Selfishness and Selflessness by Linda L. Layne

Author:Linda L. Layne [Layne, Linda L.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781789205497
Barnesnoble:
Publisher: Berghahn Books, Incorporated
Published: 2020-04-09T00:00:00+00:00

Conclusions

Discussion of the place of selfishness and altruism in men’s and gender politics offers a means of unpacking the powerful sense of change in late twentieth-century Britain, and supplements the established narrative of a ‘selfish society’ created by Thatcherism. It provides us with valuable insights into the moral basis on which both political activism and intimate lives were conducted. A complex double shift can be perceived; initially, progressive men came to feel or acknowledge the justice of the feminist critique of male selfishness – emotional, sexual or material. They responded with dismay, guilt, and sometimes with an altruist or selfless politics of renouncing their privilege. Ironically, this could lead to either smug or cliqueish politics that could in turn be perceived as selfish in its narrowness.

Yet attempts to cultivate ‘selfless’ anti-sexist politics were fraught, and led to a rejection of guilt by those more interested in new masculinities, often understood in therapeutic or spiritual terms. The potentials for alliances between profeminist men and feminist women diminished, and there were increasing overlaps between the men’s movement and the child custody activism of this same period, some of which had strong anti-feminism overtones. Keith Motherson (1981: 10) noted pessimistically that ‘it often seems that our male egos are able to recuperate themselves and reform around practically anything – “anti-sexism” too can be grist to our ego mill.’ He feared that ‘men’s “liberation”’ would substitute personal growth for political activism, and thus come to represent simply ‘traditional male-bonding, “men-ism”.’

Men’s liberation, however, was not the last word. The fluid and unsettled nature of men’s politics continued, with further reactions and renunciations sparked by the ‘men’s liberation’ of the 1980s. In 1991, a dismayed younger activist in Sheffield, Dave Gauntlett, founded a new magazine called Powercut, which tried to reconnect men’s activism to ‘things which are on the feminist agenda’: ‘It seemed that the men writing in that magazine [Achilles Heel] had got so involved in all their “men’s” stuff that they had forgotten quite what they were fighting, or that they were fighting at all (having settled into more cosy and less difficult debates like whether to have a vasectomy or not, instead)’ (Gauntlett 1991). There was a raw energy to this publication, with its critique of the spiritual elements of what had become the mythopoetic men’s movement. Gauntlett described one such text as written by ‘the lazy guilty liberal Guardian-reader extraordinaire … it makes me feel sick, all this bloody crap standing between real people and real change…. Men must change but I really don’t think a lifetime trip into outer space with this shit will help’ (ibid., emphasis in the original). The accusations of men’s politics as fuelled by guilt were repetitively applied by successive waves of men active in gender politics.

Powercut is representative of some characteristic and revealing changes in very late twentieth-century gender politics. This periodical represented a major shift in the nature of social movement activism, away from a consciousness-raising model influenced by feminism, Black activism and gay liberation.

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