To understand healthy masculinity, look to Africa | View

#MeToo has been a much-needed wake-up call about male violence against women, building on the work of thousands of women’s rights activists and NGOs around the world who, for decades, have been demanding full equality for women.

But we need to talk about the men.

The equality that women seek is equality vis a vis men. It is men in positions of greater power compared to women, men earning higher wages, men’s violence against women and men’s indifference towards (or support for) equality for women. This must also be part of the conversation about global gender equality.

Recent surveys from the UK, Denmark and elsewhere have found that many men, in fact, think feminism has gone too far or that gender equality has already been achieved. Some men get upset about this conversation, and often end up moving towards organized anti-feminist groups such as Men Going Their Own Way.

For decades, perhaps centuries, men’s power over women, men’s higher wages, and men’s higher numbers in parliaments and C-suites, have mostly gone unquestioned by men. That’s what power does; it makes itself invisible and unquestionable. When we bring up the fact that women earn, on average, 17% less than men in the same professions, many men turn to the argument that they have worked for those higher wages, and that they deserve them more. Fish don’t see the water they swim in, and so many men tend to not see this thing we call patriarchy. When it’s pointed out, they don’t want to talk about it.

How, then, can we involve men in these conversations and speed up progress toward equality? One strategy is to help men see how harmful ideas of manhood affect men themselves in terms of poor health, mental health issues, and the impact of violence on men’s own lives.

But conversation is not enough. We need men to call out other men who use violence or abuse power. We need men to do their share of care work, to stand shoulder to shoulder with women in the workplace, to call for equal wages and equal leadership opportunities for women.

Often, we look to Scandinavia or Canada as examples of what it looks like for men to be allies when it comes to gender equality. But some of the most creative and impactful examples of men engaging as allies for womens’ and girls’ equality come from somewhere else: sub-Saharan Africa. Across the continent, in the last 20 years, there has been an exciting expansion of creative, evidence-based approaches that engage men as part of the solution.

Source: https://www.euronews.com/2020/10/30/to-understand-healthy-masculinity-look-to-africa-view