Over the next few months, I will get back to developing the health section on the site.  One major change is to address men’s health concerns.  I want to develop pages not simply on men’s health issues in general, but also address women’s abuse of men and male responses to child abuse.  As I develop that part of the site more, I will be putting together professional-looking pamphlets on these topics that will be available as pdfs for anyone who wants to use them.  Simply download them, take them to your local copy place, fold them in thirds and distribute them in your community.  A few colleagues and friends are going to be helping me with this project.  I’ll announce their names as each pamphlet comes out.

To my mind, gender justice must address both women’s and men’s concerns and needs (in straight and glbtq conexts) if we are to make any long-lasting progress.  Justice (`adl) means to put things in their proper places.  We can only put things in their proper places if we come to understand the haqq of a thing; in other words, all of its rights and obligations, all of its properties and characteristics so that all things may be given their due.  To be "just," then, is to give everything its due.  Insha’Allah, the site will be able to contribute to justice in this way.

For example, with respect to domestic violence, abuse is abuse and not specific to gender. Rather, I see gender norms are an important part of an abuser’s toolbox. The abuser will use whatever he or she has to hand to control and harm you, gender norms are as effective as anything else. Sometimes gender norms are the most effective because they seem inherent to us rather than socially constructed and so open to change or critique.

Men and women may be biologically sexed male and female, but that does not mean that men and women have to perform all the gender habits that have been developed in our society over time. Some of these roles develop out of biological necessity, but as these biological necessities change (like the development of reliable birth control), roles can change.  As Mohammad Fadel has shown, some social gender roles that Muslims perceive as established by God were understood by the earliest and most influential scholars to be a function of social preference and open to change rather than eternal Qur’anic norms.  We have the ethical obligation to trace these roles back to their divine roots and see what of them is God’s guidance and what of it is our caprice. 

I see social gender roles similar to how the DSM treats mental illness. A mental illness is when a particular sort of psychological or neurological issue interferes with living a healthy life. There is nothing inherently wrong with ADD or Depression or PTSD or Schizophrenia unless they interfere with living a healthy life. Obviously, Schizophrenia interferes quite a lot, but a little ADD can be a gift for some people.

So the same with gender norms, when do male and female social gender roles become abusive and interfere with a healthy life?

I personally like a guy who does all the "manly" things like fix stuff around the house, take on the role of protecting us from intruders, take the trash out. I like being the girly one with the high heeled shoes and the eye make-up. I like cooking and doing the laundry. I do not want to fix the gutter or mow the lawn, ever. There is nothing wrong with this at all, unless these roles get used in psychologically unhealthy ways specific to that particular relationship.

I like this way of thinking about it because it allows us all to be fully responsible for our own choices as well as give the proper attention to those forces that work on us from "the outside," such as mental illness, history of abuse, drug or alcohol abuse, or even expectations of gendered behavior in our particular families, cultures, or religious traditions.  But this way of thinking requires us to be ethically scrupulous.  The middle path is never easy.  It is too easy to fall back on certain gender norms because they are ‘easy’ and ‘familiar’ even though they are, in fact, unhealthy for you and many others.  It is too easy to fall back on extreme critiques of gender norms because they articulate injustices so boldly and do not always require us to see the nuanced factors contributing to abusive relationships.  In this way to looking at things, each person must come to understand the extraordinary responsibility she or he carries in examining her or his own life choices.  As children of Adam, we must be scrupulously honest with ourselves if we want to take a middle path for ourselves and open a middle path for our community.