The Need for Men's Liberation. Part 2: Our Mutual Oppression
Warren Farrell and Ken Wilber
written by Corey W. deVos

Come on, let's say it together: "Men are being oppressed." It doesn't exactly roll off the tongue, does it? It sort of sticks in the back of the throat, and we almost need to look around to make sure no one is listening before we say it out loud. In today's academic and cultural climate, it's not easy to make a point like this—the kindest reaction you might receive is a cynical eye-roll.

But really, why is it so difficult to admit that men could use a little help learning how to redefine themselves in today's world, and how to "man up" in a new way to meet the challenges of our modern lives?

Maybe it's because our definitions for words like "oppression" and "power" are too limited, restricting our understanding of these dynamics to just a tiny shred of what's actually going on beneath the surface of male/female relations. Just as our notions of "oppression" have often led us to perceive women as perennial victims, robbing them of a dignity they had never really been without, so do our notions of "power" keep our attention diverted from the very real issues men are dealing with today.

"But men do have more power," you might say, "just look at who is running the world!" A fair argument in some circles, but kind of falls apart when we take a closer look. For one, the amount of power men yield in economic and political spheres has very little impact upon the average guy in the street. And while it is certainly true that throughout history men have largely dominated the "public sphere", it should be noted that the ratio of women in the workforce and the overall income gap between men and women is rapidly approaching some degree of balance.

But more than anything, this critique of men's power (and powerlessness) is completely missing the mark—because power is not defined by the amount of control a person has over other people, but the amount of control one has over his or her own life. In this sense, women's power is too often overlooked, while men have yet to fully come to terms with their own power, as they are still being primed from birth to equate "manhood" with "disposability."

Men are constantly being locked into a single option—to excel in the "public sphere", even to the point of breaking their own backs—with very little understanding or training around the "private sphere" options available to him. Meanwhile, men continue to place an unfair amount of cultural pressure upon women to pick up the slack in both spheres, without doing their own work to spend more time with the family, to develop their own emotional availability, to become a more involved father, and to focus on the interior realities of the home life.

We are looking for new role models, new behaviors, and new ways for men to define themselves. We are looking for a path beyond the merely macho, beyond the feminized 90's guy, and beyond the disposable hero. The goal is not to neuter men or to neutralize the sexes—quite the contrary, we are trying to find a radically improved masculinity, as well as a radically improved femininity, honoring the very real power yielded by males and females alike in both public and private spheres. We are now discovering a new generation of men and women—newly integrated men and women who can see beyond the narrow definitions of gender that have been handed to us, fluent in both interior and exterior realities, and finding new ways for both sexes and both genders to show their love for themselves and one another.