open Democracy News Analysis - Men and gender justice, Emily Esplen - Comments

loulou on "Men and gender justice: old debate, new perspective "

loulou — Fri, 09 May 2008 00:09:28 +0000

I fear that in responding to an era of patriarchy, the (western) feminist movement has not looked actively for the changes needed on the other side of the rights/responsibilities coin.

However I think that it is understandable that in a struggle for equality, looking at the rights of "the other side" are overlooked. I don't think it's justified, but I think it's human nature.

Now the men's rights movement are fighting back, sometimes with exaggerated or simply biased studies, and equally with unbiased and accurate information that shows up some of the biases in feminist studies. They, too understandably are prone to looking at the injustice done to them as a priority over the past injustices done to women in the patriarchy.

The only way to get fair and just legal rights for both men and women is to understand what both sides are crying out for and with unbiased studies into the nature of the issues raised.

Complete unbias is rare in human beings, and so healthy debate and cooperation between women's and men's rights groups (as seperate but cooperating bodies) is the only way justice can be achieved in a way that both men and women welcome.

I look forward to open and respectful debate about changes needed in society for equal rights for all genders. It is hard to see all aspects of life from all angles and even harder to see all aspects of life from the point of view of a gender you have never been and never will be....there has been much too much talk, and not enough listening on both sides.

human_tide on "Men and gender justice: old debate, new perspective "

human_tide — Fri, 07 Mar 2008 15:13:00 +0000

Unsurprisingly, I'm with Emily on this one. I've tried to address the claims for a parity in gender violence but I don't see any of the responses really engaging on that level of debate.

As to the wider questions, I'm still curious about the role of an explicit and political feminism in the bridging and analysis that the article suggests.

Again, why 'women's movement' rather than 'feminist movement'?

Devonavar on "Men and gender justice: old debate, new perspective "

Devonavar — Mon, 03 Mar 2008 07:01:53 +0000

I don't understand the concern with men setting themselves up as "victims". Check that — I understand the concern, but I think it is unfounded. Setting gender idealism aside, men have far less to gain from playing the victim than women — whether they are "actual" victims or not. Gender politics being what they are, a man playing the victim is a wimp: an object of derision, not an object of pity. Outside of a small subset of academia (read: gender specialists), playing the victim is not a viable means of attracting support for men.

A man who finds himself a victim (of any wrongdoing, not just violence) is expected to find redress by his own means — and he has his pride and his sense of masculinity to lose if he does not. That means he has more to gain by being aggressive than accepting his victimhood and passively waiting for / allowing someone to help him. The expectation is self-fulfilling.

As a general rule, a woman can get much more mileage out of playing the victim because, thanks to our ingrained prejudices, she's much more likely to attract pity and therefore help. As a man, it doesn't matter how aware I am of men and women being equally deserving of help — I'm still more likely to respond to the damsel in distress than the defeated knight. I suspect that most women would react in the same way: Help the women and children first; let the men help themselves.

I'd like to point out the irony that, seen through an uncharitable lens, the history of feminism can be seen as a study in women collectively playing the victim to the sympathies of the male patriarchy. Should the masculinities movement referred to by the author ever gain any real power, I would expect that power to manifest itself in a stereotypically male way: it will be aggressive, set its own rules, and, in all probability, completely ignore gender equality. It will wield its power with all the skill and corruption of a politician and it will succeed in spite of its opponents, not because of its allies. Is this fair? No. Is it right? Probably not, but this is where male power lies. This is what the author should fear the masculinities will become, not a network of male victims.

TM Lutas on "Men and gender justice: old debate, new perspective "

TM Lutas — Sun, 02 Mar 2008 20:15:42 +0000

What a mess this article and discussion are. Let's start with first things first. Women on men violence *is* a dirty little secret that is not handled correctly in law, police regulations, jury attitudes, or funding for men in the unfortunate situation where they have to evacuate their homes due to a battering spouse. If you can't handle the murder of men by women with justice, you don't get to come to the table to lecture about anything. You're part of the problem.

Mary Winkler gets 210 days in jail for murdering her spouse, 3 years of split confinement in total. Now reverse the sexes on the crime and watch the sentencing (and the societal outrage) rise. Heterosexual sexual crimes on minors are another area where women get off lightly in the courts (at least in the US). The disparate sentencing of men having sex with minor students versus women (especially cute women) is not something that is seriously up for discussion. It happens.

The biological fact is that men are pretty good at violence as a group. We tend to be about 10% bigger and that added mass has consequences in terms of the severity of violence inflicted. But the law and police regulations are not set up to be about comparative body mass. If it's a big guy and a small woman in a domestic dispute and somebody's getting tossed out of their home for the night to cool down, it's going to be the guy. If it's a big woman and a small man having that same dispute, it's going to be the small guy looking for a hotel room, or calling up friends, or spending the night in jail. Go talk to a cop if you have any doubt of this.

The rule of law is about equal treatment for equal acts. We don't have that when it comes to relationship violence. We don't have it when it comes to divorce. We don't have it when it comes to a whole host of things. If the desired end state is a complementary system where role specialization occurs, such a legal system can be a functional part of the larger societal setup whose disparate treatment supports complementary gender roles. What we have in the feminist West is a largely still complementary legal system with women seeking to break out of their gender roles and demand equality but in no hurry at all to change the complementary legal structure where it favors them. Recognize *that* and a useful conversation is possible about masculinity and where we go forward from our current mess.

Emilye on "Men and gender justice: old debate, new perspective "

Emilye — Sun, 02 Mar 2008 08:57:39 +0000

Depressingly, nothing could have more forcefully illustrated my point about the about lethal ease with which debates about equality can so quickly descend into single-minded efforts by a few men to prove their own victimhood. I was trying to make a call for greater solidarity between men and women, to advance our common concerns and progress towards a world of equality and justice for all people – men and women. I did not say, or I hope imply, that ‘all men are "violent ogres" or that women are always "innocent victims"’ – on the contrary, I feel very strongly that the resort to simplistic gender dichotomies is deeply problematic. Far from blaming men, I was praising the excellent work being done by men in many parts of the world to bring about greater equality, and exhorting the need for women and men to work together to challenge the structures of inequality and injustice that disadvantage us all.

So while I could respond by reeling off just some of the many horrific statistics from the hundreds upon hundreds of studies that point to the gender asymmetry of violence in terms of perpetrators and victims –which, by the way, is not only confined to acts of physical violence but is also structural and institutionalised – I think this would rather miss the point. Precisely what I didn’t want was to end up bogged down in a divisive ‘blame game’. As I said, merely counterposing women's and men's experience and perpetration of violence is not helpful; the challenge is rather to help illuminate the workings and functions of violence within the systems of oppression that organise our different societies. As such, my concern is not only with men’s violence against women (although I do believe that men should be held accountable for this violence where it occurs, just as women should be held accountable for any violence they commit). More fundamentally, however, my concern is with the violence that produces and is produced by a hierarchical gender order that is, itself, interwoven with other forms of inequality and oppression. So let’s try and get beyond this ‘men versus women’ stalemate we seem to be stuck in and start to bring all this back to the really important issues of social justice and social change.

human_tide on "Men and gender justice: old debate, new perspective "

human_tide — Sat, 01 Mar 2008 12:31:58 +0000

krigsman,

Actually, Fiebert's list proves my point. The overall summary that "women are as physically aggressive, or more aggressive, than men" avoids the difficulties of severity and context of violence that I raised. In fact, and I am only going on what Fiebert says the studies say, some of research on the list do suggest that females suffer serious violence on a higher level than men. Many, if not most of the studies, are concerned with the question of 'initiating' 'violence' and measure these issues on a self-reporting basis. We are left here with the problem that in such studies, if a female was verbally aggressive to a male and was then beaten, raped or killed by the male, this would count as 'female aggression' but not as 'male aggression'. Remarkably few of Fiebert's list seem to address issues of severity of violence or other issues that may complicate the picture, at least in his reporting of them.

The list has some other faults. Let's take one example:

Quote:

Gelles, R. J. (1994). Research and advocacy: Can one wear two hats? Family Process, 33, 93-95. (Laments the absence of objectivity on the part of "feminist" critics of research demonstrating female perpetrated domestic violence.)

Now, "lamenting objectivity" is clearly not the same as stating that "women are physically aggressive, or more aggressive, than men". I chose the Gelles example because he has clearly stated that his findings in other research of a rough parity in the 'initiation' of certain, widely interpreted types of 'violence' does not mean that females are as violent as males, precisely because male-on-female violence tends to be significantly more extreme and more deadly.

A similar problem exists with the five citations to M. J. George that follow the Gelles reference. Again, I am working here only on what Fiebert says the study say. Only one of the five citations can legitimately be said to suggest that females are as aggressive, or more aggressive, than males. The others appear simply to address female-on-male violence as a reality (who denies that it happens?) but do not make any claims of parity, in either incidence or seriousness. A similar analysis of the entire list might rather compromise simplistic claims.

None of this implies that psychological or minor physical aggression is not important. But we simply can't sustain a claim of parity in gender violence without considering these issues seriously on the multiple levels where the distinictions might have serious consequences for gender in development, which the actual article is about.

krigsman.inc on "Men and gender justice: old debate, new perspective "

krigsman.inc — Sat, 01 Mar 2008 04:22:32 +0000

Hope this might help change your mind.

http://www.csulb.edu/~mfiebert/assault.htm

"SUMMARY: This bibliography examines 209 scholarly investigations: 161 empirical studies and 48 reviews and/or analyses, which demonstrate that women are as physically aggressive, or more aggressive, than men in their relationships with their spouses or male partners. The aggregate sample size in the reviewed studies exceeds 201,500."

human_tide on "Men and gender justice: old debate, new perspective "

human_tide — Sat, 01 Mar 2008 02:31:05 +0000

Thanks for that John.

I think there are a couple of issues:

1) I'm not convinced at all that the statistics support bmmg39's claims. Much of the passage you cited is devoted to demonstrating a certain parity (and female propensity) to the 'initiation' of 'violence' and uses this as a basis to make a somewhat wider claim about overall domestic abuse. But the scales used include both minor acts (some of which, like chasing or threatening, are only 'violence' in a very loose sense) and very severe ones. So, for example, using data on incidence alone, an event in which a female slapped or threatened a male and was then beaten to death by the male would register as one incidence of 'female-initiated' violence and no incidence of 'male-initiated' violence. The CTS scales that these studies use do appear to provide grounds for measuring the severity of violence, although the article summaries I have read focus much more on 'initiation' than on these issues of severity and scale. Some articles (such as this one - http://pubpages.unh.edu/~mas2/VB33.pdf - by Murray Straus) also inflate data by re-calculating figures on the basis of supposed under-reporting of female-on-male violence. Even though Straus elsewhere acknowledges that there is also a definite pattern to under-reporting of male-on-female violence this does not lead him to change the figures on those assaults. The studies certainly demonstrate that violence of all kinds by females exists - but establishing the 'of course' symmetry that bmmg39 advocates requires much more than that;

2) Other statistics paint a somewhat different picture. In fact, Richard Gelles complains precisely that the results of his research which showed a rough parity for 'initiation' and minor 'violence' have been extensively quoted to support the claim of parity in gender violence, while results from the same studies showing that women are seriously injured at seven times the rates of men and that women are twice as likely to be killed by men as vice-versa are ignored. International studies by the World Health Organisation certainly suggest a consistent and significant bias towards violence against females. Statistics from the US Department of Justice (http://www.ojp.usdoj.gov/bjs/pub/pdf/ipv01.pdf) suggest that between 1993 and 2001 85% of victimisations by intimate partners were directed against females - even before we begin to discuss the severity of victimisation, which again seems strongly to suggest that female are more likely to be killed and seriously assaulted when victimisation does occur. It also appears that certain extreme forms of violence, such as rape, barely register as female-on-male violence;

3) There is, of course, a way of reading some of these statistics through an understanding of patriarchy that alters their significance - even if it could be shown that females kill more males than vice-versa, there would remain the problems of context. This is not to adopt a sexist, anti-male approach, per se. If we accept that there are characteristics of society as a whole (inequalities, rights differentials, measurable attitudes), it is reasonable to assume that there are corresponding attitudes and tendencies in the context of domestic violence. In the same way as the social meaning and significance of armed conflict changes with context, so does gender violence. These issues partly contaminate existing statistics themselves, as for example in studies where females are much less likely to describe physical assault by males as 'male-initiated violence';

4) Whatever contemporary figures from the US on gender violence, the original article is about a wider question of how we treat gender in development. Domestic violence is only one part of this picture. Emily Esplen talks of the 'many forms of violence', which of course includes issues of structural violence such as inequality and differential civil and political rights.

John Dias on "Men and gender justice: old debate, new perspective "

John Dias — Sat, 01 Mar 2008 00:22:04 +0000

In support of bmmg39:

bmmg39 wrote that women initiate domestic violence against men about as often as the reverse. human_tide demanded some references as evidence. I just so happen to have a few.

From chapter 1 of the book "Women Who Perpetrate Relationship Violence: Moving Beyond Political Correctness" by Frederick Buttell and Michelle Mohr Carney (Nov. 4, 2005):

Quote:

"Using U.S. national survey data, Stets and Straus (1990) demonstrated that women were three times as likely to use severe violence against a non-violent male partner than were men against a non-violent female partner. For reasons that may have to do with the predominant view of family violence as male perpetrated, this important finding has largely gone unnoticed. Unilateral female violence ranged from 9.6% in married couples to 13.4% in cohabiting couples (the comparable rates for male unilateral violence were 2.4% and 1.2%). (Stets & Straus, 1990). Hence, female violence could not be characterized as solely self-defensive. Archer's (2002, 2002) meta-analytic study of gender and violence usage in intimate relationships revealed females, if anything, were somewhat more violent than males, according to summed self-/other reports.

"Only in 'crime victim' surveys, do men still appear as the more frequent perpetrators of intimate aggression; scholars propose this might reflect differential definitions of crime, demand characteristics of the surveys, and/or sensitivity to detection (Archer, 2000; Dutton & Nicholls, in press; Straus, 1999). Furthermore, males report being injured by female partners at a rate more similar to female injury rates than feminist reports have reflected (Archer, 2000). The injuries are frequently obtained by female use of weapons to physical attacks on male genitalia (Hines, Brown, & Dunning, 2003; Morse, 1995).

"Evidence That Women Aggress Against Non-Abusive Partners

"As we have demonstrated, many studies ascertain that women commit partner violence at similar or higher rates than males [see DVStats.org, a search engine of such studies, including links to many of the actual studies]. A limitation of gender symmetry identified by many critics is that women's aggression might be in self-defense; less commonly asserted, but possible, is that some men might similarly be aggressing against their partners in response to female initiated aggression. Contrary to the self-defense hypothesis, several authors have reported that many women who use violence report striking the first blow. In a Canadian sample, Bland and Orn (1986) reported that of the women in their sample who used violence against their husbands, 73.4% said they used violence first. Similarly, Stets and Straus (1992) reported that women committed the first act of aggression more than half of the time (52.7%). In a large sample of American dating college students (N = 968 women) Fiebert and Gonzalez found 29% of women revealed they initiated assaults.

"Further research also provides evidence that women aggress against non-abusive male partners. Lewis, Travea, and Fremouw (2002) assessed variables associated with female violence in dating relationships in a sample of 300 undergraduate women. They found that 16% of the women engaged in bi-directional violence and 7% of the women were the sole perpetrators of abuse (69% were in non-violent relationships, 8% were victims). In 1998, Majdan surveyed 103 female undergraduate students currently involved, or involved in the last year, in a heterosexual dating relationship of at least one-month duration. Majdan determined that women reported engaging in more psychological and physical aggression than they reported experiencing. The prevalence of physical assaults perpetrated by the women was higher for both prior year (44%) and lifetime (49%) than the prevalence of physical victimization reported by the women (36% and 41%, respectively). The prevalence of abuse perpetrated by the women that resulted in injuries in the last year and over their lifetimes were identical (11%); they were also comparable to the prevalence of abuse that resulted in injuries to the women in the last year (11%) and over the women's lifetimes (15%). Majdan (1998) reported that the women experienced more sexual coercion (36% last year; 39% lifetime) than they perpetrated (25% last year; 27% lifetime).

"In a sample of 505 Caucasian undergraduate women Stets and Pirog-Good (1987) reported the women were more likely to experience and to use violence in a dating relationship than men; however, the differences were not significant. Stets and Pirog-Good (1987) proposed that women may be more likely to report violence than men (note that the rate of violence experienced by women is fairly equivalent to the rate of using violence by men). However, it may be that the women were involved in mutually abusive relationships -- which would explain why both the rate of female abuse and the use of violence was higher for the women in this sample than for the men. In their undergraduate sample, Simonelli and Ingram (1998) found that men were more likely to report being seriously victimized than to report having inflicted serious harm on their partners.

"Undergraduate men and women in the Nicholls et al. study reported comparable rates of abuse perpetration and victimization on the CTS2. Men reported similar prevalence rates when asked about perpetrating psychological abuse (69.2%), physical abuse (30.8%), sexual coercion (38.5%), and injuries (0%) as when they were asked about those types of victimization experiences (69.2%, 23.1%, 46.2%, 0%, respectively). Women also reported perpetrating psychological (86.5%), physical (38.5%), sexual coercion (44.2%), and injuries (11.5%) at a rate similar to their rates of victimization across those same categories (78.8%, 26.9%, 42.3%, 9.6%, respectively). Although it cannot be ascertained from that study whether respondents' partners were abusive or not, it is instructive to note the women were slightly more likely to report perpetrating each form of abuse than they were to report victimization in each category. These findings have made it increasingly difficult to view abuse in intimate relationships as solely, or even primarily, a reflection of sexism, misogyny, or patriarchy."

human_tide on "Men and gender justice: old debate, new perspective "

human_tide — Fri, 29 Feb 2008 21:53:28 +0000

Now, now bmmg39.

If you're going to make that kind of statement, you better be able to provide some references and some evidence.

Even leaving aside the less charitable interpretations of your comment, it would be very strange indeed to find that violence was initiated on "precisely the same scale", regardless of gender identity.

Not to mention that noone is actually suggesting that all men are "violent ogres" or that women are always "innocent victims" (although, when it comes to personal violence, you're going to have to put a bit more effort into the "they ask for it" line of thinking, if it can be flattered with such a label).

I'm sure I'm not the only one eagerly awaiting a more developed line of argument.

bmmg39 on "Men and gender justice: old debate, new perspective "

bmmg39 — Fri, 29 Feb 2008 21:42:05 +0000

"It is not uncommon to hear the statement that 'men are also victims of violence at the hands of women.' Such comments can be profoundly unhelpful, not least because this violence is nothing like on the same scale as the many forms of violence experienced by women from men."

Of course it is. It is precisely on the same scale. The idea that men are violent ogres while women are innocent victims is beginning to collapse like a house of cards, and not a moment too soon. Women initiate domestic violence against men approximately as often as the reverse occurs. It's downright sexist to downplay their violence and to understate the victimhood of men.

human_tide on "Men and gender justice: old debate, new perspective "

human_tide — Fri, 29 Feb 2008 13:25:02 +0000

Plenty to agree with here. Certainly the stress on recognising gender violence and inequality as overwhelmingly about relations that systematically benefit socially constructed 'men' at the expense of 'women' is a necessary corollary to any 'bridge-building'.

But what is all this about the "women's movement"? What's wrong with saying "feminist movement"? Not only does stressing feminism incorporate the necessarily political element in all this, it also gets us away from precisely the division between the separate study of 'men' and the 'women' in these gender orders.

However alert we are to the macro-picture of inequality, we must not lose sight of the important work that has been done on how females can contribute to patriarchy and males to dismantling it, on how hierarchies of masculinity and femininity work in parallel to reproduce that patriarchy, and how only by getting away from ontological claims based on sex can progress beyond discriminatory gender orders be made.

And a more open, and theoretically engaged, commitment to feminism is indispensible to that.

Men and gender justice, Emily Esplen

Thu, 28 Feb 2008 10:09:19 +0000

The nature of men's involvement in the struggle for gender justice has long fiercely divided gender-equality advocates. After nearly three decades of disagreement this seam of tension doggedly persists, little engaged with and largely unresolved.

Emily Esplen is research and communications officer at the Institute of Development Studies, University of Sussex

Even as the women's movement remains hesitant, often bordering on hostile, to the idea of men's involvement, the "masculinities agenda" is striding forwards with innovative work on men and masculinities - even though it is at times often flawed in its understanding of power and in the way it merely counterposes to the idea of women's empowerment a focus on working with men "for their sake".

The most promising work in this field is happening at the level of the personal: it concentrates on transforming men's sexual behaviour, challenging violence against women and relations of fatherhood. The pioneering work of organisations like the Instituto Promundo in Brazil, which supports young men to question traditional gender norms and promote gender-equitable behaviours and attitudes, has shown that, yes, men can change. Other organisations, like the Sonke Gender Justice Network in South Africa are taking work with men in exciting new directions, reorienting existing projects aimed at individual men and politicising it in order to promote men's broader mobilisation around structural inequities and injustices. Futhermore, organisations working with men are themselves coming together to facilitate sharing and learning, enabling a stronger, more coherent struggle, as with the recently established "Men Engage" global alliance which seeks to involve men and boys in reducing gender inequalities.

Also in openDemocracy:

Andrea Cornwall, "Pathways to women's empowerment" (27 July 2007)

Srilatha Batliwala, "Women transforming power?" (6 October 2007)

Mulki Al-Sharmani, "Egypt's family courts: route to empowerment?" (7 September 2007)

Naila Kabeer, "Marriage, motherhood and masculinity in the global economy" (29 January 2008)

These articles open a new collaboration between openDemocracy and the research consortium Pathways of Women's Empowerment project at the Institute of Development Studies, University of Sussex. This explores ideas, projects and initiatives from around the world - Brazil to Egypt, Sierra Leone to Bangladesh - which aims to understand what enables women to empower themselves and sustain changes in gendered power relations A unique opportunity

This current momentum offers a unique opportunity to advance the common goal of realising gender equality. But while the proliferation of organisations working with men for gender justice is welcome, it is notable that very few of them have close and direct relationships with the women's movement. True, some do have looser connections or networks that include people active in the women's movement in individual countries, but even these are rare. This creates a discernible danger that "masculinities" will become - or has become already - a discrete field of thinking and practice, somehow disconnected from the women's movement and from gender and development more broadly.

Indeed, a depressing reality is coming into view whereby "gender" seems - even among those most committed to the gender agenda - repeatedly to be conflated with women. As long as connections between the women's movement and those working with men remain fragile (at best) to non-existent (at worst), femininities are likely to be rendered invisible in evolving masculinities discourses. The result is that - once again - the fundamental interconnectedness of men and women and the relational nature of gendered power will be lost.

Indeed, I've been repeatedly struck at recent seminars and conferences on "engaging men in gender equality" by the meagre representation from the gender and development field: a couple of us at most, in an audience comprised overwhelmingly of specialists in sexual and reproductive health and rights. In part, this points to one of the weaknesses of the current masculinities field: the overwhelming focus on sexual health and violence, and the corresponding failure to engage sufficiently with equity issues: among them equal pay and leave entitlements, representation in politics, parental rights and benefits, and domestic work/housework. The lack of attention to such issues results in the waste of opportunities to advance shared concerns.

A false equivalence

There are other dangers in refusing to engage constructively with the evolving men and masculinities discourse. While many organisations working with men are deeply informed by feminist thinking and practice, others are less grounded in a pro-feminist framework. As the masculinities bandwagon gathers momentum, there is a temptation to slip into modes of thinking and language that (for example) regard women and men as equivalently vulnerable (i.e. women are harmed by femininity and men are harmed by masculinity), or even describe men as "worse off" than women.

This is reflected in the way that much of the discourse of men and masculinities has been expressed in terms of a "crisis in masculinity". It's certainly the case that many men share with the women in their lives similar experiences of indignity as a result of social and economic oppression. Yet it is important to recognise the real differences in power and privilege experienced by women and men on the basis of gender, and to avoid glossing over men's accountability for the ways in which they choose to act out their privilege. While it's important to engage with poor men's realities, this should be done without positing men as the "new victims".

At a symposium in October 2007 on "Politicising Masculinities", organised by the Institute of Development Studies (IDS), it was noted that this issue of false equivalence surfaces frequently in discussions of men's own experience of violence. It is not uncommon to hear the statement that "men are also victims of violence at the hands of women". Such comments can be profoundly unhelpful, not least because this violence is nothing like on the same scale as the many forms of violence experienced by women from men. Alan Greig made clear at the IDS symposium that the mere counterposing of women's and men's experience and perpetration of violence is a trap; the challenge is rather to help illuminate the workings and functions of violence within the systems of oppression that organise our different societies, while holding accountable the individuals and institutions (mostly men and male-dominated) that are responsible for enacting this violence.

But to have some influence over the evolving masculinities discourse and practice in a way that avoids positing men as the "new victims" requires working in solidarity with those in the masculinities field who do understand power and the core issues of gender equality and justice. Now is an opportune time to open up the debate and advance thinking on what it would take to build bridges between the feminist/women's movement and those working with men. The eleventh Association for Women's Rights in Development (Awid) forum in November 2008 is on the horizon, with a timely focus on the power of movements; Men Engage are hosting their first global conference in early 2009 on engaging men and boys in gender equality; and the fifty-third United Nations Commission on the Status of Women (CSW) will focus on engaging men in caring for people living with HIV.

Also in openDemocracy: Jane Gabriel and Zohra Moosa of the 50:50 project blog from the fifty-second United Nations Commission on the Status of Women (CSW) in New York These spaces offer a much-overdue opportunity for open, constructive dialogue between the feminist/women's movement and organisations working with men for gender justice. It's high time we started to have these conversations - to ask some of the questions people don't like to talk about. It's striking how little we really know or understand about women's hostility towards working with men, or indeed about men's experiences of trying to work with feminist and women's organisations. What will it take to build bridges? How can we promote dialogue and foster greater solidarity? How can we reframe our engagement with questions of masculinities and power so that new alliances can be created, bringing work on masculinities into the heart of movements for social and gender justice?

I don't have the answers - in fact, I doubt that straightforward or singular answers exist. But I do believe these are questions that badly need to be asked if we are to progress beyond the current polarisation of issues that ought to be everyone's concern. The inadequacies of focusing on women in isolation have long been recognised; if we are really serious about achieving a gender-just world, it's time for a more open debate to begin.

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