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Avoiding the Grief of Male Allyship
This is a message to myself as much as to any other man.
If you are a man who is working to be an ally because you pay attention to and speak out against harmful male behaviors towards women and non-binary people in the workplace, thank you. Take a minute with that thank you. It’s real.
But here is the next shoe to drop. And too often it does not. I believe many of us who are active allies do so from an emotionally disconnected space. We view “women’s issues” exclusively from the seemingly civil frames of the workplace. Allyship in support of women becomes a question of hiring or advancement, a question of elevating women’s voices. In viewing our allyship exclusively from within the policies and systems of a relatively protected workplace worldview, we intentionally insulate ourselves from experiencing the grief and sorrow a wider lens can evoke in us. A wider lens that fully acknowledges the epidemic of political, economic and physical violence that impacts women globally.
As much as we rely in the illusion of it, there is no magical separation for the women in our daily working lives from the violence women face all over the world. Not only are the women we know linked by blood and empathy to what is playing out everywhere, the worst kinds of violence are also happening right in our offices, on our streets, in our homes; hidden in plain sight by our unwillingness to experience the emotions our admission of such truths would engender in us.
If we are men, we have the very real privilege of walling ourselves off from experiences that women are forced to face from cradle to grave. We can choose to avert our eyes even from the ways that the universe of women’s trauma is hinted at even in our well-ordered workplaces, glimpsed in the momentary expressions of discomfort or anger that women quash to create the illusory emotional comfort so many of us brusquely demand of them.
We can avoid feeling the grief of women’s pain by getting defensive. We give into the almost automatic urge to say “Boys and men are suffering, too.” We give in to the urge to say, “What about women who do violence?”
But we can only do this particular form of self-protection by invoking a false binary. Yes, boys and men are suffering…
