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Feminism has challenged existing gender arrangements and intellectual orthodoxies. However, there is a strong tendency to assume that "gender" issues are issues about women. Feminist thought has sometimes reinforced this tendency, because feminist research has focussed on the lives of women. We must also examine men's gender practices, and the ways the gender order defines, positions, empowers and constrains men.
Men in gender relations
For a generation, the new feminism has challenged existing gender arrangements and intellectual orthodoxies. The challenge has led, inevitably, to questions about men in gender relations.
The inevitable has not always been obvious. Indeed, there is a strong tendency in many discussions to assume that "gender" issues are issues about women. Most politicians, bureaucrats and journalists assume that men are the norm, and that "gender" is about the way women differ from this norm. Thus gender issues in the public realm often in practice boil down to questions about the special needs of women. Feminist thought has sometimes reinforced this drift, because feminist research has, by and large, focussed on the lives of women. There have been good reasons for this, given the historic exclusion of women's experience from patriarchal culture.
Yet gender is inherently relational. Even if our understanding of gender is no more than "sex differences," there are always two terms in a difference. And a closer look at gender shows much more complex patterns than simple difference. Gender is also about relationships of desire and power, and these must be examined from both sides. In understanding gender inequalities it is essential to research the more privileged group as well as the less privileged. This requires more than simply an examination of men as a statistical category (though it is useful to do that, too). We must examine men's gender practices, and the ways the gender order defines, positions, empowers and constrains men.
The gender positions that society constructs for men may not correspond exactly with what men actually are, or desire to be, or what they actually do. It is therefore necessary to study masculinity as well as men. By "masculinity" I mean the pattern or configuration of social practices linked to the position of men in the gender order, and socially distinguished from practices linked to the...