Excerpted from Consent Is Not Enough: What Men Need to Know in a #MeToo World
Since we started discussions with men right after #MeToo broke, I’ve been amazed at the concerns men carry. #MeToo is disturbing and worrying to these men. Some worry for their daughters. Some now understand what happened to their sisters in ways they never did before. Some are worried for themselves because they might be outed for past behaviors. Many want to understand what they had been blind to, and of course, as men, we all want to do something about it.
In these circles, we have worked to try to understand these phenomena: How are we responsible? How do we participate? How are we also injured by a system that enables this? What do we have to change in ourselves, and how do we foster change in other men, to help change this outrage that is sexual harassment, abuse, and violence against women? Do we need to apologize for being men? Is it wrong to find a woman attractive? Must we do away with gender to end the abuse of gender? And if so, what then?
While reflecting this way, I realized that as men, we have a responsibility to each other to help create a solution. None of us want to be neutered or asexual. We don’t want to stop appreciating the beauty our female partners or prospective partners bring to our lives. At the same time, nearly all of us have been part of the behaviors so many women suffer and detest — maybe not sexual harassment in the workplace, but most men have either cat-called women, been there when other guys did, or watched it rather disgusted, yet silently, at some point in their lives. Many men objectify women through the woman’s attractiveness, through pornography, or through sex-oriented massage. And most men can recall some time in their life when they pushed too hard, broke through a boundary, or didn’t take “No” for an answer. Our work in these groups of men has helped many of the men not only claim their complicity, but also own their participation and move toward healing.
As some of these insights dawned on me and other leaders, it became daunting to realize the scope and ubiquity of the problem. Yet just as the scope made it appear overwhelming, we also realized that men can draw on a shared base of experience as we come to terms with ourselves. We can’t do this by merely shaming the men who did these things… we all have a story, and we all played a part in some way. After all, the reason so many women have a story is that so many men participate in the violations. That means we can learn from those stories as we feel our way into them, and this provides rich ground for the cultural change needed at the root of the problem.
To uncover men’s experience and guide ourselves to a better place, we cannot be satisfied to merely label a behavior as “entitled” or create a code of behavior like “always get consent.” These approaches freeze in place the precise insights that are needed to guide men to a deeper sense of self from which neither codes nor labels are needed. That deeper sense of self means a richer experience of the heart, the excitement of imagination, and connection through community. But first, we have to get the codewords out of the way. I want to open new doors and create new paths for men to consider the experiences of women in their lives and deepen the experiences of our own lives. Ultimately, men need to change to address these issues, and women — whether they meant to or not — have handed us all a golden opportunity for introspection and reconsideration of our own lives as men.
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This post was previously published on Change Becomes You.
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You may also like these posts on The Good Men Project:
White Fragility: Talking to White People About Racism | Escape the “Act Like a Man” Box | The Lack of Gentle Platonic Touch in Men’s Lives is a Killer | What We Talk About When We Talk About Men |
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