In August 1967, the African American civil rights leader Reverend Martin Luther King Jr delivered a talk to the 11th convention of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, in Atlanta, Georgia, under the title ‘Where Do We Go from Here?’ The talk was subsequently published as ‘Black Power’ in the book Where Do We Go from Here: Chaos or Community? Something he said about love and power is of especial interest:

To consider masculinity is always to consider power: to examine what power allows us to do or not do, what it generates in us and others, and what it captures or disables. Paying critical attention to power leads us to recognise not only who has it, but who is at the receiving end of it, in what forms it comes and, above all, how it works and what it produces and hides. It seems, therefore, that we must understand power if we wish to understand men. It also seems important to be awake to the fact that power is not necessarily negative or oppressive. It can instead be seen as a form of love: power can be used to demand justice for others.

This suggests that, in concerning ourselves with masculinity, we cannot escape the matter of power, which is to say we cannot evade the question of the gendered pattern of power in a place. We are therefore always faced with the question of men and their relations to other men, women, non-conforming individuals, children, other species and the environment. Of course, power is not uniformly distributed among men; some men obviously have more power than others. It appears to me that in a society that privileges men just because they are men, it is for all aware men to invite other men to reflect on what having gender power implies, which is to say what the individual might do with the limited or immense power he may possess as a man.