Janice Fiamengo is a staunch antifeminist – in her Fiamengo File on YouTube she sometimes criticizes Christina Hoff Sommers or Camille Paglia for being too soft on feminism. She has a tendency to blame 'the left' for things and her audience is probably rather right-wing. But she brings her points always in a reasonable and intelligent way, is never ranting or calling people names. The book is a selection from mostly life stories men sent to her.
The chapters are very diverse. Not for a moment one gets the impression the editor has chosen the stories that agree most with her view. The subjects also vary a lot – a lot more, for example, than in Cassie Jaye’s film The Red Pill about the Men’s Rights Movement, which had big value but was largely about divorce courts and domestic violence in the USA. Most of the contributors of the book don’t seem to be Men’s Rights Activists either, though some of them are. Most are Americans, but there are contributions from all over the world.
Quite a few chapters are about education – experiences with feminist mothers or teachers. There is also quite a bit about sexuality (the subject virtually missing in The Red Pill) in the book, partly in the same chapters. Not just about abuse by women or about false accusations, but also about being shamed and punished for making girls and women uncomfortable with no bad intentions at all. Partly also about men who don’t approach women anymore, exactly to avoid that – realize that the stories were written way before the #MeToo-campaign took off. Furthermore, the subjects vary from crazy marriages to information about feminism in the army or the Catholic church. You don’t have to like the army or the Catholic church to be critical about these developments.
Of course, the first question the reader asks himself is: are the contributors honest? Can we believe them? I tend to answer this question in an affirmative way. That is to say: they probably won’t lie about the things they remember. No doubt, they might remember things wrong. They might interpret them very subjectively. Some of the authors clearly have mental health issues and some don’t deny that either.
But Sons of Feminism is not a book you have to believe every word of for it to be still interesting and valuable. And a lot of the men telling their story do explicitly talk about their own role in what happened, mistakes they made, how sorry they sometimes are for that, while at the same time leaving no doubt they think they have been duped by what they see as gynocentrism in society or dogmatic feminism. No misogyny is found in the book – maybe partly due to the selection of Mrs. Fiamengo. On the contrary: many men talk gratefully and admiringly about women who helped and supported them in dark moments. Some chapters are rather traditionalist and conservative, others embrace practical equality between men and women; also in that respect it is a very diverse book. But none of the authors want to force women back into the kitchen or anything like that.
Some stories are a bit confused and confusing, for example the one of a transsexual who seems more the victim of transphobia than of actual sexism. Others are really moving and touching, could be even material for a short novel or story. I liked ‘Deadbeat dad’ and ‘The Definition of Insanity’ best in that regard. What is so valuable about the book anyway, is that our society has the last decades been flooded by subjective – and not always untrue – stories of women who claimed to have been duped by sexism, and the dominant narrative in education, in media, in liberal politics and partly even in conservative politics, has been largely shaped by them. Compared to that, this is only a tiny beginning of getting subjective men’s stories in the open, warts and all, absolutely necessary as a suppletion to more theoretical criticism of modern feminism. If only because of that, but for a lot more reasons, Sons of Feminism is a must read for everybody interested in an open minded approach to gender issues.
Sons of Feminism, Men Have Their Say, introduced and edited by Janice Fiamengo, Little Nightingale Press, Ottawa, Ontario, Canada.
