"Sich für Männer einzusetzen ist, als ob man den Ku-Klux-Klan unterstützen würde"

Viele finden das "Good Men Project" inzwischen zu stark feministisch beeinflusst (oder, wie es im Jargon heißt, "verpudelt"), aber man findet immer noch manchen interessanten Beitrag dort. Aktuell zum Beispiel setzt sich Glen Poole damit auseinander, mit welchen Schwierigkeiten es verbunden ist, wenn man sich ausgerechnet für Männer und Jungen einsetzt. Ein Auszug:

It is broadly acceptable, it seems, to be a champion for women, for the LGBT community, for different ethnic groups, for the disabled, for the poor and so on. These established advocacy groups evolved their identities in contrast to a dominant group and naturally excluded others by virtue of them being a man or straight or white or not poor or not disabled.

A key feature of these movements has been to challenge the oppression of the dominant group—such as men oppressing women, straight people oppressing gay people, and so on for each oppressed group.

In the process people develop narratives to help individuals to understand the problems they face as women, the problems they face as gay people and so on.

This evolving narrative has drawn people like me into the conversation and led us to ask the question where do men go to make sense of the problems we face as men—and more importantly, where is the overarching narrative that helps us make sense of those problems?

(...) Some of the opposition we face is startling: I have been told that running a support group for men is like having a support group for abusers, slave owners or the Ku Klux Klan. It can feel deeply personal to be labeled in this way, and yet when you understand the context within which other identity groups emerged, you can understand the narrative logic that leads to such offensive statements.

If you’re used to a narrative wherein men have been designated the roles of sexist, racist, homophobic oppressors, it is logical to compare a support group for men to a support group for the Ku Klux Klan.

Most of the opposition that men’s projects face is not voiced in such inflammatory terms and yet much of it seems to carry some level of undistinguished negativity towards men and boys. In recent weeks I have heard both men and women suggest that this could be our collective shadow at play, which is why I began to consider this possibility.

(...) In terms of our gender struggles, men are the ones who "have" and women are the ones who “have not”. This may seem like a childlike simplification but it’s how we define gender issues from the very, very top of our international hierarchy. As Kofi Annan said as Secretary-General of the United Nations in 2006: "It is impossible to realize our goals while discriminating against half the human race". The half of humanity he was talking about was women.

Faced with this widely-accepted narrative that all women are being discriminated against, we would have to be angelic not to cast the blame on somebody, and who do we blame when all women are discriminated against? Well, if we’re women, we’ll probably blame men and if we’re men, then we’ll probably blame other men. And therein lies a collective ability to unconsciously demonize men.

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