Men Should Help Other Men Learn How Not To Be Misogynist, Because It’s Unfair And Time-Consuming To Rely On Women To Do That

I follow a lot of feminist writers on Twitter. Some because they are my friends, some because they are friends of my friends, some because my friends or friends of friends have retweeted them a lot. I try to learn from them as much as I can about all kinds of things: politics, privilege, gender, etc. That community is continually under a disorganized attack that is both evil and mundane: unimaginative men (usually white) being rude, lewd, and dismissive at best and legitimately threatening and dangerous at worst.

As such, I have noticed that in these circles “white man” has practically become an insult on its own, and white cis men are heartily mocked and dismissed without regret (in fact, it is not implausible that if anybody ends up reading this, some people will dismiss it after this sentence as “white male tears” and stop reading — if this is your instinct, spoiler alert — at the end, I have some admonitions for my fellow white men and nothing really in that category for you, but I do hope you will finish this). Which I don’t really object to; we’ve certainly been the primary causes of human injustice and suffering for centuries, and if you spend an inordinate amount of time fighting off bears who want to attack you and steal your food, your first response upon encountering a bear is not going to be “interesting, a bear! I wonder what it has to say?” So I would not ask or expect women to waste their energy, time, and mental health on engaging with and educating rude and misogynistic interlocutors, *or to have the time or energy to sort out which ones are merely misguided souls and which ones have already been lost to the red pill or whatever you want to call it.*

But! Consider a young white cis man on the internet. We will not dismantle patriarchal or racial privilege in this generation, so this boy (we could call him Tyler) will, on average, have a greater opportunity to influence social discourse, the workplace, etc., etc. than a woman, person of color, LGBT person, and so on. We want Tyler to be a feminist, right? We want him to understand the sources of his privilege and use the opportunities he has to magnify the voices of marginalized peoples? But whose message is going to resonate more with his not yet fully developed brain — progressives demanding that he acknowledge his privilege and going “lol shut up white man” when he questions them, or the evil versions of Robin Williams whispering “it’s not your fault” as they rail against SJWs on the various chans, certain areas of reddit, etc.?

It is not a foregone conclusion that future generations will be more feminist, less prejudiced, more willing to acknowledge their privileges and use them for the amplification of others. It has to be learned and taught.

So this is my request to white men (and to myself): Engage with young white men, even the ones who seem stupid (especially the ones who seem stupid!) Be a good example of how to interact with feminist media — how to criticize without being sexist and condescending, how to praise without being creepy and expectant. If you are annoyed at the categorical dismissal of white men (and I definitely have been), work to change how white men talk and think. The bad ones are really bad, and they know the tides are turning against them. They’re out there trying to convince the young ones to sign up for alienated superiority and hatred — we need a message about how rewarding it is to listen and be inclusive.

If that sounds basic, it is! Young people shouldn’t be expected to immediately understand everything about how they should behave, and then dismissed as hopeless cases when they falter. One of the privileges we who are white men have is that most of us don’t have to spend countless time dealing with horrible people denigrating us; we can spend time engaging and influencing so that there will be fewer of those people impeding intelligent diverse discourse.

*this is my first post ever on Medium and I wrote it without any editing or revision or additional input in approximately an hour. So if anybody wants to say something like “you need an editor,” they are correct and I would accept one.*