“Ugh, I’m so tired of men.”
“Just another ignorant man…”
“Men are assholes!”
If the women in your life are anything like my friends, you hear stuff like this all time. For years, every time my feminist friends complained about men, I would bristle. My lizard brain would kick into gear and I’d get defensive immediately, sensing an attack.
“How could you say that? I’m not an asshole!” I’d respond.
I learned pretty quickly this didn’t lead to very productive conversations. In fact, a response like that is a pretty surefire way to prove that yes, men are assholes.
Now, when I hear “men are assholes,” I laugh, or sigh, and agree: “Yep, men are assholes.”
How did I get to this point? How did I become a man-hating feminist who is himself a man? Well, the thing is, I don’t hate men. And I don’t think the women who say “men are assholes” hate men either. What shifted was my own experience hearing those words – my interpretation changed. I overcame the humility hurdle.
What’s the humility hurdle? It’s that instinct that makes us take things personally and get defensive. We fear being labeled as a bad person because if we’re seen as a bad person, we’ll risk being socially outcast. So when we hear anything that could possibly be an attack on our character, we do whatever we can to prove we’re not bad people. Really, we promise, we’re not!
As a boy, society taught me to hide any feelings of weakness or fear. So when I’d hear a potential attack on my character, I would express my fear through anger and defensiveness. I’d strike back in order to avoid showing that I was afraid of being judged.
The humility hurdle is the false belief that the things people say are personal judgments of us, as opposed to expressions of their own experience with other people.
Before overcoming the humility hurdle, when a woman said “men are assholes,” I heard, “all men are assholes, and since you’re a man, I think you’re an asshole.”
Now, when a woman says “men are assholes,” I hear, “I’ve had a lot of repeated experiences with men being assholes to me, and it was painful. Now I have low expectations for men I meet to not be assholes. Oh, how does that apply to you? Honestly, I wasn’t really thinking about you in particular.”
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There are three key pieces to this humble reframing:
1. Replacing “men” with “many men I’ve met” as opposed to “all men.” Yes, the speaker could have been more specific and avoided generalizing. I just assume that the speaker is smart enough to not actually try to make a definitive statement about every single man, and also remind myself that everyone’s view of the world is based on their own experience.
2. Realizing the speaker is expressing pain, it’s just coming out as anger and judgment. They haven’t shared what painful experiences they’ve had, but it’s safer to start by assuming they’ve had some, so I can receive their statement with empathy.
3. Recognizing they’re really not talking about me. I mean, would they really say it around me if it was about me? It’s much more likely they like me and consider me a good person – that’s why they feel safe expressing it to me. If it’s not something a friend said, but rather something I’ve read in a piece of writing, then it’s definitely not about me, since there’s basically no chance that I’m one of the asshole men from the author’s past. This is why I use the word “humility” – it’s about being humble enough to realize it’s not all about me – I’m not the center of the story.
Once I was able to internalize this reframing, I started to find feminism felt a lot more accessible. Feminist statements that used to sound like attacks on me as a man started transforming into windows into the foreign experience of being a woman.
When a woman complained that “women are expected to take on more of the cooking and cleaning,” instead of hearing “you don’t help cook and clean enough, you lazy bum,” I humbly reframed it as “many women have struggled to live in a culture that reinforces gender roles that dictate that they should do the cooking and cleaning and tells men it isn’t their job to help.”
When people talked about how “men perpetuate rape culture,” instead of hearing “you might as well be a rapist,” I humbly reframed it as “many men say and do things that contribute to an overall environment in which men intentionally and unintentionally violate women’s sexual boundaries, causing women to fear sexual violence from men.”
When I saw “women-only groups,” instead of thinking they were “groups where I wasn’t allowed because I was a man and therefore automatically judged as evil,” I humbly reframed them as “groups where women who have had painful experiences with men can talk about it without having to worry about men being there and reacting poorly.”
Overcoming the humility hurdle doesn’t mean I’m off the hook when I hear a feminist statement. I’m not arguing that it’s ok for men to ignore the experiences of women. I still need to examine my own thoughts and behaviors to see how these statements apply to me. I’m offering this reframing because it’s helped me sidestep my instinct to take things personally and defend myself, which then makes space for me to both respond supportively and at the same time reflect on my own experiences with women to look for ways to improve.
The humility hurdle is responsible for the common retort “not all men are like that,” which gained popularity via the #NotAllMen hashtag after the Isla Vista killings in 2014. It resurfaces whenever feminists try to point out how a specific man’s actions are representative of a broader pattern of behavior. Trust me, feminists know that not all men are like that. They were just hoping that more men would be humble enough to realize that’s not what they were trying to say.
I’m offering my thoughts about the humility hurdle because I believe a simple reframing can go a long way towards helping men hear what feminists are trying to say. If someone complains that men are assholes, arguing back with “not all men” isn’t going to help. If we really want to prove that not all men are assholes, we’ve got to stop being defensive, and start being humble.
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Originally published on Medium.
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