In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

Can men “do” feminism? Ought men to do it? What happens when they do? These are questions with which I am constantly confronted, in my pedagogy, and in both my public and private lives. Each year, I’m invited to give about twenty or more lectures at colleges and universities all over the country. Usually, the invitation comes from a coalition of women’s studies faculty, sociologists, and the occasional student organization that has actually heard of NOMAS (The National Organization for Men Against Sexism, of which I am National Spokesperson) or my work. (On rare occasions, the funding comes from both the Women’s Studies and the Intrafraternity Council—often the first time those organizations have collaborated on anything!) The motives for the invitation are similar. In each case, the Women’s Studies faculty tell me that they feel frustrated by the fact that their courses have roughly the same gender composition today as they had twenty years ago. Today, they tell me, they typically have only one or two men in a class, and they spend much of their time cringing defensively in the corner, feeling blamed for the collective sins of two millennia of patriarchal oppression. Colleagues who teach more general courses on gender issues like Sociology of Gender or Psychology of Gender report only slightly less skewed gender composition of their classes. These colleagues believe, as I do, that it is imperative to find ways to bring men into the conversation about gender issues that women have been having for more than two decades. That, then, is the starting point for my standard college lecture. I try to explain why virtually every month there is a new name added to that growing list of men who have come to symbolize the gender issues currently in play. I began to work on that lecture the day after Clarence Thomas had been confirmed to his 209 12 Who’s Afraid of Men Doing Feminism? Originally published in Men Doing Feminism, edited by Tom Digby. New York: Routledge, 1998. RESISTANCE 210 appointment to the Supreme Court. I sat down to write a short op-ed piece for a local newspaper about the ways in which Anita Hill’s testimony opened up an opportunity for men to rethink the ways we had been taught to treat women in our workplaces. I called that op-ed piece “Clarence . . . and Us,” to suggest the ways in which what I believe Clarence Thomas did to Anita Hill is not as atypical as it might at first have sounded. In fact, what most middle-aged men probably were taught was “typical office behavior”—explicit requests for dates, implicit sexual innuendos, assumptions that seniority has its privileges of access to women, pornographic pinups on the walls or calendars—might now be called sexual harassment. I argued that it was about time men took on the issue of sexual harassment. A few months later, I was invited to expand upon that op-ed piece in a lecture . Wave after wave of women had been coming forward in the aftermath of Anita Hill’s compelling testimony, describing their experiences in the workplace . Suddenly men seemed so confused, so defensive and resistant to what they were saying. William Kennedy Smith and Mike Tyson were standing trial for date rape. It seemed another opportunity for us addled, middle-aged men to rethink what we had been taught as adolescents, for what I grew up calling “dating etiquette” or even just plain “dating”—to keep trying to get sex, to see sexual conquest as an entitled right, to wear down her resistance, to keep going despite that resistance—is now called date rape. Mike Tyson and William Kennedy Smith were not, it seemed to me, monsters, but men, assuming and doing what regular guys had been doing and assuming for a very long time. Here, again was an opportunity to rethink what we had been taught, and I was determined to raise these issues so that we could rethink our own behaviors and assumptions. Then Magic Johnson announced that he was HIV positive, and that he had contracted the virus through unprotected heterosexual contact with any one of the more than 2,500 women whom he had “accommodated” sexually—that was his term for it—during his career as a sexual athlete. Suddenly, it seemed that America was taking a crash course on masculinity—on masculine sexual entitlement, aggression, and abuse—and our instructors were Anita Hill, Patricia...

Share