We invite men from New York City and its suburbs to join us in challenging sexism, toxic masculinity, and homophobia. Please be sure to subscribe so we can contact you. We will send you very few emails.
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NYC Men for Social Justice is a new group founded by Dr. Martin Schoenhals, a long-time activist. (See “About me.”) We are collecting names and emails and then, in a few months, we will meet in person in a location convenient to all New York City residents. We anticipate a late 2025 first meeting.
The group’s goal will be to engage men in activist projects targeting gender inequality, as described below. (See what we will do.) Why men? First, I believe men need to join the fight for gender justice. Real justice work requires a commitment from those who are higher status as well as those who are lower status. Work for justice should be a commitment of all people; men need to be feminists too.
Second, gender justice needs to include not only the goal of gender equality; also of critical importance is the challenge to toxic masculinity, which is both cause and consequence of gender inequality. We need to recognize that we all pay a price for any form of injustice.
The goal for now: I am collecting names and emails of committed New York City (suburbs too) men, as a first step.
Please be sure to subscribe so we can contact you. We will send you very few emails.
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Groups of committed people can have a significant effect on movies and television shows, something I learned well when working in gay activism in the 1990s. NYC Men for Social Justice will monitor the media and will respond with criticism or praise to the leaders responsible for creating media content. When women are portrayed as one-dimensional sex objects, valued only for their looks and hotness, we will speak out. When men are portrayed as fascistic macho men, invulnerable emotionally, and purveyors of conflict and violence, we will speak out.
Teachers are major socializers of gender norms so we will work with schools to promote more humane gender values. And we will confront the lack of school challenges to bullying of boys and girls, and LGBT students. We will fight against the right-wing attempt to erase women, LGBT people, and African-American people from libraries and from the curriculum. Challenges to racism in schools will be part of our work as well.
Feminists have played a major role in urging gender equality in the raising of children. If men don’t join in this process, we tacitly condone the absence of fathers from child-rearing. I know from my students that some fathers can and do urge their daughters to be financially independent and on guard against predatory men. We can join such fathers by supporting gender equality. And when fathers do what one of my students witnessed in a toy store, calling his son gay because his son liked some girls’ toys, we can do what my student did and call out the inhumanity of this fatherly response. We will do such calling out in an organized way, helping to build a movement for teaching children humane gender values.
My name is Marty Schoenhals and I am the founder of NYC Men for Social Justice, work I happily do as a volunteer. I earned a PhD at the University of Pennsylvania in anthropology in 1991. I am a senior professor who studies contemporary Chinese culture in all its aspects, and I am fluent in Mandarin Chinese and its southwest China variants. I first spent a year in China in 1988-89 during the student democracy movement that ended with the killing of over 1000 peaceful protestors in Beijing’s Tiananmen Square. My work on Chinese culture and education was published by M.E. Sharpe and is entitled, The Paradox of Power in a People’s Republic of China Middle School.
I have taught at Columbia University, Johns Hopkins University, the University of Pennsylvania, and Swarthmore College, among other institutions, and among my invited lectures is one to the faculty in Chinese Studies at Harvard University. In 2015 I was the Project Manager for an anti-hate project at the United Nations; my duties even included writing several speeches for Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon.
I have been a strong advocate for social justice, beginning with work in the 1990’s as a salaried gay activist at the Philadelphia Lesbian and Gay Task Force. I took my UN work–which awarded money to youth worldwide for projects to challenge sexism, homophobia and racism–and turned that work into an anti-hate class that I have taught for seven years.
I am the author of several books, including one on race, Intimate Exclusion: Race and Caste Turned Inside Out, and my most recent book sketching out concrete ideas for a better and more egalitarian society, Work, Love, and Learning in Utopia: Equality Reimagined. I have lived in Brooklyn since 2007.
Please be sure to subscribe so we can contact you. We will send you very few emails.
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