Fear Factor: Mansplaining edition

So, I’m dating a feminist. It’s a relatively new experience for me; I’ve dated guys who were “not feminists, but” and guys who called themselves feminists but who, when push came to shove, had pretty traditional beliefs about gender. This is the first time I’ve dated a feminist who rightly calls himself one, and who actually thinks – worries, even – about how to be a better feminist. His greatest worry? Mansplaining.

He loves to talk and debate and think aloud about how issues and ideas are interconnected. But he is really afraid that one of these days, as he is talking or debating or thinking aloud, he is going to accidentally mansplain and be called out on it and be labeled a mansplainer and a terrible person and be sent straight to the third circle of sexist hell with Joe Francis and Bill O’Reilly.

It’s a reasonable fear. Feminist women rightly don’t like being mansplained to, and we tend to call men out on it when they do it. My lovely gentleman friend – I’ll call him, er, Schmaniel – wants to talk about gender and sex and culture and all those interesting, important things. But he’s afraid that he’ll forget to check his privilege, or that he’ll fail to notice a particular aspect of that privilege, and that he will end up mansplaining and upsetting someone.

My general policy, and what I usually tell him to reassure him, is that if you are worrying about being a mansplainer, you are probably not a mansplainer. If you’re thinking, before you speak, about how your male privilege might alter the meaning or reception of what you’re about to say, you’re unlikely to say something that assumes that you’re right by virtue of being a man or that dismisses the experiences of women. You might still occasionally and accidentally mansplain, but that doesn’t make you a mansplainer. It makes you someone who mansplains occasionally, by accident, and who listens to whomever calls you out on it and tries very hard not to do it again. The process of thinking before you speak, and listening if someone objects to what you said (or how you said it), and then thinking again before the next time you speak, in fact, makes you a pretty diligent and valuable male feminist ally.

I also remind him that we all forget our privilege sometimes. As Jay Smooth said to me last week, part of being a “good person,” or in this case, a “good male feminist ally” is “to constantly challenge yourself and be open to being challenged, and to respond to criticism with humility.” Which is exactly what Schmaniel is doing.

But when we have these discussions, Schmaniel and I, they always end up being about something larger than mansplaining. After all, he’s not just afraid of being labeled a mansplainer – he’s afraid of what that label will say about him and his feminism. What’s really at the core of these discussions is this very important question: what is the role of an individual man in feminism? I’m not talking about men, as a group, as an idea, as the master’s house, because that’s a much, much bigger question on which whole books could be and have been written. I’m talking about the individual feminist guy out there, the guy who wants to do his best to be a good feminist ally, who wants to be able to engage in, say, a dinner table conversation about gender and about sexism, without recreating the very power dynamics that feminism seeks to break down. What is his role in that conversation? How can he best participate in those small, personal but political moments of feminism?

Enter the brilliant women’s studies teacher and blogger Hugo Schwyzer, who in a recent blog post summed it up in just four words: “Step up. Step back.”

Stepping up means being willing to listen to women’s righteous anger. That doesn’t mean groveling on the ground in abject apology merely for having a penis — contrary to stereotype, that’s not what feminists (at least not any I’ve ever met) want. That means really hearing women, without giving into the temptation to become petulant, defensive, or hurt… Stepping up means, of course, being willing to confront other men. I’ve said over and over again that the acid test of a man’s commitment to feminism often comes not only in terms of how he treats women, but also how he speaks about women when he’s in all-male spaces… Stepping up means challenging the jokes and complaints and objectifying remarks that are so much a part of the conversation in all-male spaces.

So that’s part one. Schwyzer explains part two, stepping back, thusly:

Stepping back doesn’t mean men should never speak up in feminist spaces. Stepping back is not about silently serving in the background. Stepping back is about the willingness to engage in self-reflection, to defer, and remembering that the most important job feminist men have within the movement is not to lead women but to serve as role models to other men.

Engaging in a feminist dialogue about complex issues, the way Schmaniel wants to be able to do, without mansplaining, is a combination of both these things. To engage is to step up. To engage in a thoughtful way, aware of your own privilege and careful not to discount women’s experiences or assume that you know best simply because you have a penis, is to step up and back at the same time. Men who participate in the fight against sexism, a form of discrimination that affects them, for sure, but that has almost always been used against women, need to be content being a supporting character even though the world has raised them with the expectation that they would always play the lead.

We need men like Schmaniel, feminists or pro-feminists or feminist allies or whatever they call themselves, to step and step back. We need men like Schwyzer and Jay Smooth to keep reminding them how to do it right. We need these men, and pro-feminist allies like them – we need them, we want them, and we love them.