The men's movement: history, participation, and social dynamics

¶ … gender wars and the issue of men's movement that has been taking place for quite a long time now and is still prevalent in the times of today. It started to shape up in the 18th century.

GENDER WARS

Men's movement has been a burning topic for the last century or so whereby it has involved heated debates from not only the dominant gender of the society - the males but also the female population. It is a persistent war between the two of them. The men's movement, at the present moment, includes dozens of organizations be they large or small, is spread across hundreds of websites and online communities and is an engrossing topic amongst thousands of people worldwide. Women come to this movement issue because they started to realize that feminism has nothing in store for them. They do not seem to get into the groove of the narrow feminist understanding of what a woman should want for herself and what she should look like in the society, not to forget her standing in the clique as well. We will limit our conversation to the men's movement and thus stick to the male gender. This paper is all about the men movement, which has been taking, place ever since and even before the 18th century and has now become a bone of contention between the two sexes.

GENDER DEFINED

Gender is a word, which describes the characteristics, and attributes that are culturally accredited with women and men. It is pretty different and distinct from sex, which in its own entirety means the physical characteristics that make up one biologically either a male or a female. Structuralists have been in agreement with seeing the gender as a product of universal cultural laws and customs of the languages that shape up a cultural utterance and assertion. Consequently, structuralism accounts for the gender that focuses on the traditional contour of the male hero as somewhat of an "active subject" and the heroine (from the female sex) as rather "passive object" of narrative action. [URL]

MEN INVOLVED IN MEN'S MOVEMENT

The men involved in men movement are basically not all the divorced fathers or for that reason victims of their wives living with the feminist approach so very close to their hearts. Men, in the present era have started to become more and more active in understanding the rationales behind this kind of movement and they have started to see what is right and what is wrong. Nevertheless, efforts on their part have begun to turn the wrongs into rights.

ORGANIZATIONS INVOLVED IN MEN'S MOVEMENT

The organizations which are playing an active part in the men's movement usually consist of privately funded institutions which are basically run through private donations or membership dues as well as by some other ways. Some do work as non-profit organizations, which might work from grants from various sources, that could be undisclosed at times. [Schuett, 2002]

HISTORICAL SIGNIFICANCE OF MEN'S MOVEMENT

Very few people actually paid heed to what the word 'man' was all about, before the men's movement of the 1970s. These included the Americans and the British alike. Masculinity or maleness, as one might understand in the lighter sense, was termed as something solid, a part of the social construct of the person. Similarly, masculine norms were jagged by unrestrained configurations of attributes that were deeply fed in the Judeo-Christian customs and traditions and not to forget their scriptural stories.

CONCLUSION

Men's movement has been an issue, which has always been at odds with the societal norms and practices. This does not take into perspective whether a society is male-dominant or one that speaks out loud on topics like feminism or the chauvinistic approaches adopted by the women. It is here to stay, as the people do not feel inclined to change from their very set pattern and living in haste. Men's movement might not be in good taste in conservative societies but surely is a harsh reality which is there for everyone to witness, experience and adopt, though the latter one is on the choice of the person under movement, i.e., men movement.