'To Fight Against Oneself'
Ivan Jablonka, A History of Masculinity: From Patriarchy to Gender Justice
Allen Lane, 368pp, £25.00, ISBN 9780241458792
reviewed by Jennifer Thomson
A recent Guardian article asked male authors to name one book they would recommend by a woman. It set my little (feminist, literary) corner of the internet aflame, falling over itself to mock a selection of famous male writers who did not appear to have read anything by women for several decades. The article is tone-deaf in its ignorance – Richard Curtis admits, with no evident shame, to not having really read anything by a woman until the Covid lockdowns; To Kill a Mockingbird and Middlemarch make inevitable, hackneyed appearances. Female authors are now deemed important because men were curating them for the rest of us.
The effusive praise which Ivan Jablonka’s A History of Masculinity was met with on its publication earlier this year felt similar. Sexism seemed to be being given greater credence now that a man had kindly explained it for the general readership. The book has been written up across a wide range of popular publications, with The Times urging us to ‘Go and read Jablonka and change the world.’ Jablonka’s work is (gendered language intended) masterful, and an incredible and worthy display of knowledge and scholarship, but I didn’t feel any such transformative urgency myself.
Though ostensibly about masculinity, much of the book's focus is is really on women. This is to some extent inevitable in any book on gender – there’s no understanding of men without women, no ying without yang – but it did feel that the focus on masculinity itself was a relatively late arrival. Instead, we get a long overview of the history of women’s subordination — which is a related topic but not the same topic.
The book’s range is wonderful, and depressingly accurate in its global survey of patriarchy from ancient to contemporary times. Yet it aims at more than just a historical review. Jablonka is equally concerned with providing a plan of action for us to escape the male-dominated world he describes. Here, the book becomes more gentle. The prescriptions that Jablonka offers are mild and liberal: he advocates for parity in institutions between men and women, for increased paternity leave, for a strengthening democracy so as to ensure a greater diversity of voices. All of these are admirable, but hardly ground-breaking for anyone who has lived in and around liberal democracy for the last few decades — and sound increasingly fanciful in an ever more authoritarian world.
The most engaging, and least gentle, section of the book is the postscript, where Jablonka gets most self-reflective. He ponders his role as a father of daughters (why does it take procreation of females for men to become vaguely feminist? Don’t men who do this see how obviously it smacks of an absence of ethical imagination?), concluding that ‘To argue for gender justice as a man is to fight against oneself.’ This was a refreshing and welcome note of conclusion. But if we are to really consider masculinity, this is the point we need to start from, not end with. An undoing of masculinity requires men to have difficult conversations with themselves about the structures of privilege in their lives, and the things that they need to do to end them, even if that necessitates their own material disadvantage. A History of Masculinity starts this conversation, but the project needs far greater urgency and introspection.
Reading it, I couldn’t help think of the many other difficult and troubling feminist books that I have read of late that have received neither the attention nor the admiration of Jablonka. Books such as Lucy Delap’s powerful and expansive Feminisms, truly breathtaking in its reach, which explores the global scope of feminism as both idea and social movement. Or two smaller feminist projects which ask complicated and nuanced questions about relations between the sexes, and the nature of desire: Tomorrow Sex Will Be Good Again by Katherine Angel and The Right to Sex by Amia Srinivasan. Jablonka’s book is an effective starting point, but it is not boundar- pushing and uncomfortable in the way these works are. Still, at least if anyone asks me to recommend a book written by a man any time soon, I’ll have something up my sleeve.
The effusive praise which Ivan Jablonka’s A History of Masculinity was met with on its publication earlier this year felt similar. Sexism seemed to be being given greater credence now that a man had kindly explained it for the general readership. The book has been written up across a wide range of popular publications, with The Times urging us to ‘Go and read Jablonka and change the world.’ Jablonka’s work is (gendered language intended) masterful, and an incredible and worthy display of knowledge and scholarship, but I didn’t feel any such transformative urgency myself.
Though ostensibly about masculinity, much of the book's focus is is really on women. This is to some extent inevitable in any book on gender – there’s no understanding of men without women, no ying without yang – but it did feel that the focus on masculinity itself was a relatively late arrival. Instead, we get a long overview of the history of women’s subordination — which is a related topic but not the same topic.
The book’s range is wonderful, and depressingly accurate in its global survey of patriarchy from ancient to contemporary times. Yet it aims at more than just a historical review. Jablonka is equally concerned with providing a plan of action for us to escape the male-dominated world he describes. Here, the book becomes more gentle. The prescriptions that Jablonka offers are mild and liberal: he advocates for parity in institutions between men and women, for increased paternity leave, for a strengthening democracy so as to ensure a greater diversity of voices. All of these are admirable, but hardly ground-breaking for anyone who has lived in and around liberal democracy for the last few decades — and sound increasingly fanciful in an ever more authoritarian world.
The most engaging, and least gentle, section of the book is the postscript, where Jablonka gets most self-reflective. He ponders his role as a father of daughters (why does it take procreation of females for men to become vaguely feminist? Don’t men who do this see how obviously it smacks of an absence of ethical imagination?), concluding that ‘To argue for gender justice as a man is to fight against oneself.’ This was a refreshing and welcome note of conclusion. But if we are to really consider masculinity, this is the point we need to start from, not end with. An undoing of masculinity requires men to have difficult conversations with themselves about the structures of privilege in their lives, and the things that they need to do to end them, even if that necessitates their own material disadvantage. A History of Masculinity starts this conversation, but the project needs far greater urgency and introspection.
Reading it, I couldn’t help think of the many other difficult and troubling feminist books that I have read of late that have received neither the attention nor the admiration of Jablonka. Books such as Lucy Delap’s powerful and expansive Feminisms, truly breathtaking in its reach, which explores the global scope of feminism as both idea and social movement. Or two smaller feminist projects which ask complicated and nuanced questions about relations between the sexes, and the nature of desire: Tomorrow Sex Will Be Good Again by Katherine Angel and The Right to Sex by Amia Srinivasan. Jablonka’s book is an effective starting point, but it is not boundar- pushing and uncomfortable in the way these works are. Still, at least if anyone asks me to recommend a book written by a man any time soon, I’ll have something up my sleeve.