Critical Step for Men Dismantling Their Own Sexism
And my 'How To', making sure other men can do it too
Last week I watched a man I follow online in the feminist space get feedback he didn’t like.
He fired off voicemails criticizing the women who’d given him said feedback. He blocked them, as well as others. A few days later, he came back with apology videos. He talked about how he felt like an imposter. He talked about what had prompted his reaction. And he talked about how he was sitting with it.
Look, stumbling and falling is part of the work. As men trying to work through this stuff, we’re going to be imperfect. And that’s fine. But we’re also going to be called out for it. And that’s fine.
Actually, let me be very clear about this, it’s more than fine because we should be called out for it.
Doing “the work” does not give us a pass on our own conscious or unconscious behaviours that negatively impact gender equality. If anything, our actions should be scrutinized more because we are putting our hands up saying, “Hey, guys, follow me! Let’s walk down this path together. I’d like to try and lead the way.” That requires commitment and leadership, but, more importantly than anything else, it requires a massive, HEAPING scoop of humility.
Otherwise we’re going to negatively impact the movement we claim to want to push forward as well as miss important chances for ourselves to grow.
Avoidance
Here’s the thing I’ve started to notice about how men handle being told we got something wrong. We have two paths available to us, and we use both.
Path one is dismissal:
She was being too aggressive about it.
She said it in a way that I didn’t like.
She’s not arguing in good faith.
On the path of dismissal, the delivery of the message becomes the whole story for us. The message is tossed aside (assuming we even acknowledged in the first place).
Path two is self-flagellation.
Fine. I guess I’m just the worst person alive.
I can’t do anything right.
Why do I even try?
On the path of self-flagellation, the conversation becomes about how bad we feel, not about what we did. We skip straight over the actual point and focus on how bad their feedback made us feel.
Dismissal and self-flagellation look different but accomplish the same goal: avoiding having to deal with the uncomfortable feeling of being wrong and, therefore, potentially have to change something about ourselves. Dismissal just flat out ignores the message because of the source of the feedback (in this space, most likely a woman) while self-flagellation ignores the message by making the conversation about the man’s feelings, instead of his behaviour.
In both cases, the person who gave you the feedback is now doing emotional labour they didn’t sign up for. Either they’re being told their delivery negated their point, or they’re being asked to comfort you for having listened to and received their point at all.
And that’s what I saw happening last week. A man got feedback from women who were correcting him on something he should have done better, and the whole thing turned into a multi-day, multi-video display of dismissal.
(The jury is still out on whether he’s on the self-flagellation path now — via public apologies — or if he is actually taking the message to heart. I’m not saying this as a criticism, because it’s a real question that can only be answered with time. I’m hoping it’s the latter.)
And, just so we’re clear, I’m not above this. In the past I’ve made my wife’s reasonable observations about me into a temper tantrum about whether I’m a good husband or not. Ever since I first started posting reels and writing Substack newsletters, I’ve received comments from strangers online, and I used to spiral for a day or two about whether I should even be creating content in this space. In other words, I sulked and whined.
And, look, I don’t want to make this about one person’s incorrect judgment call. We’re all on our own journey and I hope this is one he takes seriously. But I do want to take visible and relatable moments like this one and discuss them in a way that allows men to reflect on their own individual lives.
Because, if you’re like me, seeing these moments reflected onto actions I’ve taken helps me recognize what I need to change.
The Change
I don’t know if feelings of defensiveness will ever completely go away. IMHO, the patriarchal manipulation that creates reactions of that nature runs pretty deep. That said, it doesn’t mean we can’t find ways around it. Here’s the mechanism that’s worked for me.
All feedback I receive I now break into two parts:
The Delivery is how it’s being said. The tone. The word choice. Whether it came in a calm conversation or a furious text. Whether the person sounded patient or fed up. Whether they framed it kindly or unkindly…or somewhere in between.
The Message is what they’re actually asking me to consider. It’s the underlying point. The thing they want me to take in, regardless of how it arrived.
To me, The Message is what matters. The Delivery matters a lot less. What I’ve noticed though is that men doing this work can be quite reactive to The Delivery, so much so that we completely miss The Message.
For me this meant I needed to figure out a way to lessen the effect of The Delivery so that I could focus on The Message. I needed to find a way of getting to the actual message without becoming consumed by The Delivery.
And while it’s not a foolproof plan, what it does do is stop me from making my feelings about being wrong into someone else’s problem.
It means the people in my life — my wife, my friends, my readers, the women who push back on my work — don’t have to wait out my spiral before we can have an actual conversation. The work of changing my behaviour still has to happen, but the person giving me the feedback doesn’t have to absorb a tangent through my own self-pity before I get there.
If you’re a free subscriber, I hope you’ve found value up to this point. The rest of this post is for paid subscribers.
For paid subscribers, the rest of this post gets practical. I walk through the four-step process I created for myself, as well as five things I’ve learned as I’ve implemented this framework. This has provided me a lot of benefit, not just in my online life but also my offline life.
