[Smashpatriarchy] dating tips for the feminist man

[Peter Gill]

dating tips for the feminist man

[image: dating tips for the feminist
man]<http://www.mediacoop.ca/sites/mediacoop.ca/files2/mc/imagecache/bigimg/men-feminism-e1372102217532.jpg>

This post is in honour of male feminists and their dating rituals.

You’re a straight monogamous cismale who identifies as a leftie. Maybe
you’re a Marxist or a socialist; maybe you’re an anarchist. You respect
women. You would never act like a player. You fall in love with strong,
smart, feminist women. You believe that our movements are stronger if they
include everyone.

This is not the 1950s; if you’re committed to social justice but you are
still marching along using ‘the rules’ http://therulesbook.com/ to govern
dating, it’s time to consider the connection between your politics and your
personal life. Social justice is intersectional; we can't just fix our
economic relationships without fixing our personal and cultural ones.

So identifying as a male feminist is a tricky line to walk. It's important
that men use the term. But keep in mind that you'll get kudos just for
taking on the term as your own; it may even help you gain trust
extra-quickly from women you're dating.

Want to be worthy of that trust? Practice your consent skills.

Here's how, in a tidy list.

(ed's note: A lot of these skills I’ve learned from more poly friends who
take accountability and consent seriously. There's a lot that my more
monogamous buds can learn from the poly world and its committments to
ethical dating. So thanks to many friends who give consent workshops and
think about these things in their daily lives, for sharing wisdom and
insights.)



you're a straight cisgendered monogamous feminist man,and you want to hook
up with or date women? ok.

here's the deal:


1. learn to recognize your own emotions. Consent requires honesty, and you
can't speak honestly about your intentions unless you know what they are.



2. Just as we teach high schoolers that ‘if you're not ready for the
possible outcomes of babies and diseases, you're not ready for sex,’ the
same is true of emotions. Sex brings up emotion. That is just the reality
of choosing to engage in sexual relationships. If you're not ready to work
with the emotion to make sure everyone is ok afterwards, then you're not
ready for the sex.

If you're the kind of person who avoids your own or other people's
emotions, then you're not going to be able to have good consent
conversations until you get more comfortable with your own and other
people's emotions. Sign up for a consent skills workshop, or several. Read
books on consent and on radical conflict resolution skills. Recognize that
you agreed to or initiated a romantic relationship, however short or
long-lived, and so you are responsible to the other person in that
relationship as well as to yourself. Nobody put a gun to your head and made
you make out with this person, so own your choices and their effects.
People need different things after a hookup; know your own needs and be
responsive to the needs of the other person.

*Don't* say or act like you are serious about someone, make out with them,
and then avoid them. Can I say this clearly enough? If you make out with
somebody, you are responsible for checking in to make sure they are ok, not
just during, but also after. Discuss casual sex as casual sex, and
ambiguous sex as ambiguous sex. If your initial connection seemed serious
but things don’t work out the way you hoped, do the work to become a friend
to this person. You may have to have some emotions-talk first to get to a
good place and clear up any miscommunications or accidental harm you
caused; if so, you're responsible not only for grudgingly going along, but
for actively initiating and holding space for that conversation. Do not
make it their job to ask for a conversation to get your friendship to a
good place. It is your job as much as theirs. Do not run away if things get
uncomfortable or you start to feel emotions that confuse you. If you need
space to calm down, pick a specific near-future time in which you will come
back fully present and taking a proactive role in getting back to a good
place. If you are in a conflict with this person due to tangled emotions,
pick a process and, if you need it, a friend to help. Remember the goal is
for you both to feel ok about things, not for one of you to win and one of
you to lose. If you’re uncomfortable with process, work on that instead of
making it their problem.



3. In that same vein: actively invite conversations beforehand, during, and
after a hookup to check if you are on the same page and have similar ideas
about what it all means. Oxytocin's a powerful drug; when you're hooking up
and having those heady feelings of hope, you're both vulnerable to
misreading, or seeing what you want to see. It's up to both of you to
initiate reality check conversations: "what are you expecting after this?
what do you think this means? are you ok with this if it's casual? Are you
ok with this if it's serious? Do we understand each other properly?" Those
conversations are not a one-time thing, just as you can't get one-time
consent to touch somebody. Consent is continuous and has to be established
through ongoing checkins. If you want to be a good male ally, get
comfortable with changing emotions - yours and the other person's, and good
at talking about them as they change. This comfort is necessary in order to
be honest with the other person, and to create shared expectations so no
one ends up feeling used or played.


4. if you don't know how you feel, or you're not sure, or you have
conflicting or ambiguous or confused emotions, *say that.* Say "I'm not
sure what this means. Do you want to continue even if I don't know  where
we're going?" Do not tell the other person what you think they want to hear
- you do not know what they want to hear. Do not say the thing that is easy
for you to say, or oversimplify in order to keep them happy (and making out
with you) in the moment. This kind of fuzzy communication can end up being
dishonest communication.

It is ok to not know how you feel for a time, as long as you are committed
to figuring out how you feel as soon as you can, and honest about your
uncertainty in the meantime, so the other can make *informed* consent
decisions.

Do not tell someone you're serious about them or planning to follow up with
them romantically if you're actually not sure. For example: do not promise
to date them again or say you will spend romantically-oriented time
together again if you're not sure whether you will. Casual sex needs to be
discussed *as casual* so both people involved can feel respected and cared
for.

If your feelings change, simply name the change. If you were interested in
a possible partnership or in an ongoing relationship, and then aren’t or
are less sure, and you feel bad about that, do not avoid saying so to make
your life easier. Just name the emotion and be available and present to the
changes in the other. Try things like this: “I felt this way when I said
and did that, but things have changed, and this is how I feel now. This is
why and when they changed. I feel bad that I let you down or inadvertently
misled you. Are you ok, and what do you need?”



5. Don't mix up acting 'nice' with being a genuinely good person. Kindness
and treating people well are valuable, but politeness can be violent if it
masks normalized oppression. Naming oppression, even when done gently, is
not always perceived as being 'nice' because it pushes back at status quo
ways of relating, seeing, and thinking.

When naming oppression happens as a response to naturalized violence, the
anger you're hearing is a response to actual violence that you may have
enacted while thinking you were being 'nice.' So before you decide that you
don't have to listen because someone is breaking politeness protocols,
consider whose interests those protocols protect. Don't mix up your
internal defensiveness, which can arise at having your real privilege
pointed out, with the external message you are receiving. Is there trust
being offered to you behind anger or critique - trust that you're the kind
of person who is open to growth and change? Notice that trust, and earn it.


6. actively taking on the identity of a feminist man means you are equally
responsible to do your own research and actively notice these things. Help
your friends of all genders see them. Realize this is your responsibility.
If you miss something, you don't do the work yourself, and someone has to
approach you with a way in which they feel you've been sexist or
clueless,*don't
make them convince you*. Stretch yourself. They've done enough work in
*figuring
it out*, *extracting the internalized programming* that tells them your
sexist behaviour is totally normal and that they're just crazy, and
then *offering
you the gift of their honesty*. That shit is not easy when you’ve just been
harmed by behavior normalized through dominant scripts. If someone has
bothered to share this with you after they manage to figure it out? The
likelihood is that they hope you'll hear them - even if they sound
defensive, scared, sad, angry, or otherwise upset when they bring this to
you. Instead of challenging them to logic battles or insisting that they
provide evidence, kindly recognize just how hard it is to understand and
name violence one has experienced. Assume there's some truth to what
they're saying, and take on the role of helping them articulate it better
if it's wordless or fuzzy at first. Honour the gift by listening and asking
questions, and taking it upon yourself to educate yourself.



7. Notice if your tendency when called out is to bolt. Notice if your
tendency when you bolt is to turn to a reaffirming other female friend and
ask them to reassure you that you're really not sexist. If your friend
feels loyal to you, they'll want to support you and they may see things
your way, but they aren't the one who experienced the problematic
behaviour, so they're not the one you should be listening to. A female
friend who is not the person you dated may not know how you behaved in that
dating context, and so may not be the best one to tell you whether you've
actually acted like an unconscious douche. The nature of structural forms
of violence like sexism is also such that we all internalize the normalcy
of oppressive behavior; discomfort with conflict or a desire to be the
'good' member of that group, or simply to be on your side because they are
your friend, can also come into play. Be wary of your desire to just seek
proof of your goodness, rather than actually being a good person by being
open to learning about ways you can be a better ally. If you notice you
want to retreat to women who praise you, take time to check that response
to find out what you can learn from the women who trust you enough to tell
you where you have blind spots.



8. Give up on trying to be perfect. It just gets in the way. Get used to
process. You fuck up, you learn, you grow. If you want right relationships
with other human beings in our shared spaces and communities, show that you
walk the walk by being big about admitting mistakes quickly and rolling
with them. Make amends, make it better in your actions as well as your
words. That honours the trust people have given you.



9. Share the load. Consider it your responsibility to be continually
self-reflexive about your actions and their effects. Don't wait to be
taught, because that puts multiple burdens on the other: to understand and
name the harm that’s affecting them, *and* to take the risk to talk to you
about it, *and* to find language to articulate it in a way you’ll hear.
Those things all take a lot of energy and are not easy. So if someone
you're dating gets angry at you and has a hard time articulating why, check
your defensiveness and listen. If you want to be a feminist, you are going
to have to challenge yourself to invite having things you do, that you
don't notice, pointed out, without withdrawing or attacking or putting the
burden of proof on women. Don't try to defend yourself and say you're 'not
sexist.' One of the features of violence is that it creates silence.
Articulating what has happened to you is particularly difficult when you've
born the brunt of violence, particularly if you were raised to believe that
violence is normal. So it is hard enough for someone experiencing the
impact of your actions to figure out how to name them; if you want to be a
feminist that is your job, not just hers.



10. Do you believe in solidarity and mutual aid? Do you also believe we are
all individuals who should manage our own problems on our own or with those
who choose to freely associate with us? Notice the contradiction in those
beliefs. Question the assumed individualist values you may have inherited
from capitalist forebears, and put them to the test of your belief in
mutuality. If you are a socialist who still believes that we are all
individuals who enter voluntarily into relations and can exit them without
accountability, notice the contradiction. Human beings are not
interchangeable, fungible entities who freely enter into contractual
relations; we are interdependent and need each other to live. It is a very
privileged position to be able to retreat to your individualism when you
have harmed someone, rather than being in relation with them, and staying
present for the change as that relation shifts out of a romantic one to
something new and long-term you both are comfortable with. Your theory and
your lived daily practice will line up if you notice this contradiction.


11. Which leads to the next point: if you cause harm, even by accident, and
someone calls you on it, and you believe we are all mutually
interdependent, 'i need space' is not an acceptable response. You can take
space to get your head clear so you can listen better - but that kind of
space is measured in hours, or at most days. If you want 'space' measured
in weeks or months, you're not taking space, you're avoiding responsibility.

Get used to being uncomfortable and learning to have loving, clear, and
interconnected boundaries that honour your internal voices as well as the
needs of the other humans you share this planet and this community with –
that is where learning happens. So when the zombies or the bankers come for
us, we won't have to waste energy fighting each other.




12. saying 'sorry' only means something if your behaviour changes. On its
own it does not remedy the situation. 'sorry' has to come with
responsiveness.



13. similarly, don't threaten to leave if emotions are running high. Those
kinds of threats just exacerbate the situation. If you can calm your own
knee-jerk tendency to avoid, and offer a grounded listening presence
instead that honours your own emotions and those of the other person,
you'll find that foundation reduces the intensity of the emotions coming at
you quite a lot. remember that you care about each other, and/or that
you're both humans sharing this planet, and that we need each other to
survive. connect your daily life and daily relationship practices with your
beliefs in social justice, mutual aid, anticapitalism, marxism, etc. When
the zombie apocalypse comes (or we bring it about?) we will need skills for
getting along after we hook up. Start practicing now.



14. if you find you are paralyzed with feelings of guilt and  resentment
(sample script: “I feel guilty, but I shouldn't feel this guilty because i
didn't do anything, well maybe i did something small, but it's not worth
feeling *this* guilty, and I feel guilty becuase she's upset even though I
didn't do anything, so it's her fault I feel guilty, so since she made me
feel guilty unfairly, I don't have to deal with this!), notice the internal
script, and check it. Your feelings of guilt may be completely useless and
completely out of proportion to the situation.
If they prevent you from being responsive and accountable, they cause more
harm than good. Learn to recognize the difference between internal feelings
of guilt or shame, and the external messages you are receiving.



15. if you find yourself disregarding something she is saying because she
is upset as she is saying it, notice that this is sexism. You may have been
raised to believe emotion is not rational and is therefore not legitimate.
That is for you to unlearn, not for you to impose on others. Emotion and
intuition are legitimate sources of information. Don't retreat into logic
when you find emotions coming your way. Build up your capacity to feel and
to respond to feelings. You'll be more human for it, and a better feminist,
too.



16. sometimes being wrong is a gift. be grateful for your mistakes and for
the interdependence that lets you maintain relationships through them. Feel
proud of your strength to be able to say “I messed that up. I’m very sorry.
I’d like to not make that mistake again. How do I make things better?” and
then to be able to follow through in your actions.



the benefits? other than 'integrity' and creating a better world and
movement, the personal benefits of walking the walk include deeper
friendships with those strong feminist women you find yourself attracted
to, after the hooking up ends. they may also include creating more spaces
where kind, gentle, intuitive people - who may be the same people as those
strong feminist women you like so much - can be themselves and open up to
you. It creates more shelters and more places of strength from which our
movements can resist, heal, and connect. And it may open your heart.



http://www.mediacoop.ca/blog/norasamaran/19018
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