Oppressed and Oppressors? The Systematic Mistreatment of Men

Abstract

This paper argues for a structural definition of oppression as systematic mistreatment. Using the work of Connell and other theorists, I discuss the implications of the proposed definition for the oppression of women and suggest that men, too, are systematically mistreated and therefore oppressed in modern societies. This structural concept of men's oppression is compared with the idea developed in the men's movement of the 1970s that men are oppressed by sex roles, and with more recent discourses of masculinity. I argue that men may have conflicting interests in relation to the gender order. While men are frequently the agents of the oppression of women, and in many senses benefit from it, their interests in the gender order are not pregiven but constructed by and within it. Since in many ways men's human needs and capacities are not met within the gender orders of modern societies, they also have a latent ‘emancipatory interest’ in their transformation.