MANPOWER: Members of Fathers 4 Justice make their point (left); The Scotsman highlights their cause (top left); a cartoon from a men’s rights website (middle); an anti-abortion rally (bottom)

I find myself increasingly shocked at the unthinking and automatic rubbishing of men which is now so part of our culture that it is hardly even noticed. Great things have been achieved through feminism. But … why did this have to be at the cost of men?

DORIS LESSING, feminist writer

THE FRONTRUNNER

The most quoted men’s rights activist Warren Farrell ran against Arnold Schwarzenegger for candidacy for California governor this year (he placed 97th in a field of 135 candidates), and his No. 1 campaign agenda was male birth control. His campaign focussed on reducing the economic costs of social neglect, such as when children lose their dads after divorce. Farrell, a doctorate in political science, began his academic career as a card-carrying feminist, but then “realised men/fathers were getting unfairly savaged in the feminist critique of the world”. He is a best-selling men’s issues author (Susan Faludi’s Backlash includes a whole chapter on him) who believes America has gone from a “women’s crisis to a men’s crisis” and that now, three-and-a-half decades after the rise of the feminist movement, many of America’s worst gender inequities work against men and fathers. His first book, The Myth of Male Power, (Berkeley, 1993) got a wealth of endorsements from the likes of Camille Paglia, Nancy Friday, and David Horowitz.

Eight days back, London had a rather unusual Christmas call when a group of men dressed as Santa Clauses called at the minister for children, Margaret Hodge’s office. And delivered a giant turkey. Nothing unusual, after all it is the season of cheer. But Hodge wasn’t smiling. For every one of the group, which numbered in hundreds, were very angry dads dressed as Santa. And the plastic turkey was a symbolic protest at their being denied access to their children. The minister for children was branded the “Turkey of the Year” as the men claimed that she refused to change old child access laws which favour mums.

The organisation behind the event was Fathers 4 Justice. Slick, professional men (“We are not misogynists: we are barristers, teachers”) who are ready to go to jail for their belief that fathers get a raw deal from the divorce courts. The group claims to have acquired up to 1,000 members in four months. The unit of very angry fathers was just one part of a global movement which has been gaining ground over the past few years.

Two years after novelist Doris Lessing famously told feminists to lay off men, low rumblings persist. Of a conspiracy against men, spiking in fierce accusations of prejudice, even persecution by the state, by the health industry, the media and by their female counterparts. (Lessing, who became a feminist icon with the books The Grass is Singing and The Golden Notebook, had said a “lazy and insidious” culture had taken hold within feminism that revelled in flailing men. And that young boys were being weighed down with guilt about the crimes of their sex (“pointless humiliation of men”). Proponents of the men’s movement say men are going the way of the dodo in our feminised society. Even when men want to be “nurturer-connectors”, society insists they are “killer-protectors”.

The groups call themselves “men’s rights” groups, “anti-feminists” or “masculinists”. Says Australian men’s rights advocate Peter Vogel, “Feminism’s changes to laws, particularly the family laws, have made it necessary for men to speak up for themselves. To revive an old metaphor, we all live by a social contract; if that social contract is always unfair to men, men will no longer honour it. And they shouldn’t.”

Sadly, the anger directed towards men in the last 30 years of feminism has helped solidify the men’s movement. The popular all-women website Salon.com reported in a recent article that the Internet is awash in men’s rights’ websites, many of which urge males not to marry or have children. The writer quotes political science professor Stephen Baskerville of Howard University, US, who says that men victimised by family law constitute “the most massive civil rights abuse of our time.” Male activists liken the man who wants to be a stay-at-home father today to the woman who wanted to be a surgeon in the 1950s.

Women Can’t Hear What Men Don’t Say. In this bestseller, Warren Farrell (the American academic and erstwhile feminist-turned-men’s activist. See box) neatly sums up men’s rage against a ‘feminist driven world’: that the male point of view is invisible in the media. “In a study of more than 1,200 headlines from seven high-circulation Canadian newspapers, women were referred to as victims of violence 35 times for each one reference to men as victims. Not a single article focused on men … Newspapers virtually ignore the violence against men in each of these areas — no matter who the perpetrator. More discouraging, when violence against men was reported, it was usually in statistics; women’s was personalised.”

But how can it be true that when men make the front pages, their underlying stories do not? Because, explains Farrell, the process of climbing success ladders, that gets a man on the front pages, requires him to repress his fears. So a man’s external story is visible; his internal story invisible. (“This is the paradox of the visible-invisible man”).

Men’s activists believe that the time has come for men to begin defining what it is they want. Men, not women, must define what it means to be a man.

An eastern rising

The movement is coming to India, to Bengal, to Calcutta, slowly, but surely. And there are signs to indicate that next year, it will hit our towns and cities in a big way. The storm has been brewing for some time, of course.

For the last so many years, while feminists battled on for equal rights in Indian homes and city streets, winning some, losing others, a different, war cry was also emerging parallel to these. These voices were at first just whispers, muttered by disgruntled men under their breaths.

In a crowded subway train, for instance, you don’t have to strain your ears to catch the venomous hiss of a frustrated male passenger, who doesn’t see the logic behind having two rows of seats in each compartment reserved for ‘ladies’. And he can’t help passing a snide remark about the fight for equal rights. He has a point. Young women, perfectly sound of body and mind enjoy right of way while frail, old or disabled men rely on their mercy and magnanimity for a chance to sit. “I find it objectionable that women have special seats reserved for them in Metro trains,” says 30-year-old Debshankar Sen, a regular commuter, who works for the electronic goods company, Arya Omni Talk.

Sen belongs to the category of ‘moderates’ in the movement. They are scattered and do not want to unite against the feminist movement. They simply think about their rights and speak out against ‘injustices’ faced by their gender. In this category are also men who are baffled by the generalised tirade against their gender and themselves feel victimised by discrimination.

A 63-year-old retired executive recalls with horror the time he was falsely accused of molesting a young girl in a crowded bus in Calcutta. His 34-year-old daughter was with him that day. She remembers: “I told the screaming woman that he was my father and couldn’t possibly be responsible. The woman turned to me and shouted, ‘So what? It’s because of women like you, that men get away with murder. ’”.

Everyone gets branded because of a few bad men,” says 28-year-old Soumya Basu, who works for Hindustan Levers in Calcutta. “If you’re packed into a bus like a can of sardines, chances are, you’ll accidentally touch someone. That doesn’t mean everyone is a molester”.

Now the rumblings are growing louder. And a more militant face of the men’s ‘movement’ has started to peer out of the veil of silence. In July this year, a Chandigarh daily carried the following news item: “A group of city lawyers, well posted about the fact that there is no one to give a patient hearing to men, have floated a special cell that will cater to those, who face harassment at the hands of their wives”.

In fact, never before has the issue of the harassment of men been more highlighted than throughout 2003. This year saw droves of men come out of the woodwork and protest against the alleged ‘misuse’ of the country’s most stringent anti-dowry law - Section 498A, of the Indian Penal Code. And finally verdicts were pronounced, which suggested that some of the punitive teeth of the law – namely its non-bailable and non-negotiable provisions – be knocked off.

Pirito Purush Poti Parishad (PPPP) or the oppressed husbands’ union, which started in 1997 in Calcutta, to “free” men from the physical and mental agony, allegedly inflicted on them by their wives, is also surging ahead with its pro-active campaign against 498A. On July 7, it dashed off a letter to Parliament demanding a new law — 498B. “It would punish wives who harass husbands and in-laws,” explains Subroto Mookherjee, lawyer and executive member.

Activist-writer, Maitreyee Chatterjee of the women’s rights group, Nari Nirjatan Protirodh Mancha, however, condemns such organisations as “stupid and reactionary”, which are detrimental for women’s movements because of their sheer lack of understanding of issues. But she welcomes the men’s movement as long as it liberates men from the burden of oppressive gender stereotypes. “Kindness and tenderness, for instance, are considered feminine traits,” she explains, “So a gentle man gets branded effeminate and weak. If men try to break free from this bondage, I support them”. But she warns against a superficial understanding of men’s rights. In defence, PPPP points out that women constitute a major part of the group. “In fact, our president is a woman,” says Mookherjee. “We are not anti-women. We just want equal rights for men.” He hopes that an approval of their petition “will come through by next year”.

Are these indications, then, that 2004 will be a year of male emancipation? In the lull before the storm, we can only speculate. Will the men’s movement happen at the cost of women’s rights? Is it in danger of going overboard like the very ‘ultra’ feminist movements they condemn? Or will it strike the right balance? Only 2004 will tell.