ABSTRACT
The lead essay in the collection Men in Feminism opens with an eye-catching assertion, one that is as provocative as it is literally and figuratively arresting. "Men's relation to feminism," Stephen Heath writes, "is an impossible one. This is not said sadly nor angrily ... but politically. ,,1 Heath's claim to dispassionate objectivity and political correctness notwithstanding, the contents of this volume fairly bristle with the antagonistic emotions conjured forth by the subject matter
announced in the controversial title of the volume-an antagonism fueled by the very wording of that title, in which the loaded preposition in is made to bear the weight of a rather questionable relation between men and feminism. But that relation, according to Heath, is also supposedly "an impossible one," and it is telling to note how Heath's formulation has set the tone for, as well as defined the limits of and boundaries to, nearly all the discussion that follows: one critic after the other in Men in Feminism, whatever his or her personal reading of the issue, nonetheless accedes to the theoretical impossibility of men ever being "in" feminism except as an act of penetration, violence, coercion, or appropriation.
