Gray Rockin’ with Trolls

So, I finally wrote something yesterday that pissed people off. Well, men. It pissed men off. First I received a whackadoo, profanity laced missive that congratulated me on my feminist victory and then blamed me for the male suicide rate. He also told me I have a smug grinn(sic). That one hurt.

You can’t make stuff like that up. But it is ignorable.

Less ignorable are comments like the one from Biard below. When somebody starts throwing big words around like “systemic” and “regressive”, this stuff almost sounds reasonable. Except it isn’t.

Normally I would just gray rock the hell out of someone like this, but he brings up stuff I hear over and over and over in Men’s circles. I could have just replied in the comments, but I figured if I was going to have to explain it anyway, at least I could make some content out of it.

Dear Biard,

Nobody serious is saying men exist to provide unlimited free labor to women. Nobody serious is arguing that women are entitled to men’s time, money, attention, expertise, protection, emotional support, or professional services on demand. That would be absurd. Men are human beings, not public utilities.

But that is not usually what feminists are talking about when they ask men to show up.

They are talking about the social cost of participation in a system that benefits men, whether individual men personally designed that system or not. They are talking about the fact that men often receive unearned advantages from structures women have had to fight, name, explain, document, survive, and dismantle. They are talking about the gap between men saying, “I support equality,” and men doing anything that actually costs them comfort, status, money, reputation, or convenience.

That is not asking men to be feminists’ daddy. That is asking men to stop acting like life is a customer service department women are required to staff for free.

There is a real conversation to be had about labor. Women should not assume any individual man owes them endless unpaid work. Men should not be guilted into martyrdom, performance, or savior cosplay. But it is deeply dishonest to take every request for accountability, solidarity, repair, or redistribution and call it oppression.

Systemic oppression is not “someone asked me to contribute.” Systemic oppression is not “someone expected me to use my advantage responsibly.” Systemic oppression is not “I was asked to notice who has been carrying the burden while I benefited from not noticing.”

The phrase “pull your own weight” is especially rich here, because much of feminism has been about naming all the weight women have already been pulling: domestic labor, emotional labor, childcare, sexual risk, workplace discrimination, bodily danger, social management, and the endless unpaid work of explaining sexism to men.

So no, men are not feminists’ daddy.

But men are also not innocent bystanders floating above history, culture, money, violence, sex, family, politics, and power. We live inside these systems. We benefit from some parts of them. We are damaged by other parts of them. And if we want to be taken seriously as decent men, we do not get to treat every request for participation as an attack.

The question is not whether men should provide women free services.

The question is whether men are willing to pay any cost at all for the equality they claim to support.

And for a lot of men, the honest answer is still no.