Young men do share a sense of acknowledgement of the exhaustion experienced by women – suggesting grounds for possibilities of longer and critical engagements with them on questions on unpaid labour, time poverty, leisure inequality, and ethics of care.

By Ansh Sharma

Feminist advocacy organisations and movement-building forums have been concerned with ‘engaging men’ within action-oriented frameworks operating with premises of promoting gender justice and equality. While some have pointed out the risks of such a trajectory (Gilbertson, 2020), many (both, at national and global levels), have echoed such sentiments (Alliance, M., 2016; Fabian et. al., 2003), with special focus on questions of anti-women’s rights groups, allyship, and funding. Simultaneously, the need for creating interfaces with young boys and men is becoming a growing concern for feminist organizations engaged in direct implementation processes at the grass-roots level, such as ANANDI-India, due to the increase in cases of sexual violence and unnatural deaths.

Existing literature suggests rootedness of notions about masculinity in acts of sexual violence, assertion of power and domination by men, alongside men’s attitudes towards gender discrimination (Fahlberg & Pepper, 2016; Messerschmidt, 2000; Moore & Stuart, 2005; Philip, 2022; Sen et. al., 2020). Broadly, the discursive formulation of masculinity is oriented towards a conceptualization of ‘toxic masculinity’ – which further, presents an intriguing juxtaposition for both, an inquiry and systematic action on engaging with men as allies in feminist advocacy processes.

Attempts aiming towards understanding young men’s perception, notions and understanding of masculinity provide the potential for a deeper and promising exploration of possible means to build gender-centric dialogic interfaces with men.

Trespassing boundaries

Masculinity does not operate in a vacuum. Instead, it reproduces and is reproduced by both material and socio-cultural conditions. While young people’s perceptions of masculinity largely coincide with mainstream notions surrounding masculinity, and by extension, gender norms, it is also seen that in the praxis of their everyday lives, young men engage in several negotiations, often trespassing expected boundaries of gendered behaviour. People’s conception of masculinity stands in relation to the framework of hegemonic masculinity, with articulations suggesting that young people hold clear notions about what it means to be a man enough.

While there is a clear difference between the views held in terms of labour and rest/leisure, young men do share a sense of acknowledgement of the exhaustion experienced by women – suggesting grounds for possibilities of longer and critical engagements with them on questions on unpaid labour, time poverty, leisure inequality, and ethics of care. On the question of risk, mobility, and protection, a possible factor playing out in the reproduction and maintenance of a framework founded upon restricted and regulated mobility of women, could be men’s self-identified burden of protectionism, possibly, encouraging them to facilitate this framework.

Little affirmative vocabulary

A deeper engagement is required with young men surrounding the fundamental question of agency so as to arrive at the idea of men overriding women’s agency, particularly, with regard to consent – since ANANDI-India already engages with young women on questions of consent, there possibly lie grounds for engagement with men on similar questions – it was found that young men also do not consider themselves to be in control of their bodily autonomy, with regard to marriage and reproduction, further inquiries using participatory research methods can be helpful for building future interventions on this aspect.

There is little affirmative vocabulary (and comfort) for conversations on desire: the sexual, evidently, operates within a marital-procreation framework, instead of a framework which acknowledges bodily desires and the need for peer-support and guidance, particularly for adolescents – no concrete suggestions can be made on this juxtaposition presently and a deeper engagement which takes into account the context more carefully, especially with real-life implications of desire-affirmative engagements with young people, shall be greatly fruitful.

Ansh Sharma is a postgraduate student in Sociology at School of Liberal Studies, Ambedkar University, Delhi. This piece has been extracted from the internship report submitted by the author as part of the Abhijit Sen Rural Internship programme of National Foundation for India (NFI).