I wanted to give a shout out to my brother who got an A+ in his Women's Health class last semester at the University of Michigan. While I'm always proud of my brother, I'm especially proud because he was willing to take a class that isn't always popular among guys.
Throughout my college career, I encouraged my guy friends to take a Women's Studies class. I told them not only will it help them to think critically, but it fulfills a race and ethnicity course requirement (at least at the University of Michigan).
However, I was always met with a wall of skepticism.
In this case, perhaps, the stars were aligned. My brother wants to become a pharmacist so I mentioned that he would benefit from a Women's Health class. In my college days, I had taken the general Women's Studies class. The Women's Health professor came to speak one day during class and I was just blown away--she made me want to start a career in health! I heard her class was so popular that there was always a waiting list so I told my brother to register early. A few weeks later he called me to tell me that he got into the class---my brother was still surprised to discover that the current waiting was in fact a mile long!
I asked my brother what he learned from the class and he said that it was helpful to learn about a variety of viewpoints and issues that are different than his own. I also asked him if he would recommend the class to other guys--he said yes, especially for people who are interested in health.
So here's my question for the feministing community, how do you encourage guys to learn about feminism? Has anything worked particularly well?
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Congrats to your brother! After helping my fiancee find his own path to feminism... he takes women & gender classes all on his own! He is taking them for his soc minor, which I'm really scared for him to drop (He's a math major and physics minor first and foremost.) So I nudge him to keep the soc minor no matter what because of the academic AND social help it will give him.
He goes to University of Illinois... I hear there is a rivalry between them and the University of Michigan. Something about Ann Arbor being a whore. Yuck. Hard to get people into feminism when they go to a school that has that plastered on the back of t-shirts. : (
is the way many men learn about feminism appreciably different than how many women do? come from a family with a good parental situation or one that's teachably bad, go to college, meet a nice progressive group of friends... feminist. that's what worked for me.
ABSOLUTELY YES, Athenia. Otherwise, there is little point to feminism.
As far as what works particularly well: this sounds like too big a contradiction to some, but compromising is important. Sometimes we enter conflicts and we want to exit with our feminist principles untouched. Sometimes we have to go places, or "stoop," in ways that being feminist tell us not to.
Sometimes all this takes the form of just trying not to write men off for not being familiar with the many discourses of feminism. I'm going to re-create a great thing I read from a commenter on another post: don't tear a sapling out of the ground because it's not a tree.
Since I am a man, I think I need to slightly modify the question to best suit my answer. The approaches that worked best on me were those which came from a spirit of mutual respect and trust. Those who believed that treating another person like they themselves wished to be treated themselves---if the roles had been reversed---were the most successful.
I genuinely think many men want to be allies and want to do their part to address sexism and to advance gender equality, but sadly even one bad experience with someone who believes that angry confrontation is the best approach usually makes a negative impression that turns off potential male allies. It's tough to undo the damage once done but making a good impression early is the best way to guard against this effect, in my opinion.
No one wants to learn about something unless they find something they can relate to in it. My husband was put off by feminism when I was always talking about women's sufferage, but when I started talking about sexism in general, and how it hurts men, he started asking more questions. Now, he often finds examples of sexism in the world around us before I do!
I took a women's history class last fall... I had to take something to fulfill a requirement, but I took that instead of something only nominally gender-related because it was way different from everything else I've studied. Obviously if you can show a guy how sexism harms either him or directly hurts many people he cares about, that will probably be best for inspiring his participation, but a basic suggestion of learning something new while focusing on the challenge of a very different class will work with others.
Totally off-topic, I'm sitting in the student union and there's a group of eight guys who are dressed up all nice for some kind of fancy pants get together. They were throwing really retarded lines back and forth to use on the girls here, which hurt in a "do you know how stupid you sound" kind of way... then I looked over and saw they all had a sheet of paper with a list of the damn things to practice with. At that point it just became funny. I wish I had a video camera.
"They were throwing really retarded lines back and forth"
What kind of lines? Like using retarded as an insult? Sweet.
I wish you could have gotten that on the internet for the, as you put it, "do you know how stupid you sound" factor.
Oh wait...
Rock on to your bro!
You know, I actually didn't take women's studies in college myself. It never occurred to me as something I'd like, because I still thought of feminists and women's rights as kind of dowdy, irrelevant, etc. My how things change!
So I think for anyone, women or men, it'd be helpful to even just list some of the things that women's studies includes, or topics covered in a particular class. If you've taken a class and are encouraging others to sign up, you could talk about what kinds of stuff you read or can write about. But I think just identifying yourself as a feminist is a good first step - letting the men in your life know, cliched though it may be, that "this is what a feminist looks like."