Webster’s Dictionary defines the word “chud” as “a generalised term of disparagement used somewhat synonymously with fool, troll, and jerk, to suggest that someone is rude/boorish/regressive/unintelligent/etc”. “Chud” first entered the vernacular as an epithet for a certain type of far-right, chronically online troglodyte. A chud uses vague, inconsistent ideas of politics as a way to harass minorities or dismiss their experiences. An infamous example of this is how International Women’s Day is discussed more than International Men’s Day on INM as a disingenuous put-down to discussion of women’s issues. Despite what the title of this article may suggest, I assure you that I am not a chud, and there will be no “chudding out” in this article. Instead, I’m going to lay out why I think Movember is important, and why some critiques of it are wrong and unhelpful.
Movember is a charity set up to increase awareness of and fundraise for men’s health issues, specifically testicular and prostate cancer, mental health, and suicide prevention. I think that the latter two are why Movember takes up so much space in public discourse. Many men seem to feel very strongly that there is a men’s mental health crisis.
A pertinent question to address is whether there actually is a men’s mental health crisis. Critics of Movember often cite the fact that women actually attempt suicide at higher rates than men do as evidence that there is not a mental health crisis specific to men, but rather a general one. However, citing these statistics without considering the context behind them is flawed.
These statistics are inaccurate because, firstly, considering the stigma around male emotional vulnerability, men are less likely to report surviving a suicide attempt than women, and secondly, when men attempt suicide, they tend to choose immediate methods which result in near-instantaneous death, while women choose less immediate methods and are more likely to reach out for help in the interim. This results in women having a vastly higher likelihood of surviving an attempt than men do. Given that one in five survivors of suicide go on to attempt again, this skews the attempt rate towards women, because if men commit suicide on their first attempt, they obviously can’t go on to re-attempt later.
But even if we contextualise this disparity in this way, it doesn’t completely flip the statistic; it doesn’t suddenly make it so that men attempt suicide at vastly higher rates than women (I think it’s fair to say the above contextualisation could at best make attempt rates about equal). It still doesn’t tell us what a lot of men are telling us, that there is a widespread mental health crisis specific to men. So what do men mean when we say this?
I submit that what men mean is that we live in a culture which forcibly sands off men’s ability to openly express and articulate their normal human emotions in a way which denies men wholeness, closeness, or the ability to make themselves fully knowable to the people around them. As bell hooks writes in “The Will to Change”:
“The first act of violence that patriarchy demands of males is not violence toward women. Instead, patriarchy demands of all males that they engage in acts of psychic self-mutilation, that they kill off the emotional parts of themselves. If an individual is not successful in emotionally crippling himself, he can count on patriarchal men to enact rituals of power that will assault his self-esteem.”
I think that this is a good description of what most men mean when we talk about difficulties regarding mental health and emotional expression, and this is what I will be referencing when I respond to critiques of Movember.
The first of these critiques comes from a Trinity News article from last year titled “Movember: the Man, the Myth, the ‘Legend’” by Grace O’Brien. The most objectionable segment is below:
“From what I can see, we all know and must deal with men’s mental health whether we like it or not. Men not talking to other men because of stigma (created by the patriarchy) doesn’t mean it has been a silent battle for all suffering gents. Mothers, girlfriends, wives, and daughters everywhere have been subjected to the private highs and lows of men’s mental health. This silent, unpaid, emotional labour is no secret, but because it’s women who do it, its [sic] valueless.”
I really don’t like this argument. Firstly, I emphatically reject the notion that I, or any other man, is somehow responsible for the shame I hold in this regard. In my most formative years, I was repeatedly and publicly shamed (by both men and women) for any sort of outward expression of emotional vulnerability. It was made clear to me as soon as I was old enough to understand that those parts of me were wrong to show anyone, and it was wrong because I am a man. My childhood is littered with memories of me crying into my pillow because I was rejected when I sought comfort and reassurance in some of my most vulnerable moments, and the feeling that I was somehow inherently lesser as a man for expressing normal human emotions and wants. Apparently, however, because this shame is created by patriarchy, and because I am a man (and thus literally a patriarch), I actually chose to do this to myself and the ~12,000 years of patriarchal culture that came before me had nothing to do with it.
Aside from being profoundly cruel, this critique is also completely nonsensical. Women are absolutely (and unfairly) tasked with compensating for men’s inability to emotionally regulate themselves and other men, and end up doing more emotional labour. It would probably reduce the amount of emotional labour forced upon women if there was some sort of mass men’s movement where men encouraged other men to be open about how they felt and discuss these things amongst one another. Perhaps you could hold it in November or something …. Oh wait!
O’Brien then laments that Movember is “an exclusively male charitable body”, and refers to it as a “pseudo-fraternity”, connecting Movember with all of the illicit misogynistic implications that come packaged with fraternities. O’Brien simultaneously criticises Movember for “relying […] on the maternal push of the many women that I see organising, working, and promoting these events”. In O’Brien’s view, if Movember is organised by men to discuss men’s issues, then that’s wrong and vaguely sexist somehow, yet if they choose to allow women to volunteer, or to hold organisational or leadership positions, then this is also wrong, sexist, and subjecting women to undue emotional labour. So how should Movember organise then? O’Brien seems to believe that no matter how Movember is organised, it is inherently wrong, and that men at large should go back into their box rooms and stop talking about how patriarchy strips men of emotional wholeness and intimacy. Which, ironically, is an extremely patriarchal line of thinking.
The second critique of Movember comes from an article written last year by Manasvini Naren, titled “Movember’s Apolitical Performance”. Naren’s main point is that Movember is not sufficiently anti-capitalist and anti-patriarchal. Naren laments the absence of any mention of patriarchy on the Movember website. I think that this absence is actually a good thing, and I think that Naren’s general argument reveals an ignorance of how the realities of capitalism actually manifest in the lives of working people.
During a visit to the Dalkey Book Festival in June, Salman Rushdie asked, “What happens when language does not work any more?”, remarking that “Even if people speak the same language, we don’t understand each other, and we use the same words to mean different things”. There is no better topic that displays this than feminism. As Ferdinand de Saussure tells us, language only works when we, as a society, agree about what concepts words actually refer to (signified and signifier, respectively). When I say the word tree, you know that I’m referring to the thing we both see outside with branches and leaves. If I said the word “feminism” in the 1970s, you would know I’m referring to Betty Friedan because we both saw her on television. But today we no longer have the same frame of reference for how we learn about the world. Due to algorithmically curated content, your algorithm is exactly that: your algorithm. It is tailored to excite, sadden, and most commonly infuriate you specifically, and what you see online could be completely different to what someone else sees.
Because of this specificity, you could define patriarchy in the way that you and I do, or you could define it in a chud-esque manner that patriarchy means that all men are literally oppressing all women. Both definitions would genuinely be valid (not correct but valid), because for some people, through no fault of their own, only the latter is discussed. It is exceptionally difficult to have a conventional discussion about patriarchy in these circumstances. If our goal is to deconstruct patriarchy, then it might be best for movements like Movember to not say the words “feminism” or “patriarchy” outright, as the very men whom we need to convince the most have been deliberately poisoned against these terms by agents of patriarchal culture. I find from my own conversations with friends that if you articulate what you mean without saying those two words, most adherents to chud-esque arguments will actually agree with you unreservedly.
But what makes something anti-patriarchal? Does something become increasingly anti-patriarchal the more times it says the word “patriarchy” on its website? I think not. Consider the mass radicalisation of young men online towards far-right ideologies in recent years. The first thing they saw was almost certainly not outwardly fascist, but it served to slowly radicalise them into more developed versions of that ideology. Why can’t we do the same for feminist or anti-patriarchal ideas? Surely we can see how Movember challenges patriarchal norms, even if it doesn’t follow the ironically capitalistic demand to constantly brand itself as such, or to outwardly broadcast the intimate, private conversations the movement inspires, as Movember aims to encourage men to connect with their own, and one another’s, emotional wellbeing and sensitivity.
Now this aim may seem surface level or banal to you, dear reader, but I would humbly ask you to put down your unlit performative cigarette, take off your Doc Martens, and take five steps outside of the Arts Block and remember (or learn for the first time) how normal people actually live. Most working people don’t come from academic households, where both parents went to college, and these kinds of topics were discussed over the dinner table. Most working people didn’t attend prestigious private schools where they pursued their interests to the fullest and read up on these matters. Most working people simply don’t have the time to read dense, jargon-ridden academic textbooks about feminism. And this isn’t their fault, as academics have consistently failed to recognise how class issues intersect with feminism. As hooks writes:
“Had Faludi read the work of feminist women of colour writing about the poor and working-class men whom we know most intimately, she would not have been “surprised” to find masses of men troubled and discontent. Women with class privilege have been the only group who have perpetuated the notion that men are all-powerful, because often the men in their families were powerful.”
For most people, particularly in parts of Ireland like where I’m from, the idea that it’s normal and healthy for men to embrace and freely discuss their emotions is genuinely a novel radical idea.
Naren writes that “[men’s mental health] is inherently social and therefore demands a political reckoning which Movember firmly refuses to do”. Imagine going up to your average guy, who is just now unpacking that it’s okay for men to have feelings, and expecting him to then immediately understand as well as “confront the structural and historical forces that place men in this position to begin with: the patriarchy and late-stage capitalism”. Can you see what I mean when I say that it might be a bit much, a bit fast?
While I’ve critiqued both O’Brien and Naren heavily here, I acknowledge that parts of their articles relate to the conduct of TCD Movember specifically, and I find their criticisms of TCD Movember to be salient. Frankly, I think that some past conduct of TCD Movember veers into misogynistic chud-esque territory. But I don’t think the failings of these particular Arts Block “celebrities” need to be lumped in with Movember as a whole.
I think a lot of women object to the existence of Movember out of hand, and I actually think this is more than fair. I cannot imagine how infuriating it would feel as a woman to articulate the visceral effects of patriarchy your entire life, to be consistently ignored, only for men to turn around and say that patriarchy is real, actually. And it’s real only because it “makes men feel bad sometimes”. But I ask you to be patient. Just as women came to feminist ideas by reflections on their own personal experiences with patriarchy, can we fault men for doing the same? (Provided this is accompanied by reflections on how patriarchy affects others, which I acknowledge for some men is a big “if”).
I hate that this argument has pitted men and women against each other. Because I think patriarchy deeply wounds everyone (women more than men), and that it’s in everyone’s best interest to dismantle it. If we take from hooks that this “psychic self-mutilation” is the first act demanded of men by patriarchy, that this severing of emotion creates profound dissatisfaction, frustration and quiet desperation in the lives of men, and that these effects cause men to enact and encode the cruelty of patriarchy in their own homes and onto the next generation, then we have to accept that the emotional reintegration of men is an essential part of dismantling patriarchy, even if some don’t want to hear about it. For if this is how patriarchy disseminates, how else can we expect to stop it?
It is only when we, as a collective, encourage the emotional healing of men that we will see real change. But this change will be gradual, not excessively slow or centuries long, but it might not all happen at once. But that doesn’t mean that nothing is changing. As Rebecca Solnit writes:
“Describing the slowness of change is often confused with acceptance of the status quo. It’s really the opposite: an argument that the status quo must be changed, and it will take steadfast commitment to see the job through. It’s not accepting defeat; it’s accepting the terms of possible victory. Distance runners pace themselves; activists and movements often need to do the same, and to learn from the timelines of earlier campaigns to change the world that have succeeded.”
