Men and masculinities: A necessary but tricky topic for gender equality

When talking in policy debates on gender equality or gender equality+ or when engaging in more academic analyses of gender power relations, it is instructive to ask: what is (the elephant) in the room, but so often unspoken? One simple answer is: men and masculinities. Naming men as men, as an unmarked, often, if not always, privileged and yet gender-diverse social category, may seem odd, awkward, painful, uncomfortable, even self-indulgent. Indeed, gender inequalities, and equalities, clearly concern women and girls, but also men, boys and LGBT*IQA+ people.
You might imagine it might be difficult to talk about gender equality and gender power relations, without discussing men and masculinities, but that is not so. There are, for example, many excellent documents on gender equality, but that are silent or virtually so, on men and masculinities. This situation can be summed up as that of an ‘absent presence’ (Hearn, 1998) of men and masculinities or as the denial of concepts and perspectives that are hidden in plain sight (see, for example, Messerschmidt, 2019) from much gender equality work and much gender power analysis. Indeed, it is worth asking how can it be possible to gender inequalities or transform gender power relations without changing men and masculinities? Changing men is a major political priority, at all levels of societies and politics.
To put this another way, institutions, organisations, social movements and social structures are never gender-neutral phenomena to or onto which women, and girls, can then simply be added – and stirred. Accordingly, research, scholarship, and universities, as well as academic disciplines, cannot be understood, neither historically nor currently, as gender-neutral, that are then available for changing by the addition of more women, often young women, into the mix.
Thus, this short contribution aims to examine some complexities in the relations and involvement of men and masculinities in gender equality, with particular focus on gender power relations – what is in effect a distinctive tricky issue for gender equality. In the remainder of this text, I briefly review of some key themes that have been developed in Critical Studies on Men and Masculinities. The paper continues with more focused attention to some of the variety of motivations for men to become interested and involved in gender equality and related concerns, as well as some motivations to resist and oppose such investments. Some of the implications of these different positionings of men for academia are also spelt out, before outlining some key challenges now and in the future.