My wife loves getting in fights with people online. She often looks up when I get home from work, startled at how much time has passed. I ask what she did today and she blinks a few times, then guiltily says, “Someone was wrong on the internet.” My reaction to this has been different at different points in our relationship. In our first year, when I was a political firebrand and the ink was still drying on my diploma (minored in Women’s Studies, natch), her online encounters with The Enemy seemed tame. I felt about her as Lenin must have about Trotsky, or Malcom X about Reverend King; I was at once amused, dismissive and paternalistic. I would insert myself in a conversation only to say, “For real though, kill all men,” or, “This is all very interesting but have you considered that God is made the fuck up?” or whatever. Because they don’t learn from reasoned debate and the more you try to compromise with them the more they’ll exhaust and distract you from the real, *important* work. What that work might have been I couldn’t say, as I mostly smoked weed in the alley behind the restaurant where I worked and screwed around on Tumblr. Did we fight about it? You guys of course we fought about it.
In our second year, as I was performing the maneuver we call Growing The Fuck Up, I just didn’t have the energy. I switched from an enjoyable job with a flexible schedule that didn’t pay shit to a rigid corporate fuckpit that made me feel dead inside but paid almost a living wage. My hatred for The System atrophied into a resentment for everything around me. On top of everything else this was the year I started transition, and I was painfully aware of how delicate my situation was, how the cis world around me could revoke their acceptance of my identity at a moment’s notice if I didn’t behave. My reaction to my wife’s crusades did a 180, to the point that Oppressors could out and out attack her and I would be either too depressed or too afraid of reprisal to say anything at all. If she’d thought having a cackling jester as her backup was annoying, the hand-wringing wallflower was even worse. We fought, of course, because she thought I didn’t care enough to defend her and I resented her ability to find these people ALL THE TIME.
This year’s been different, though. I’ve come to terms with my job, published a book, transitioned well enough that even though I still have to use the men’s room at work men who don’t know me always look confused and check to see if they’re in the right place when they first walk in. We stress about rent, but I’m almost never in doubt that we’ll scrape it together somehow. I feel less and less like a child pretending to be an adult. And I have the emotional energy and the confidence to join my wife in taking on The Enemy through discourse and reason. I’ve given it a few tries now, and I have to say I still don’t know if it’s worth it, where one demographic is concerned. You might be wondering if that demographic is straight, white, male, cisgender men.
You might be one of those things I just described, reading this now. Maybe you’re like, “HEY! That’s not me!” Of course it’s not. You’re one of the good ones. It’s those other guys who are dicks. But in all honesty, you really might be out there crushing it and helping to wreck the patriarchy. Lots of Whitey McDudelords are, and you’re all beautiful. But I have a hard time believing someone *convinced* you to take up the cause. Maybe I’m wrong? I’m open to the idea that I am. Please send me your anecdote if you have one. But it feels like every time I get mad I’m being told by people that I’m only hurting the cause of justice by ever getting angry at men who insinuate that rape is ever the victim’s fault, or who talk over and dismiss women while they are talking about how rape culture affects women, or who just act like misogynistic assholes all around. I’m being told that hurting their feelings will just make them want to listen to me less, and if I’d only been nicer, sweeter, more patient, we’d have one more footsoldier in the army of feminism. Pressuring women to be sweeter to men so their feelings don’t get hurt: how the revolution will happen, I guess?
But I’ve been trying. My strategy has been to take people’s posts, copy them, paste them into a word document, and explicate them like poems. I make sure the exact line and thought I’m reacting to is right next to the words I’m using to react. I leave no room for ambiguity. I can be a little sarcastic, but I never *start* with acrimony. I do my best to say that someone is doing a misogynistic thing, instead of calling them a misogynist. I repeatedly point to very specific things that actually happened in the conversation in an attempt to keep them from veering off into the funhouse mirror reality of their remembered events. And it never, ever fucking works. It gets me called a bitch. It gets the guy I’m trying to talk to posting information about my fucking workplace in the thread out of the blue to try and shame me. Then everybody gets mad, and I leave, and sometimes the man apologizes and we have a one-on-one talk, and he approaches understanding. But that’s all he does, like the graph of a quadratic function. No matter how many times you cut the gulf between privilege and understanding in half, you still have a positive number. It always comes back to how hard this is, or how he’s being persecuted for an accident of birth, or how other angry parties from the broader conversation will never forgive him so what’s the point, every time. The closer he gets to the finish line the whinier he will be.
Maybe I’ve been approaching it the wrong way, though. Maybe there can’t be any distractions — no previous conversation, no tangents, no hurt feelings, no pride, no logical fallacies to obsess over instead of listening to what’s important. Maybe it can’t be a teachable moment, and it just has to be a lecture. So let’s talk about privilege, and how I understand exactly why it’s so hard to come to terms with having it, especially if you live in the South (and if you’re reading this you probably are). Let’s talk about how I understand and you STILL NEED TO CUT IT THE FUCK OUT. Like seriously, man the hell up and listen.
You’re a progressive man in the American Southeast. Let’s be honest, it’s pretty much a theocracy down here. Maybe you’re not an atheist, but you’re pretty ambivalent about religion. If you don’t believe gay marriage should be a thing you still believe in civil unions, which means you’re on the right track. You believe in the American dream — not the hypocritical one where everyone’s free but slaves and women can’t vote. You believe everyone should vote, everyone should have a shot at a college education and meaningful work, and everyone, white or black, man or woman, has the same potential to succeed. Even if the world around you isn’t a meritocracy you’d like to see it that way, and you work to make it that way. You believe everybody should know about safe sex and people should only get married and/or have children when they’re ready. You pride yourself on being rational and intellectual in a social milieu that…isn’t. All of this will get your ass kicked if you’re too vocal about it as a straight man in the South, which makes me want to cry because in my opinion it’s like the bare minimum required to not be The Worst Fucking Person.
So you believe all this, and you get looked at sideways at church, and your family rolls their eyes when you come to Thanksgiving dinner because they don’t get to be full bore racist without you getting your panties in a wad, and your co-workers call you a faggot if you’re blue collar or don’t invite you to get drinks after work if you’re white collar, and you feel lonely and kind of jealous of how women and people of color have these communities to rely on but for you being conscious of this stuff just isolates you more and more from other men. Then you’re having a heady, intellectual conversation about art or law or sexual politics and a woman reacts to one of your opinions really badly, or she recounts a personal anecdote that just seems out there and nonsensical. You contradict her, and her immediate response is that, no, you don’t get to talk over a woman while she’s talking about this, because you’re a man. But you’re a human being, right? And every voice has value, and nobody should be silenced because of an accident of birth. Plus she’s being irrational and why is she so angry and now she’s making you feel like a bad person even though you’re a good person. You HAVE to be a good person, because being on the right side of history is the only thing that makes the daily frustration of being a decent person in this fucked up country tolerable, and if she’s right about rape culture and privilege and everything else then what does that mean? It means your idea of yourself is invalid and no matter how hard you try you’ll never stop being part of the problem. And people are ANGRY at you, which hurts, and you want them to stop because you’re sure if they just understood what you really meant they wouldn’t be mad, but they’re too up their own asses to see, god, they’re so bitchy and hysterical—
Let’s stop there. I get it. I’ve shoved my foot in my mouth. I’m still white and able-bodied. I have a college education. There are people out there who won’t ever talk to me again because I flipped out over having my own privilege pointed out to me rather than learning right then. The difference between you (the guy I described) and me, though, is that I have a handhold for understanding my OWN privileges. Most people in America do. You don’t. You might be poor, but the peculiarities of American politics are such that, with rare exceptions, you’re so busy trying to BECOME your upper-class oppressor that you’re not able to stop and confront just how badly you’re being exploited. This is going to be harder for you than for any other type of person, is what I’m saying. The trick is, you have to listen. You have to be open to the idea that, no matter how many books you’ve read, the shit you don’t know about what women, queer people and people of color go through could fill the library of Alexandria. You have to give up on the idea of yourself as a good person who isn’t part of the problem, because that’s a cop-out. You will always be part of the problem. People like you will never, ever stop exploiting the underprivileged and giving you what’s taken from them, like a pet cat leaving dead birds on its master’s bed.
You have to be okay with getting shit wrong and having it pointed out to you. It’s the only way to get good at anything in this life, and being an ally to oppressed groups is no different. You have to be okay with not being the center of attention. You have to be okay with the idea of joining a movement where you can never be in charge. You have to be okay with losing WAY more than you already have just by being a decent person. You have to listen though, really. You have to always, always listen. And the more it hurts to hear something, the more it frustrates you, the more it seems silly or irrational or unnecessary, the more you need to listen. Because you have so much to learn, and even if we don’t want you in charge we’ll definitely welcome you with open arms if you seem like you really want to learn, and we’re much better company than the people you’re leaving behind.
