Essay by Harper Nicole Anderson

Not my best but my latest
Copyright 2012 harper nicole anderson University of California Berkeley

Not All Duke Men Play Lacrosse or Basketball: Why Men Should Become Allies to Women
This discussion will focus on how men--even the most privileged among them such as those presumably mostly middle and upper class, mostly heterosexual white men attending Duke University mentioned in an essay we will look at--can benefit from becoming allies to women. But before we begin this discussion, let us define what an ally is and some of the implications involved in becoming an “ally to women.”
One dictionary definition of an ally is “a person, group, or nation that is associated with others for some common cause or purpose” and that pretty much sums up what being an ally is all about: joining together for some common cause. (dictionary.com) Straight people can ally with gays and lesbians to support gay rights issues such as supporting same-sex marriage and opposing “don’t ask don’t tell.” Because of the support of allies, (recently Obama became an ally) same sex marriage will become a reality soon, at least in most “blue” states and, of course, the fight to repeal DADT has been won. .As well, cisgendered folk (those who are not transgender) can ally with transgendered folks (transgender is an umbrella term that includes all gender variant people from cross dressers to transsexuals which Judith Lorber in “The Social Construction of Gender” describes as “a person who has had sex change surgery”) (Kirk & Ozakawa-Rey 24) and women to support rights for transpeople. Maryland recently became the latest of several states to add “gender status” to the list of protected classifications regarding housing and employment discrimination and such which got passed because of ally support. (Transgender folk are one of the few or perhaps the only minority who do not have a single voice in the US Congress so that movement depends strongly, even almost exclusively on allies.) So in the same way that straights ally with gays and cis with trans, white men can and should ally with women because it is in their own self-interest to do so. But does becoming an ally to women make a man a feminist? Should men who ally with women call themselves feminists? I found some interesting discussions on this.+
Blogger “kobeski,” a man, makes an argument that men who ally with women should not declare themselves feminists because the act of doing so asserts male privilege.(kobeski) He bases some of his views on an article written by Chris Clarke, another male ally, who declares in “Why I Am Not a Feminist” that “I am a sympathizer. I am a fellow traveler. At my best, I am an ally. But I am a member of the class against which feminism is aimed. I can do my best to be a traitor to that class.” He writes that when he read Cherrie Moraga and Gloria Anzaldua’s This Bridge Called My Back, he became an ally to the Chicana/o cause. Should he then call himself a Chicano? Of course not. (Clarke) Did white civil rights workers in the 1960s call themselves “negroes” or “colored folk?” No. Whether or not men should label themselves feminists is open to further discussion. Now I mentioned earlier that men allying with women would presumably benefit women. There are arguments to the contrary: that men should just stay out of the equation, they are the oppressors after all. So before we look at how male allies can benefit themselves, let us take a brief look at how their alliance might benefit women.
In Men Speak Out: Views on Gender, Sex and Power, Jackson Katz and Shira Tarrant refute the argument that men should be excluded by arguing that the inclusion of men benefits the feminist movement in several ways. First, including men as allies breaks down the traditional binary gender construct “where feminist equals female, and where it therefore becomes extremely strange or weird to think of a man as being a feminist.” In addition, the exclusion of men leaves out some trans, gender queer and intersexed people. Furthermore, the authors point out, there is strength in numbers, and lastly, allying with men brings in people who were directly involved with “with sexist practices and institutions, such as hardcore pornography, gender discrimination, or violence against women” and men “can be helpful in exposing and critiquing these practices.” (Katz & Tarrant 108) Conclusion: including men as allies benefits the women’s movement. Before we look at how becoming an ally to women works in men’s own self-interest, let us look briefly at the system that men (and women) have to deal with as it is today: the system of patriarchy.
Allan G. Johnson, author of “Patriarchy: the System” likens patriarchy to a Monopoly game. Players are doled out property and build their little empires by acquiring properties, developing them with hotels and charging exorbitant rent. When opponents land on your property and are unable to pay, they are considered bankrupt and lose the game. Johnson says he stopped playing the game because he does not like the way it makes him feel. Like Monopoly, patriarchy is an artificial construct that is about “standards of feminine beauty and masculine toughness…the ‘naturalness’ of male aggression, competition and dominance and of female caring, cooperation and subordination.” (Okazawa-Rey 34) Some would call this system hegemonic. Like Monopoly, the system produces winners and losers but unlike Monopoly, where there is one winner and a handful of losers, patriarchal capitalism sets up very few winners and a multitude of losers. We are all familiar with the concept of the 99% who control most of the wealth but I recall that recently economist Paul Krugman wrote that .1% control most of the wealth. We might define the .1% as winners except that one has to wonder if the Wall Street tycoon who lusts for a new yacht like he lusts (Buddhists would call this suffering) for a new “Trophy Wife” is really happy. In the end, patriarchal capitalism benefits almost no one. Clearly then it is in the interest of the vast majority of men to help change this rigged game, there are others.
The other arguments I found to support my thesis are that male alliance empowers men as proposed by John Stoltenberg and that involvement in the feminist cause helps men fight systemic oppression that affects all of us (at least the 99.9%) as argued by Brandon Arber in “It’s Just Common Sense,” an essay in the aforementioned Men Speak Out : Views on Gender, Sex and Power. First, we will discuss Stoltenberg.
In “I Am Not a Rapist! Why College Guys Are Confronting Sexual Violence,” John Stoltenberg paints a fascinating portrait of Duke University men who decide to organize against sexual violence towards women. Stoltenberg interviews several students who explain how taking a stand against rape empowers them. Andy Moose, a 21-year-old English major, says that he began to "really reflect about how I felt about a lot of emotional and personal issues that I had not spent much time thinking about before." And goes on to say that the driving force for him was the "personal gains that I see possible for people working with these issues." Eric Fink, 22, a psychology major and a woman's studies minor reveals that he is not comfortable with the traditional male ideal instead he prefers to “be exactly who you are without having to be a man in the traditional sense. My sense of masculinity mostly came from where everybody else's does, TV … but I did not want to be this macho guy.” Carleton Leftwich, a 25-year-old premed student: "I never could identify with what straight was – – this rugby playing kind of rough-and-tumble guy always having to prove that I was macho – – so I just automatically thought that I had to be gay, because I was very sensitive and I love classical music." Further evidence needs to be gathered but it appears just from this little vignette that many men, maybe most men, feel that they do not fit the typical macho male stereotype and that their alliance with women helps them get in touch with their true masculinity and this empowers them. (Kirk & Okazawa-Rey 270, 271)
In his captivating essay “It’s Just Common Sense,” from the book Men Speak Out: Views on Gender, Sex and Power, the author Brandon Arber introduces himself as a “a college athlete… a beneficiary of white, upper-middle class male privilege and access” who feels that most of his male colleagues still view feminism as a “dirty word from the locker-room to the boardrooms that are still dominated by men.” Arber sees oppression against men and women as systemic and “that fighting for women’s rights was synonymous with fighting injustice in general.” Arber “aspire(s) to more pragmatic, humanist values: caring for all people and using reason to bring about a better world ” and sees great potential for men as allies as many men see themselves “as victims of prejudice by virtue of being black, Asian, Muslim, or Jewish”. Furthermore, he opines that “whether we know about it or not, most of us probably have had a friend, girlfriend, sister, mother, or wife who was abused or sexually assaulted at some point in her life” Arber concludes: “When we need to make decisions either in our own private lives, or regarding public policy, a feminist perspective has to be a viable option. Because when it’s time to dig in, we are going to want the true feminist majority behind us…It’s just common sense.”
The women’s movement could use more allies like the students at Duke and Brandon Arber. As the evidence clearly shows that it is in men’s own self-interest to become allies, it is likely that more and more men will do so. Together, the 99.9% of us who do not benefit from patriarchic capitalism can fight the greed, sexism, racism and oppression of the .1%.
Works Cited
Clarke, Chris. fault line.org. 27 March 2006. http://faultline.org/site/comments/why_i_am_not_a_feminist/. 11 July 2012.
Katz, Jackson and Shira Tarrant. Men Speak Out: Views on Gender, Sex and Power. Ebsco Host:. Routledge, 2007. ebook
Kirk, Gwen and Margo Okazawa-Rey. Women's Lives: Multicultural Perspectives. New York, New York: The McGraw-Hill Companies, Inc., 2007.
Kobeski. So You Wanna Be an Ally? 16 Jan. 2012. http://demandnothing.org/so-you-wanna-be-an-ally/. 11 July 2012.