often strug­gle to fit into all-male groups. He was not refer­ring to fra­ter­ni­ties or ath­letic teams; the major­ity of the groups men­tioned were “ad-hoc.” Even in the absence of any orga­niz­ing prin­ci­ple, these groups tend to give rise to gen­dered pat­terns of behav­ior: sex­ist jokes, dis­cus­sions about par­tic­u­lar women, or mas­cu­line com­pet­i­tive­ness. Many men feel tempted to speak up, Maus­ner said, but social pres­sures often sup­press that impulse. In these sit­u­a­tions, the men feel torn between their rela­tion­ship to their beliefs and the integrity of the imme­di­ate social group.

The Male Fem­i­nist Net­work works under the aegis of the Yale Women’s Cen­ter, which pro­vides resources and space to over a dozen other under­grad­u­ate orga­ni­za­tions. The Women’s Cen­ter also hosts another all-male fem­i­nist orga­ni­za­tion. Orig­i­nally called “Yale Men Against Rape,” this group briefly became “1 in 4” before set­tling on its cur­rent name, “Pro-Feminist.” Maus­ner defines the aims of Pro-Feminist as one of “edu­cat­ing men about sex­ual vio­lence in the form of men against women.” To date, there is no mem­ber­ship over­lap between these two male fem­i­nist orga­ni­za­tions. “Ours is an inter­per­sonal sup­port group, theirs is an activist orga­ni­za­tion,” he says. “They have entirely dif­fer­ent tra­jec­to­ries. A per­son could be a mem­ber of both, but right now, that’s not the case.”

With a small but devoted mem­ber­ship, the Male Fem­i­nist Net­work has recently decided to move its meet­ings to pri­vate res­i­dences. “The open struc­ture of the group led for it to be excit­ing, but not super-constructive,” Maus­ner said of its tenure at the Women’s Cen­ter. At the time of the inter­view, he said that the group intends to start meet­ing at a flex­i­ble time and place, to bet­ter accom­mo­date the sched­ules of its mem­bers. As before, the meet­ings will con­tinue to appear in the Women’s Cen­ter weekly email newslet­ter, and Maus­ner urges the seri­ously inter­ested to con­tact him directly. “First and fore­most,” he said of the group’s future, “we want to be there for each other.”

Eric Ward is a senior in Yale College.