Men Aren’t Going to Save Us. Or Are They?
On Friday June 24th, I heard the cries, the rageful re-awakening, of the divine feminine. So many women got loud, as I expected them to.
While I heard their screams of injustice, I also heard a deafening silence from the men in my own network. It was as though we all showed up to a silent disco, and only the women decided to participate by putting on headphones to hear. The women were immersed in noise, and the men were wrapped in silence.
In a sea of women using their Instagram stories and Twitter feeds to take up as much digital space as possible, I saw only a handful of men posting about the same issue.
It was as though we were living in different worlds. And then that’s when it hit me: we do.
I, as a woman, was living in a world where my rights were taken away, and men were living in a world where women’s rights were taken away. The dichotomy in our proximity to the issue created a comfortable distance of Other where men didn’t feel the issue the way I did. I believe we call that privilege.
Even though I was unsurprised by the Supreme Court decision, I was surprised by the tempered reaction of my male peers.
It is not that my feminist ass was looking for a righteous knight (get it because men have rights) in shining armor to rescue us, but maybe I was a little bit.
While women don’t need male saviors, we still want male allies. Men could, and should, be joining us.
I thought the Millennial and Gen Z men would rally alongside us as partners. I thought they would understand, and deliver, the role we needed them to play as our assumed equals.
For the most part, I thought very wrong.
Although it is true that some men showed up for women in person or individually, more men, it seemed, showed up for Aaron Judge. On any other day, I’d get the appeal.
And although I’m generalizing men in this piece, I’m also not: some of you showed up, but most of you didn’t.
What did the men have to say on one of the darkest days that this generation of women has ever seen?
I had men tell me it was performative to post on social media. I had men tell me it was virtue signaling to post on social media. I had men tell me they didn’t need to post on social media because they were so obviously pro-choice.
The audacity to think being pro-choice, on the most pro-life day in history, is implied is absolutely outrageous.
If men were truly as angry as some claimed to be, they would have used every avenue at their disposal to rage, including social media.
The blaring male silence activated a paradigm shift within me. And I don’t think I’m the only woman who felt it.
In the quiet, I was painfully reminded that men will not save us.
I used to believe that the only way to dismantle the patriarchy would be by convincing enough men that it was in their best interest (which it is) to do away with the existing social order.
I thought the best way to achieve this would be to work with men to revolutionize masculinity so that we could help them help themselves. If they could only heal themselves, I thought, then they would free us.
Like the older feminists who I imagine are smirking at my naive optimism, I too look back on that opinion, one I held as recently as a few days ago, sheepishly for my disillusion.
After all, it was a nice idea. One I, admittedly, still cling to. But, I now realize we must primarily believe we can free ourselves.
Once I got that through my head, I stopped being so mad about those who hadn’t shown up and started being thankful for those that did.
I was reminded that this fight was originally won largely by women for women. If it has to be that way again, so be it.
This week has shown me, and many other women, that we could never have entirely depended on men, collectively, in the same way that we rely on our sisterhood. Not yet.
I want men and women to fight equally, in both intensity and number, for abortion rights. I want men to show up for us. I so badly want to see our generation of men show the men on the Supreme Court that their opinions are, if nothing else, outdated.
While I may want that to be our reality, and although it still could be, I am no longer holding my breath. Instead, I’m holding other women closer.
