Can men be feminists?

[IsSamNormansDad]

This is my first post in FWR, so please be gentle.
I was chatting with DH about random stuff and he remarked that girls always seemed to be portrayed playing with 'house stuff' and boys seemed to be portrayed being 'actiony' (his words not mine).
I agreed, and said that with a DC of each sex, he best get used to his daughter being told she couldn't/shouldn't play with stuff that's not 'girly', must wear pink etc. he got a bit annoyed that it would be assumed that she wouldn't be as strong as her brother etc.
He was really quite pissed off when he realised she might not have the same opportunities as her brother just because she's a girl. I told him that I think he is a feminist, but DH thinks only women can be feminists. He's wrong isn't he?

As AF said there are few publicly visible men even identifying as feminists: if someone was asked to name the twenty most active people for the cause of women's rights or gender equality (to avoid the "feminist men" question in the first place) I would expect 20 women.

It's not the same with other movements though. eg movement against poverty led by bourgeois shop stewards on £130000/year and millionaires like Michael Moore and Barbara Ehrenreich. Of course we can't expect those who are in absolute poverty or near that to be political leaders, but could it not be done better than by people from such comfortable backgrounds? I have no doubt most of these people's empathy is genuine, it just isn't a substitute for the lived experience of the worse off.

and anti-racism seems to be spoken by whites most of the time that I hear it, apart from at specialist spaces like Racialicious and The Root. Most of the leaders against fascism and Islamophobia are non-Muslim whites.

Is that inevitable though? Could all the social liberation movements now reach a stage where they are led by members of the oppressed group and not by privileged spokespeople, and yet be inclusive of anyone who recognises their privilege, wishes to be an ally and does not demand the right to define the movement?

I'm a man and probably much like your DH in that I assume people are entitled to equal rights, and I don't see people in terms of gender stereotypes. I don't really see gender as a valid concept at all.

But I don't call myself a feminist. I think doing so would cheapen what it means to be someone whose life is actually demarcated by that struggle. I always suspect when men call themselves feminists that they're trying to get credibility vicariously, to assume oppression by proxy so they can be "down with the struggle". Maybe there's a kind of guilt involved, I don't know.

I tend to agree with AnyFucker. There's a difference between being someone at the centre of an injustice, whose happiness is directly dependent on addressing that injustice, and being a concerned outsider.

you sound like my H, FL