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"Our findings suggest that [so-called] real men experience their gender as a tenuous
status that they may at any time lose and about which they readily experience anxiety and
threat." Earlier in the paper, they wrote that -- although "our focus on manhood does not
deny the importance of women's gender-related struggles" -- "Women who do not live up
to cultural standards of femininity may be punished, rejected, or viewed as 'unladylike,'
but rarely will their very status as women be questioned in the same way as men's status
often is."

When is it to a man's disadvantage to publicly examine and question masculinity? Surely
the mere act of questioning and examining gender does not make a man less masculine;
how can we work against the perception that it does?

At the same time, though, this isn't a "with us or against us" situation: men who don't
choose to identify as non-normative also don't tend to join the "opposition." By
"opposition" I mean folks like "Men's Rights Activists" (on the Internet we call them
MRAs). MRAs -- at least according to my stereotype of them -- are conscious of social
and legal disadvantages suffered by men, such as the fact that men are at a severe
disadvantage in child custody cases; at the same time, they're blind to male privilege. It's
a deadly combination. My personal favorite MRA quotation ever is, "White men are the
most discriminated-against group in the country." Mercifully, MRAs are a fringe group,
but they make a big impression.

My "not into gender studies" friend once told me that although he frequently deconstructs
problems of masculinity in the privacy of his own mind, he doesn't like to publicly have
those conversations because he doesn't want to sound like an MRA. He said, "A lot of the
time, men who want to think seriously about masculinity won't talk about it aloud
because we really don't want to be that." He later added, "It's very tricky to discuss
masculinity yet avoid simply devolving into male entitlement. That's the crux of the
problem with the 'Men's Movement' assholes -- none of them are addressing the
underlying problems of masculinity. They're just whining about not receiving the
privileges their cultural conditioning tells them to expect."

How do the current "men's rights movements" discourage men who might, in a different
climate, be very interested in discussing masculinity? Assuming men can reclaim the
"pro-masculinity movement" from MRAs, do any men feel motivated to do so? Can men
occupy the middle ground between MRAs and LGBTQ, feminist, or other leftist
discussions of gender -- that is, can men find space to discuss masculinity without being
aligned with "one side or the other"?

All too frequently in radical sex/gender circles, the theme has been blame. Men in
particular are excoriated for failing to adequately support feminism -- or criticized for
failing to join the fight against oppressive sex and gender norms -- but few ideas are
offered for how men can be supportive and non-oppressive while remaining overtly
masculine, especially if their sexuality is normative (e.g., straight/dominant/big-dicked).

There are fragments: some insight might be drawn from the ways in which many BDSM
communities create non-oppressive frameworks within which we have our deliciously
oppressive sex. With practice, one can get shockingly good at preserving a heavy
dominant/submissive dynamic that still allows both partners to talk about their other

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