Get Over It.

Dear, not-so-dear, pro-feminist man,

I demand, I command, that you be perfect.
I know that you are not. You make me painfully aware
Each time you say:
‘We should’
‘You should’
‘I think’
Who is this ‘we’? We are not sisters.
And ‘you’, like dogs. ‘You dogs should bark’.
If you were perfect, you would not tell us what you think;
We know already.

Each time you sit down in this room
With your neutral, thoughtful silence
Your ‘I am listening to the women’ face
You apology for patriarchy
Your silence says:
‘Patriarchy does not gag you’
‘Men do not gag you’
‘I do not gag you’
But we are silent as you are silent
In our nice dresses and our ‘conversing in front of the man’ face.
We’ll say it later;
Out back;
With the noise of the cars in the distance.

-- Lisa Millbank, of A Radical TransFeminist

My earlier posts might have given impression that I think I am actually somewhat good at what I am talking about. They might have given the impression that I consider myself above and separate from the "bad men". This is not the case -- I write about these things because these are the things I struggle with. ("I struggle with" -- gag! I need a better way to word this.)

When I read this poem last week (before I had worked out the stuff I recently posted about) I was filled with the familiar man guilt. Oh god, what should I do? Speak, not speak? What should I do? Not exist? That last isn't a flippant statement -- I don't joke about suicide -- it was real, though thankfully fleeting. (I need the skills I am developing here as much for my own well-being as for my political responsibilities.)

That, needless to say, is not the right way to respond to the poem. Responding that way doesn't do anything. Well, anything but make me miserable. It doesn't help anything to make the poem about me personally -- to make it a personal judgment, the sentence being despair.

It is better (for me) to read the poem as being about the persistence and pervasiveness of the harms caused by patriarchy. Men, and other people who politically function as men, are going to cause harm, are going to cause hurt. Even if you are pro-feminist, even if you try to be perfect. Speaking, not speaking -- simply by politically functioning as a man in a patriarchy (the only context in which one can politically function as a man?), you will cause harm. There is no set of rules you can follow to be perfect, but the demand for perfection still stands, is still valid. So get the fuck over it and do what you can.

I need to get over it.