How men benefit from misogyny "free of guilt"

An exculpatory method some men use in conversations around male privilege and misogyny is to say that he or they do not personally contribute to the oppression of women, and so he or they bear no responsibility for the deeds of others. I'd like to address this line of thought.

I’ll approach this point by way of a hypothetical. Suppose there was a man completely free of any misogynistic tendencies. This man goes about his life without incident. But what is happening around him is the ambient level of gendered violence: domestic violence, rape, cat-calling, stalking, sexual harassment, and a number of other overt and unconscious ways other men communicate to women that they are lesser. And women, who know that it’s often safer to give a guy a fake number than refuse to give a number, develop survival techniques because--more often than not--there’s no immediate way to tell the horrible men from the not-horrible men. Women learn that politeness to random men keeps them safe.

In this way, all misogyny is terroristic in that the use of violence seeks to control women individually and as a whole. Women are nice to men in order to survive, because they never know if they will anger the wrong man. (Note: some women act against this tendency, knowing that they do not “owe” men openness to their advances or the time of day. I think that’s courageous on their part.) In any case, the man completely free of misogynistic tendencies benefits from the terroristic violence of misogynistic men because their actions condition women and create the gendered climate around the man free of misogynistic tendencies.

Now suppose the man free of misogynistic tendencies never notices how the patterns of violence color his interactions with women. Technically he is not guilty of any act in particular, but his lack of knowledge keeps him from contributing to the lessening of the misogynistic environment, even as he benefits from it in small ways.

But suppose the man free of misogynistic tendencies discovers how women are being treated, and can connect how women are treated to his own ease in existing in the world and in interactions with women.

Now there is a choice: If we assume misogyny is bad, and should not exist, the man can either choose not to act or contribute in small ways to challenging misogyny. The choice not to act is something I would consider a refusal to do the good when the good is entirely possible.

But that notion of terroristic violence is where I am coming from when I say that all men benefit from the misogynistic violence of a few men. Women do not want to become victims of men, have no way of telling which men are likely to become violent, and act accordingly. Men benefit from this social arrangement, often without seeing it.

However, living in the society we do, this hypothetical man does not exist. And all of us participate in sinful social structures built on the domination of others to some extent. A repudiation of participation in those structures and the active attempt to dismantle them is to turn toward holiness.