January 29, 2006

Men on marriage

There's a great interview over at Salon with an author who interviewed a number of men on the state of marriage today:

Were you at all worried that there's a danger in saying, Wait a minute, why are we devaluing this male style? -- that you might be cutting into the gains that feminism has made?

I came of age in the late '60s and early '70s, which is right at the time that things were changing radically, and I never felt feminism to be a threat. Now, I know there were some angry people, angry women in particular, who I thought were sometimes wielding a broad brush by saying that you can't trust any man, that all men want is sex, or that they are uniformly dangerous and abusive, but I never really felt angered by that because I believed that, in the bigger picture, both men and women stood to gain from the larger feminist goals of equality and removing biology as destiny.

I've seen that in my own life. I married somebody who has her own career, who's very good at what she does. She also supports me at times as I'm chasing my dream of writing books. So my philosophy is that we can be pro-female and pro-male and pro-relationship if we are reasonable with each other. And I sense that women, even very strongly feminist-oriented women, are open to hearing what men have to say.

1 comment:

S A J Shirazi said...

Nice dig that I have linked to my post for tomorrow. Thanks.