This is who men need to listen to regarding misogyny
(it's not alpha)
I’ve been thinking about who men are listening to when they’re trying to understand masculinity, and I think we have it a little backward. There are a lot of men talking to other men about masculinity right now. Some of those conversations are thoughtful, important, and necessary. Men need other men who can model emotional maturity, accountability, vulnerability, friendship, and healthier ways of inhabiting masculinity. I genuinely love this. But when the conversation turns specifically to misogyny and patriarchy, men cannot only look to other men to explain the system to them. (Studying masculinity without properly excavating misogyny is a particular, eerie cruelty.) They must listen to the people most harmed by it.
Try this on: men are in a boat talking about the water, while women are in the water trying not to drown.
The people in the boat can study the water. They can debate whether the current is actually dangerous, discuss how the water affects their boat, and interview other people in boats about their experiences with water. They can create podcasts and books and entire philosophies about how everyone might develop a healthier relationship with the water. Meanwhile, the people who have spent their lives swimming in it know things about that water that simply cannot be learned from inside the boat.
Women can pinpoint where the current gets dangerous. We feel it snag at our bodies. We know which parts of the boat are impossible to grab onto, accessible only by those with dry hands. We know what it feels like to expend enormous amounts of energy simply staying above water while someone safely inside the boat explains that the conditions really aren’t that bad. We also know the particular insanity of yelling, “This system is making it difficult for me to breathe,” only to hear a boater respond, “Have you considered getting into a boat?”
It gets even wilder. Instead of reaching into the water, the people in the boats begin elaborate conversations about why these drowning women haven’t figured out how to get themselves into boats. They analyze us. They diagnose our choices. Our illnesses. They develop theories about what women need and then teach those theories to other men, without ever leaning over the side and asking the women in the water what is happening down there. Or throwing a life save. Or letting down a ladder. Or getting in the water.
This is what frustrates me about conversations about misogyny that happen almost exclusively between men. Men certainly need to talk to other men about masculinity. But if you are trying to understand misogyny, you also need to listen to women. Not because women are inherently wiser or because men are incapable of understanding sexism, but because proximity to harm (oppression) creates a particular kind of knowledge. The person in the boat understands water in relationship to floating. The person in the water understands water in relationship to drowning.
If men genuinely want to construct a version of masculinity that harms fewer people, the question cannot only be, What are other men teaching me about how to be a better man? It also has to be: What are women telling me about what it has been like to live alongside men? Where are they telling me the current is strongest? What are they asking me to notice? What have they been yelling from the water that I have dismissed because it did not match my experience inside the boat?
And perhaps most importantly: Am I willing to believe them, even when what they tell me makes the boat I’m sitting in a little less comfortable?
Rooting for the fellas,
Mermaid Celeste
P.S. I sit in boats too. Whiteness, able-bodiedness, and income security...just to name a few. What are yours?