Over Halloween, I had the (dis)pleasure of speaking to a man about Tyler the Creator.
Tyler the Creator, if you don’t know, is a musician who I will admit, makes pretty good music. But I try not to listen to him because of his tendency to write songs that include lyrics about raping women.
“I fuck bitches with no permission and tend to hate shit” –”Tron Cat”, 2011. The others are a bit too graphic to include. I would do your own searching on that one.
Anyways. I was explaining this to a man who is a proud Tyler the Creator supporter. A man who had openly proclaimed himself a feminist. A man who loves to repost social media graphics on world issues. He shrugged his shoulders.
“Not my problem.”
That sent me into a spiral of thoughts, which may sound dramatic, but isn’t it fun to rethink your views of the entire feminist movement? As someone super into gender studies, I think that’s a grand time. And headache inducing.
In my search to find out if anyone else on the internet was annoyed with male feminists, I stumbled across a Harvard Crimson article from 2017.
“Recently, Saturday Night Live produced a skit called “Girl at a Bar” where a woman sitting alone at a bar is repeatedly approached by self-proclaimed feminist men—“not gross guys trying to hit on you or anything”—who make it clear, through their pussyhats and their feminist T-shirts, that they are not one of those “skeazy guys” at a bar. However, after successfully convincing the woman of their feminist credentials, these men use the opportunity to make a sexual advance. And when she gently rebuffs their advances, these men become angry, calling her a “bitch” and complaining that “it’s not fair.”
I had never watched this skit, but after reading this description, they got it spot on. So many men put on this “feminist” front in order to appeal to women. There’s a trend where a man could say that women deserve equal rights and people have the tendency to jump up and down and squeal, ‘He’s one of the good ones!”
Let’s break that down. What does “one of the good ones” mean? I’ve heard it a lot with male celebrities, but of course, this can apply to men in our daily lives. I tend to hear it in reference to men who believe women have a right to their own bodies and publically say so. Justin Baldoni is a big one. Hozier. Cillian Murphy. Mark Ruffalo. Ryan Gosling. George Clooney. The list goes on.
I think it’s great that there are men out there advocating for women. But I do not think that they should be labeled “one of the good ones.” It makes them almost blameless for controversy. This summer I wrote about the drama between Justin Baldoni and Blake Lively and how everyone was jumping down Lively’s throat for saying something stupid about domestic violence survivors.
In this controversy, people were acting like Baldoni was blameless because in the past he has advocated for womens rights, and in turn, were degrading Lively physically and mocking her. I don’t like what she said and it did change my view on her. But Blandoni stood behind his male feminist presence and allowed a woman to be the victim of a mass internet attack. If you read my piece, I also point out he may not be that dream feminist man that everyone is making him out to be. He hired an abusers crisis PR manager and took it upon himself to direct a film that probably should’ve been directed by a woman.
The Crimson article I read provided a more real lfe example of male feminists being performative.
“This is my male coworker at UN Watch who was a loud feminist and well-versed in complex feminist literature—but who complained that he should be the one giving the speech about women’s rights to the United Nations, not me, because “if a man is giving a speech about gender equality, then more people will pay attention.”
I think the issue is that men see the praise other men get for being feminists and they like that attention. Men like the attention they get from it and they can use it as a shield. Take the example above about the man at the U.N. He’s a “good” feminist because he reads feminsit literature, but he uses that label to then turn away another qualified woman for his own academic/professional gain.
Looking back on that SNL skit- Beck Bennett, one of the male feminists, shouts after being rejected, “But I followed all the rules!”
“Followed all the rules” of course, means that men have this idea that if they put on a feminist front, women will be more attracted to them because they come off as less creepy. Feminism shouldn’t be that. It’s a movement that has gone back centuries and it is disgusting for a man to claim the title and then spew the most egregious misogynistic words ever spoken.
This of course, isn’t to bash on the men who proclaim feminism. Some men do it right. There are organizations out there like HeforHer which is a national organization that men can join to support women. Some men know when to be quiet and let women talk. Some men educate themselves. Some men practice what they preach every day.
Ultimately, I think men should be feminists. But they have to practice what they preach. You can’t use a label that means so much to so many women as a way to show that you’re “one of the good ones” so that you can get laid.