On Blaming, and Being, the Patriarchy, part III
Always more to say on this topic, it seems. Which, of course, means I am in danger of shifting my focus in a way that's not very feminist. Ack. Navigating these concepts is hard.

But I am still heartened that there are others out there thinking about the stuff I'm thinking about. This time I'm looking at Chris Crass' essay, "Going to Places That Scare Me," which contains some good reflections of being a feminist man (various flavors are represented in articles there), as well as great pointers toward constructive action.

One of the things that resonated with me on a personal level was Chris' biographical account of the guilt he feels as a white male:

I remember sitting in an African American women’s history class, one of two white people, one of two men, the other 15 people Black women and I’m the only white man. We were studying slavery, Ida B. Wells’ anti-lynching campaign and the systematic raping of enslaved African women by white male slave owners - millions of rapes, sanctioned and protected by law. Simultaneously hundreds of Black men were lynched by white men who claimed to be protecting white women from Black male rapists. I sat there with my head down and I could feel history in my nauseated stomach and in my eyes filling with tears. Who were those white men and how did they feel about themselves? I was scared to look into the faces of the Black women in that room. “While there is mixing of races because of love,” the Professor said, “our people are so many shades of Black because of generation after generation of institutionalized rape.” Who am I and how do I feel about myself?

To me, this conveys the force of the guilt that I can sometimes feel, that I look to overcome to the degree that it inhibits getting stuff done, but which ought not be ignored completely. But Chris' contribution is more than this--he then goes on to explain not only what he's going through/went through, but also some practical ways to do some good, even in the face of the guilt. And he does this, appropriately enough, by asking for help and listening to an activist who is also a woman:

While it’s necessary to get into the hard emotional and psychological issues, there is also an endless supply of conrete steps we can take to challenge male supremacy.

An organizer working on Palestinian Liberation wrote me saying, “some things gender privileged people can do: offer to take notes in meetings, make phone calls, find meeting locations, do childcare, make copies and other less glamorous work. Encourage women and gender oppressed people in the group to take on roles men often dominate (e.g. tactical, mc-ing and event, media spokespeople). Ask specific women if they want to do it and explain why you think they would be good (don’t tokenize). Pay attention to who you listen to and check yourself on power-tripping.”

Turns out, 'check yourself on power-tripping' is just very, very hard, and a constant struggle, really. And another interesting thing about this, I think, is that it's probably literally not possible to do this all by oneself. We have blind spots, and we need people to call us on shit sometimes. Fortunately, this can be done by feminist men as well as women, as I'm starting to discover. And, while I don't expect feminists in general to focus on how difficult it is for feminist men to struggle through this stuff, it is nice to find some other feminist men (at least in the land of the internets) who recognize the struggle as a struggle.
Filed under:Feminism