Allies: The Live Chat

This week, your intrepid bloggers met for a long and wide-ranging chat about allies, privilege, intersectionality, and more, partly in response to this article. We publish the chat here in two parts.

This chat has been edited for clarity and condensed. All views expressed are solely those of the individual blogger.

Update: Part II of this chat can be found here.

Jordan:          Welcome to our live chat! I’m so excited to talk about male allies with y’all.

First, let’s talk about good experiences with male allies. What do they add to the feminist movement? Can you name a specific contribution from a male ally?

Jocelynn:       This has been a question for me throughout my academic career. On the one hand, we want to have safe spaces for women to be able to open up to share and support each other. But the other reality I’ve experienced is that we (unfortunately or not) need men to move things forward. They need to give up some power/privilege to make space for women & others at the table. So I think we need allies but it’s a tough balance. We really need men who understand the difference between being an ally and trying to define feminism for themselves.

Robert:          I wonder about how helpful I can be on my own as a male ally. While I might have more privilege in a conversation, feminism needs a critical mass of folk to really create social pressure. Because I still find that I can be written off by those who have no good faith interest in learning about feminism.

Jordan:           So you find that you can easily be written off as “not a real man” or “duped by feminists”?

Robert:           Duped/deluded would be words I think others would use to describe me. “Difference of opinion” is thrown around a lot. Mostly I get what I’ve written about before: men do not think they are actively contributing to misogyny.

Jocelynn:        I think that’s a real challenge because men who would challenge or disrupt the patriarchy face the same threats (physical and verbal) as women do. So there is a real risk to them.

Jordan:           I don’t know that it’s the same threats. Some threat, certainly. But look at #GamerGate – men who push back against the gamers are trolled but not doxxed or sent death threats like the women.

Robert:           I think men are more likely to get discredited/shamed/threatened/diminished before being physically threatened. There seem to be a few more steps on a spectrum of response before men have to deal with death threats. But I do think there is some risk to being a visible male ally particularly in online settings where anonymity is the rule.

Jocelynn:        When my husband and I were dating, he was playing hockey for his college. We were apart – he lived in Florida and I in Connecticut. At the end of the season, the coach told the team they would have their end of the year party at [a restaurant featuring scantily clad female waitstaff] because they were a team sponsor. He publicly stood up and said he wouldn’t go because he felt they were degrading to women. His teammates and coach laughed, but the coach said he had to be there (he was the starting goalie, and as such, had a particular place in the hierarchy of the team). He said he wouldn’t go, and he was called a fagg*t and all kinds of slurs by the team. But there were also players who admired him, in a way. Some said he did it because of me, or because I told him to which was absolutely false.

Jordan:          But even if that had been true, wouldn’t that have been ok? Like, that plays into patriarchy too, this idea that husbands of women shouldn’t listen to their wives or respect their wishes.

Jocelynn:        Exactly.

Robert:          There is this pressure men feel to not be “whipped.”

Jordan:           A guy who does what his wife/girlfriend asks is whipped. A wife/girlfriend who patiently puts up with her husband/boyfriend is a good partner.

Robert:           The ideal woman in fact. Proverbs 31 and all that.

Jocelynn:        They were talking like I had brainwashed or yes, “whipped” him, but we had had conversations about [this restaurant] and he already felt that it was a bad place, and in some ways to be with me gave him space to acknowledge his real feelings.

Jordan:           I wonder if being with feminists, either as a romantic partner or as a friend or colleague can give men words to express feelings they’ve long held about the injustice of the patriarchy.

Jocelynn:        Yes!

Jordan:           Like, they knew it was wrong before they knew why it was wrong. And then talking with feminists helps them figure out why it’s wrong and express it intelligently to other men.

Robert:           You know, I often wonder about that. The last ten years of my life have felt like dropping a mask, which included a sense of hypermasculinity. I bet a lot of that had to do with my wife, but many, many other women too. And it’s possible that it happened more by story than theory.

Jordan:           As Christians, I think we know the power of story. I’ve never yet met a Christian who was compelled to be one because of Cyril of Alexandria’s defense of Christ’s dual natures, but rather because of the story of God’s love for the world.

Jocelynn:        Haha there are some students who are wooed by the theology first, but certainly they are few and far between.

                        It seems like the men that “get it” as described in that Slate article about male allies are deep thinkers and tend to be pondering this as their lived experience intersects with their thoughts.

Robert:           I started my Christian walk because of story, came back because of the theology, and am staying because of relationship with the divine.

                        Jocelynn, your mention of that article reminds me of a few things. In seminary, I would hear stories from other white men about how they felt attacked in class. I never felt this way, which is surprising, given my interests. But in any case, my understanding of feminism was that no matter what happened in the classroom, once we walked out that door, privilege would immediately take back over.

Jordan:          Did they ever talk to you about why they felt attacked?

Robert:          Things like people saying “check your privilege” as a trump card in any discussion.

But I really mean *as soon* as I left the classroom – the Ivy League is still deeply bound in sexist, racist, classist patterns.

Jordan:           I had an experience like that at seminary as well. While putting together a worship service for Black History Month, I sought advice and help from a few black students I knew well. Hearing their feedback was hard. They were actively being as kind as they could be, but listening to them describe the latent racism they had seen in my words hurt bad. But when that conversation was over, I could’ve ignored them. I still had that privilege. None of the white people who would be the primary congregation for the worship service would have noticed what they noticed. No consequences would have followed for me. So as much as it sucked to be called out like that, I still had so much power.

                        Later that spring, I wrote a Blues Tenebrae connecting the Cross and the lynching tree. Holy Wednesday was the same day as the anniversary of the martyrdom of Dr. King that year, and I used a lot of his words, as well as James Cone’s newest work, The Cross and the LynchingTree. After the service, one of those black students came up to me to say, “Now, didn’t that feel different? See how good it can be.”

Jocelynn:       Wow!

Robert:          I’m glad to hear that because the Tenebrae service was fantastic.

Jocelynn:       There is an apocryphal story about a famous feminist theologian who, when she’d teach or give a public lecture, would tell men to put their hands down, because she only takes questions from women. There are plenty of profs who would answer men’s questions, go to them.

Robert:          Jocelynn, that is quite a story … wow.

Jocelynn:        I know, on the one hand I want to cheer, on the other it’s like ouch. And she has a level of privilege to be able to do that, right?

Robert:           For me, it’d be like, do I trust male professors as much as I trust a feminist theologian on this particular subject.

Jordan:          So often, particularly in the church, we say “two wrongs don’t make a right”, whether it’s calling God by feminine pronouns, or privileging women’s voices in a particular conversation or setting.

Jocelynn:        Yep! And yet ….

Jordan:           Sometimes I’m like, “When we’ve called God ‘she’ for 2,000 years, let’s talk. Or when we’ve said ‘peace on earth, goodwill toward women’ every Christmas for generations. When our entire society has been reoriented around privileging women, when women have equality or superiority in even one sphere, then we can talk about how two wrongs don’t make a right.”

Jocelynn:       Well, the question of pronouns is always interesting for me. People often say that the male centric language “doesn’t matter.” So if it doesn’t matter, then we can use feminine language, right? Apparently not.

Robert:           Going back to the public space and conversation bit:  this is how new I am to this more public advocacy and space-creating for women. When I published a post a few months ago, I specifically said that it was not a space to make a “not all men” argument. I didn’t deny men space to talk. At. All. I simply carved out one line of argument as out of bounds. Which two men ignored.  So I get what the theologian might have been going for in terms of setting the bounds for a conversation.

Jocelynn:       I think that’s the key difference with someone who is an ally – as Jordan found in her experience above. You have to be willing to *really* listen to the Other and hear what they are saying and then potentially revise yourself in response.

Robert:          Yes! It is a really hard thing to do: maintain humility without defensiveness in light of criticism about things you either cannot see or are actively trying to work on.

Jordan:          I think in America we have this robust free speech tradition that is so awesome, but in practice means that some voices are privileged above others. And as soon as you try to carve out a space for less-frequently-heard voices, more privileged voices come in and shout censorship.

                        In fact, the more privilege they have in the first place, the more likely they are to shout censorship, because they’re so used to being heard that they cannot fathom a space where their voices are unwelcome.

Jocelynn:        Bingo to you both!

                        What’s worse is the men that *think* they are allies and then dominate the conversation. And sometimes that means allies who have good things to say have to be quiet for a bit. Which is, I think, what that theologian was getting at in a crass way.

The conversation continues with Part II of Allies: The Live Chat.