How I became a feminist man
It started when I was 21 and finishing up my last year at college. I was getting more and more distressed by a recurring pattern I had noticed. It happened every time I went out to a party. I would walk in, and immediately my eyes would flit around, scanning the room, surveying the women. In conversations, I would find myself focused only on flirting with women. On the dance floor, I would dance near women, searching for a sign of interest. I’d often pick out one woman, and my focus would lock on her for the whole night. I felt like a hunter, zeroing in on my prey.
Unsuccessful hunts (i.e. most nights) would end with me lying in bed, feeling disappointed and lonely. I didn’t want to feel like a hunter. It didn’t bring me any enjoyment, and I was desperately afraid of coming off as creepy. But it seemed like it was unconscious — like it was coming from a deep corner of my mind that I couldn’t control. I felt helpless.
I was single at the time, having ended the last of a series of year-long romances. Through these intimate relationships, I learned about the experiences of the women around me. I was struck when, reflecting back on the stories these women shared with me, I realized a pattern: each of these women struggled with their body image. They worried whenever their weight fluctuated. They would continuously monitor to make sure they didn’t eat too much.
At first, I was puzzled, because they all seemed attractive to me. They were skinny, young, white, and blonde (in fact, my friends joked that I had a type). Why would these women, of all women, still worry their bodies weren’t good enough? I tried to compliment them, to reassure them that I found them attractive, but it didn’t seem to help.
I came to realize that it wasn’t about what I thought of them — they were comparing themselves to impossible standards set by the women in movies, magazines, and advertisements, a comparison that told them their bodies would never be good enough. Talking to more women, I learned that this was an experience shared by almost all women — that body image issues weren’t an exception, they were the norm. And I, with my “type,” was reinforcing those standards. I felt angry.
As I grappled with these experiences, I felt a lot of guilt. I wanted to improve my relationship with women. I wanted to stop feeling like a hunter. I wanted to stop reinforcing beauty standards. But I didn’t know how. I did know that the women I knew who thought about this stuff called themselves feminists. So maybe if I became a feminist, that would help.
I already believed men and women should be treated equally, but I could sense there was something more to feminism than that. I felt like an imposter calling myself a feminist without finding out what that “something more” was. Could men even be feminists? I wasn’t sure.
I had tried to learn about feminism before — I even checked out a gender studies course once or twice — but I always found the writing confusing or pretentious. I searched online for a guide to feminism for men, thinking that might be more approachable, but couldn’t find anything. So I asked some friends for reading recommendations, and started digging into the feminist canon. I learned there were waves of feminism, so I sampled writing from each wave to try to get my bearings. One friend told me about intersectional feminism and pushed me to learn about racism. I told her I was focused on women, so I didn’t have time for that.
I read and I read and I read. Books and blogs, everything I could get my hands on. At first, I was resistant to all the angry rants. Why were men always the enemy? I got defensive. My mind shielded itself with counterarguments, deflecting anything that felt like blame. But I kept reading anyway. Eventually I cleared the humility hurdle and stopped taking things personally.
The more I read, the more aspects of my life I began to question. As I pulled on the feminist thread, the social fabric around me began to unravel. I moved to San Francisco, arriving in the middle of the gay pride celebration, where I started exploring what it felt like to break gender norms. That weekend, I kissed a man for the first time. I wore a skirt, and got heckled as I walked down the street. I started to see that the dividing lines between different genders and sexual orientations were drawn in pencil, not ink. I started to understand what the rewards were for staying inside the lines. When I crossed the lines, I started to understand the costs of living outside them — costs that I, a straight white man, had never had to pay. I was starting to wake up.
When I look back on this journey, I see countless missteps and mistakes. I see how so many of the ways I acted were ignorant, privileged, sexist, racist, and homophobic. I was learning, and learning is messy. I never answered my original questions, or at least, not absolutely. Each question I asked only led to more questions. But slowly I learned how to frame my experiences through a new lens.
I learned that I felt like a hunter at parties because that was part of my gender role, and that I had learned this role from the culture I grew up in. I learned that I could retrain myself, and that it would take time.
I learned that women’s body image issues were caused by a culture that treats them as sexual objects. I learned that I could help by avoiding talking about women’s bodies, and instead focus my compliments on their personalities and skills.
I learned that these two issues were connected. I was hunting women because I was told that their bodies were the objects of my desire. They worried about their bodies because they were told that their desirability to men determined their worth. Together, these mindsets created a vicious reinforcing cycle.
Learning all of this didn’t help me solve these problems — they are too large in scale for one person to solve — but it helped me start to see them. And recognizing them helped me start to change the way I thought about myself and interacted with others. I’m more in touch with what I actually want, as opposed to what men are supposed to want. I’m a better friend and partner to women. While I feel responsible for my actions, I don’t feel guilty anymore.
Many arguments for why men should be feminists speak from an ethical perspective. They argue that men and women do not get treated equally in our society, that this inequality is unethical, and that if you want to be an ethical person, you should do something. I agree with these arguments. But I don’t think there was ever a time that I disagreed with them. I just didn’t see what it had to do with me. I didn’t catcall women in the street. I didn’t decide how much women should get paid. I wasn’t sexist, as far as I could tell.
If you’re a well-intentioned man, and feminism hasn’t clicked with you, you may view feminism the same way that I did. Maybe you agree with the basic ethical arguments, but it doesn’t affect you personally. Maybe you’re turned off by all the anger. Maybe you know some men who are actively misogynistic, but since you’re not one of them, you don’t feel like sexism is a problem for you.
I felt all of these things. But I also felt unhappy in my role as a man. I also felt distressed by the struggles of the women I cared about. I’m sharing my story because I think the reasons I became a feminist might resonate with you. Do you want to better support the women around you? Are there parts of being a man that don’t sit right with you? If so, believe me when I say that feminism is for men, and feminism is for you.
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Thanks to Sarah Hyde, Adam Kurzrok, Potluck Mittal, Michael Ducott, and Julia Herring for giving feedback on earlier drafts of this piece.
