Unreasonable Men

Chapter 9

Feminism

MEN AND FEMINISM

I want to explore how men’s relationships to feminism over the last twenty years have helped shape some of men’s explorations into inherited forms of masculinity. They have also helped to shape a sense of the inadequacies of prevailing forms of social theory which in part have helped sustain some crucial frameworks of Enlightenment rationalism. It is not simply that women’s experience of powerlessness and subordination is rendered largely invisible within the traditions of positivism, Marxism and phenomenology, but they have allowed men to appropriate an impersonal and universal voice of reason.

The authority that men can assume in the larger society is reflected within the prevailing traditions of social ...