This special issue of The Courier, ‘Genders’ contains no articles that make specific reference to the noun ‘man’ in their title. Nevertheless, man, the male of the species, is the principal subject. When we speak of the injustices condemned in Beijing in 1995 at the United Nations World Conference on Women – injustices that are continuing – man is there. When we stress the progress achieved in terms of national and international laws, education, the combating of misogyny and iniquities against women, he is also there. Laws to promote equal opportunities between the genders could not have been approved in the parliaments of the world without the support of the men who make up the majority of the law-makers who sit in them. 

Women and men – whether champions of equal rights between the genders, or chauvinists –are engaged in a permanent dialectic. When one is in the light, the other is in the shadows and the light is only perceived because there are shadows. When one speaks of injustice against women, from rape to the pre-empting of important political posts, one also speaks of the perpetrators. The perpetrator or the subject, the one who “does commit the act”. While women are conquering certain male bastions, such as high-level posts in the US black community or academic success at Jamaica’s universities, we also see the emergence of complexes among men that translate into reactions that are chauvinist, suicidal or self-deprecating. The film by the director Denys Arcand, The Decline of the American Empire, which takes place in Quebec, illustrates the fact that disarray among males is not limited to certain societies. 

When we speak of women, man is also present. Elisabeth Badinter, in X Y. De l’identité masculine, remarked that the male will proclaim successively in the course of his life that he is not his mother’s boy, that he is not a girl and that he is not  gay. She concludes that “being a man is said more often in the imperative than in the indicative… it implies a labour, an effort that does not seem to be demanded in the same way of women… as if femininity were natural and masculinity had to be acquired at great cost*.” She adopts the words of Pierre Bourdieu**: “To praise a man it is enough to tell him that he is a man.” She then concludes that “contrary to patriarchal belief, it is not men who are the first referents of humanity but women. It is in relation to women and in opposition to women that men have been defined… Until now.”  

Until now. Because men are changing. A new masculine identity that seeks similarities with women, rather than dissimilarities and oppositions, is in the making. We must no longer ignore the violence and the strength of women considered as the eternal “victims of masculine oppression, of the other, of the all-powerful torturers”*** in a humanity that is divided into two. 

Failure to combat misogyny in the name of misandry. That is a way of speaking of men.

* L'Un est l'Autre, Éditions Odile Jacob, 1986, p. 249
** La domination masculine, Actes de la recherche en sciences sociales, no 84, Sept. 1990, p 21.
*** Fausse route, Éditions Odile Jacob, 2003, p. 113.

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