Throughout the Reformation Year 2017, this site offers trendsetters and thought leaders a place to present their notions of change and innovation. What are the potentials and needs for current and future-oriented “reformations”?
Feminist movement advances on many fronts. I’ve visited many progressive spaces in the West, and discovered men taking sexism seriously. If somebody says, “there are sexist dynamics in this group”, it’s common to find at least one or two men in the group whose first reaction is humility rather than defensiveness.
Humility is a great place to work from. From a position of humility, I can pay attention to the experience of others, start to undo my sexist programming, and build new habits that bring my behaviour in line with my values.
However, to challenge patriarchy, I believe we need more than humility: we need courage too. I want to hear the voices of men, boldly explaining to other men how everyone would be better off without patriarchy.
I have heard many stories from women and trans people’s experience of patriarchy: personal stories of oppression and resistance.
Cis men have personal experiences of patriarchy, but we’re not sharing our stories. How does it feel to be raised to dominate others? How did you overcome the guilt and shame of your complicity? How do you challenge your friends’ sexism and still have friends? How does it feel to carry around this heavy fragile mask of strength all day?
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I know similar conversations are happening in “men’s groups”, but I’m hungry to connect those conversations to feminist theory, and then to feminist movement.
As Carol Hanisch explained in 1969, the personal becomes political when we 1) identify patterns in our individual experiences, 2) discover the root causes of those patterns, and 3) rally collective power to demand structural change.
It’s wonderful that men are learning to shut up, make space, and listen. But next we need to learn how to raise hell.
Biography
Richard D. Bartlett, born in 1984, is one of the cofounders of Loomio, an New Zealand based open source software tool for collective decision-making. He's also a Catalyst at Enspiral: a decentralised network of 250 freelancers who have been working without bosses since 2010. His background is in creative activism and DIY open source hardware. He's passionate about co-ownership, self-management, collaborative governance, and other ways of sneaking anarchism into respectable places. He writes at richdecibels.com
