On sexism in the alt-lit community and a message for all us wannabe male feminists

Stephen Tully Dierks

I find myself rereading Kiese Laymon’s essay “Kanye West is Better At His Job Than I Am at Mine (But I’m Way Better at Being a Fake-Ass Feminist)” a lot.

Kiese’s a friend now, but I knew this essay before I knew him, and it’s when I read it for the first time that I knew I loved him and that he loved me. I could tell because he was willing to tell the truth about us. “I am a wannabe black male feminist who is really bad at loving women who are really good at loving me,” he wrote. It made me tense up, breathe oddly, and mutter a bunch of ‘fuck’s to myself. Truth, man. That shit is potent.

I am a wannabe. We’re all wannabes. Any man claiming to be a feminist, adhere to a feminist politics, be a feminist ally, to do feminist activist work–we’re all wannabes. The unlearning of misogyny, sexism, and patriarchy is not done by standing on proverbial mountaintop and shouting “I Am a Feminist.” You can’t purchase a bunch of “This is What a Feminist Looks Like” t-shirts and think you’ve got it down. You can’t be “good” just because you’ve declared yourself so.

I had never heard of Stephen Tully Dierks before the Gawker story “Hip Alt-Lit Editor Quits Public Writing Career After Rape Accusations.” I’m neither hip or a reader of alt-lit. But what I recognize in the story of Sophia Katz, the young woman who wrote about the ways in which Dierks violated her (she gave him a fake name in her essay), is a man who believed himself “good” and therefore absolved of the toxic sexist culture and therefore incapable of harm. And therefore, also, even more entitled. 

It’s a complaint I hear often from women in what are supposed to be progressive spaces. The types of men they organize, write, and form community with, the ones who talk the loudest about the dismantling of the heteropatriarchy and all the other “good” sounding rhetoric, are some of the biggest predators.

Last week, when I wrote about how feminism shouldn’t make men comfortable, I got a number of responses about how feminists should be more welcoming to male allies because the movement needs them. I couldn’t help but think of the stories like Sophia’s–in which the men are accommodated and the women have their trust broken and sometimes their bodies violated. And then I want to ask, “Is that risk really worth it?”

That isn’t an argument against men joining feminist movements, but in favor of being critical. Any man who talks a good game should be scrutinized extra heavily, to find out if it’s just that: game. I don’t exempt myself from this. “I am a wannabe black male feminist who is really bad at loving women who are really good at loving me,” Kiese said about himself and me. It’s as true today as when I started on my journey engaging feminism. I could pat myself on the back for not being Dierks, but what an incredibly low bar to set. More men than not could claim to be feminists if that’s all that were required.

It’s not enough to separate ourselves out into categories of “good” and “bad,” “feminist” and “misogynist,” because too often the assigning of the label is mistaken for the work. Robyn Pennachia has a great piece up over at Death and Taxes about this, where she writes:

There’s been a lot of attention, recently, paid towards sexism, sexual assault, harassment and misogyny in certain counter-cultural or non-mainstream groups. Specifically, the gaming community, the atheist community and, now, the alt-lit community.