Unreasonable Men: Masculinity and Social Theory

InUnreasonable Men,Victor Seidler argues that the conflation of masculinity and reason has influenced and distorted Western concepts of modernity as well as the dominant forms of social theory and philosophy. This alliance of masculinity and reason is also a source of power that promotes an unreasonable form of reason often used to control women. Under this belief system, emotions are deemed to be too "personal" and "subjective" when contrasted with the "objectivity" of reason and are thus discounted as forms of knowledge. The dominant forms of social theory have worked with a universal and impersonal conception of reason which discounts the value of experience, treating it as the mere effect of language.