Not An Exception: '(Un)ethical' Men, Apologies, and Women (still) as Healers
CW: ranting about sexism, mention of r*pe culture, descriptions of men abusing power, mentions of #metoo,
There is a trend of men who are often 'woke', feminist, and well-educated, but who will also always consider themselves as exceptions to the rule.
For example: - The activist who interrupts and talks over women to talk about feminism. - The gender studies academic who doesn’t think it’s an abuse of power to sleep with his students. - The feminist who talks about the importance of sharing domestic labour but doesn’t practice it. - The sex-positive guy who’ll find excuses to push touch boundaries. - The leftie friend who treats women as emotional weight bearers and doesn’t take ‘no’ for an answer. - The good boyfriend who doesn’t know how to be friends with other women and ends up objectifying or ignoring them. - The chill guy who doesn’t think his mate is really as bad as what women say about him, cuz he’s a good bloke who just isn’t like that.
If you feel personally accused by these descriptions, or that it hits close to home, then I’d like us to take a moment to process this, because it’s important to have this discussion move towards looking at it as a systemic problem. Depressingly, yes, I probably know at least a couple of people who would fit into each description above, but it’s not a problem of thinking it as if they are ‘bad eggs’. I’m sure everyone knows some - if not all - of these types of ‘good’ feminist men. That’s the point.
All men fuck up, yes even the ‘good ones’ #yesallmen, because everyone fucks up.
Learning to apologise is an important skill for the times after we fuck up, and the first step is to practice trying not to be defensive, which is really hard but something that can be unlearnt with some effort. But if someone is taking the time and energy to say something, maybe something about how you’ve hurt them and opening up and being vulnerable about this, it’s probably because they care and believe that you can do better (which I think is a rather nice thing, and that its productive to not think of ourselves as stable beings but as people who are in processes of becoming~ H/T simone de beauvoir~).
There’s a bunch of resources online about how to apologise well. There’s many ways and approaches to apologise, but here’s 5 steps published in a psychology journal (https://link.springer.com/article/10.1023/A%3A1025068306386):
“These five strategies are
[1] an illocutionary force indicating device (IFID; such as, "I'm sorry," "I apologize," or "Excuse me"),
[2] an explanation or account of the cause which brought about the violation,
[3] an expression of the speaker's responsibility for the offense,
[4] an offer of repair,
[5] and a promise of forbearance.”
Something I would like to add here is that there are political implications at play in these dynamics. Women are pressured and assumed to be the ones who must fix relational tensions (c.f. my honours thesis, 2016). Men who perform defensively, who do not show a desire to listen, and who have not taken the time to learn to apologise well, are continuing to force women to perform as healers. In this gendered dynamic, not only has the man hurt the woman, the onus is always on the woman to repair the hurt the man has inflicted on her.
I've seen feminist people rationalise how it’s okay to pick and choose between when and where they will listen and dismiss women, like tuning in and out of radio stations. But if we've learnt anything this past year is that we should be \ \ \ LISTENING TO WOMEN / / /
The #metoo movement was people sharing their personal stories and exerting huge amounts of emotional labour en masse to educate people. #Metoo allowed those who didn’t think it was ‘as bad as it was’, the privilege of a lens into people’s deeply vulnerable and traumatic experiences, so that we all might understand something about how the patriarchy and rape culture works.
Sometimes talking to men, yes even more poignantly with feminist men sometimes, I feel like I’m banging my head against a brick wall if they start to feel like what I’m trying to say could be considered as an attack on their good character, like how sometimes individual men feel personally attacked or threatened by feminism. Which misses the point, disregards the emotional labour being performed (talking about politics is not just an intellectual discussion and an exchanging of ‘opinion’ but is very personal because it directly impacts people’s ability to live), and replicates the dismissal of women’s knowledge/emotions/voices as unreasonable. It happens all the time, because men aren’t used to being accused or held accountable for their actions.