An honourable MENtion to being a man about International Women’s Day

On 8 March, we celebrated International Women’s Day. To misquote from an often cited statistic, 95% of men immediately think “What about International MEN’s Day?!” when International Women’s Day is mentioned. The other 5% are liars.[2] Many will not have voiced this openly. Those of us working in gender-related fields may have felt guilty about it afterwards. But we have all thought it. Perhaps we could go as far as to define a man as being a male human being who has been subject to the constant stream of sociocultural messages telling him explicitly and implicitly that he is superior to women. Moreover, when we accept and embrace the fact that we are “men”, this necessarily involves some degree of conformity with the social expectations of our gender and thus, it almost inevitably means accepting a privileged position that gives us a degree of power, and notably power over women (at least in the same demographic group). That is not to say that our acceptance of the male gender label is a free choice by any stretch of the imagination – conformity to masculine social norms is enforced through some pretty hefty sticks alongside the carrots of privilege (see for instance Kilmartin & Smiler, 2015).