Keywords

In the previous chapter I argued that feminist allyship opens up conceptual space for a normative alternative to toxic masculinity not just consistent with but actively grounded in feminist values and projects. It does not appeal to some elusive essential difference between men and women, but in differentiating itself from feminist androgyny, it also shows how virtuous human qualities like compassion or courage exhibited by those who embody masculinity and also how those who do not can fit within a relational conception of allyship. My account builds on bell hooks’ vision for feminist manhood, Linda Alcoff’s work on anti-racist whiteness, and a socially situated analysis of allyship generally and of men’s feminist allyship more specifically. In this chapter, I want to think more expansively about the challenges for feminist allyship masculinity in social context. Among other things, this might help us see the intersectional possibilities of allyship masculinity—what it looks like in practice for allyship masculinities to be accessible to differently positioned men, not despite but because of the considerable diversity of social locations and experiences among us.

Deeply Nonideal Masculinity

Consider a contrast between allyship masculinity and the mythopoetic masculinity of Robert Bly’s Iron John (1990), Bill Kauth’s Circle of Men (1992), or Sam Keen’s Fire in the Belly (1992). Like the ideal of androgyny, allyship and mythopoetic masculinities oppose gender roles and divisions as conventionally configured in modern society, but unlike feminist androgyny their opposition to traditional masculinity is taken as grounds for reformation rather than abolition. The “new heroic man” is full of wonder, humility, and empathy, Keen says; but he is not androgynous, not a blend of masculine and feminine characteristics. “In my own experiences, I can locate nothing that feels ‘feminine’ about holding my daughter in my arms,” he writes. “Nor do I feel ‘masculine’ when I am chopping wood or riding my horse down a steep mountain trail” (1992, 213). These are just stereotypes, labels. “Once we have stripped away all the false mystification of gender, an authentic mystery of gender remains. Beneath the facade of socially constructed differences between men and women, there is a genuine mystery of biological and ontological differences” (1992, 217).

What’s fascinating and confusing about Keen’s simultaneous critique of gender stereotypes and celebration of authentic manhood echoes J.J. Bola’s (2019, 118) characterization of masculinity as both a mask and one’s true face to be revealed. Gender is real and binary, Keen says, just not in the way we were taught to perform it. “God did not make persons–chairpersons, mailpersons, or spokespersons–only men and women. Peel away the layers of social conditioning and there remains the prime fact of the duality of men and women” (1992, 218). This celebration of “the communion of opposites–in love and sex” (1992, 219) reflects a commitment to gender essentialism typical of mythopoetic masculinity (Clatterbaugh 1995, 49) that runs roughshod across the diverse range of human experiences. By contrast, to whatever extent participating in allyship masculinity involves building solidarity with other men, it is not to separate from what Keen calls a world of WOMEN—“larger-than-life shadowy female figures who inhabit our imaginations, inform our emotions, and indirectly give shape to many of our actions” (1992, 13)—in order to find an essentially masculine self. To whatever extent allyship masculinity directs us to look inward, it is not to uncover some primal, authentic manhood deep within. As Bob Pease (2000, 117) aptly puts it, “If we are talking about evolving non-patriarchal masculinities, they have to be as socially constructed as the patriarchal masculinities.”

Allyship masculinity as I have tried to describe it is a decidedly nonideal thing. By this I do not mean that it is inadequate or second-rate, but that it would not have the substance that it does under ideal conditions. It is in the aftermath of injustice where allyship masculinity is made meaningful. (By aftermath I mean only that injustice has been done, not necessarily that it has since stopped.) Given our histories, institutions, and systems of oppression, what does feminist masculinity look like? It is admittedly not an easy question to answer, which is one reason I appreciate the epistemic humility that Tom Digby (2014, 149) and Jared Yates Sexton (2019, 252) bring to their respective critical analyses of toxic masculinity. But the contingency of allyship masculinity is a feature, not a bug. As with those who advocate an ideal of androgyny, we can hope and plan for a possible future where systemic, wide-sweeping gender justice has made normative masculinity an obsolete category. And yet this does not mean we should now act as if it is already obsolete. What allyship masculinities offer are critically reflective, substantively feminist ways men can be—not forever and always, but for the unjust meantime. “Our work should not aim to produce ideals capable of serving as permanent standards of assessments for all societies,” Alison Jaggar (2019, 17–18) argues for philosophical investigations beyond the armchair; “instead like the results of scientific investigations, the ideals we produce should be taken as provisional, subject to change as our circumstances change.” My own account of feminist allyship masculinities is offered in this spirit, where contingency and openness to change as the circumstances of justice change are constitutive elements rather than inadvertent or unwelcome areas of incompletion.

Intersectionality Revisited

I have focused on men’s distinctive relationships and potential contributions to feminist projects in an effort to show how these contributions can be valuable and constitutive of a meaningfully feminist masculinity. But this is not to say men should limit their contributions to emancipatory and reparative projects to only those things that are distinctive to their social positioning as men. For one thing, there are of course many actions large and small that men, women, and non-binary people can all do to contribute to gender justice; simply because these things are not as connected to our specific social locations does not necessarily make them less important. Further, as social identities are not exhausted nor fully constituted by gender alone, our allyship practices needn’t be limited to those that are constitutive of masculinity, even an alternate to masculinity as traditionally configured. Following Alcoff, we might recognize anti-racist white histories and communities as themselves constituting an alternate whiteness available to those who do the work. For white men, the work of anti-racist allyship sometimes may also be the work of feminist allyship: these allyship practices are constitutive of both anti-racist whiteness and feminist masculinity. At other times the tasks of dismantling racism and patriarchy might be distinct (which is not to say in conflict) and even when the projects themselves converge, the work of anti-racist white allyship may be distinct from (again, not necessarily contrary to) the work of men’s feminist allyship. Consider for example anti-racist allyship practices that call for similar contributions from white allies across gender, or feminist work to which men’s gender identities and experiences make a difference even as other aspects of our social identities are less relevant to the specific task at hand. Consider contributions of Frederick Douglass, W.E.B. DuBois, and other feminist forefathers not only to androcentric racial justice but also to progressive gender activism (Guy-Sheftall 2006, 43; Byrd and Guy-Sheftall 2001). The point is not that our allyship practices must or even should always be clearly delineated and identifiable nor that we should always know which allyship practices are constitutive of what parts of our (or others’) social identities. Taking intersectional allyship seriously does not simply mean recognizing our contributions to feminist projects as aligned with or as orthogonal to other liberatory and ameliorative collective responses to historical and existing systems of oppression. It also means that as men vary in our social locations, those distinctive contributions that we are well-positioned to make toward feminist and other projects sometimes also will vary.

Intersecting axes of oppression mean that men in the fullness of their social identities can be both beneficiaries and victims of gender injustices. Sexism, racism, and other forms of oppression cannot always be neatly disentangled without losing what is explanatorily significant about these oppressive structures and about how victims experience them. As Nico Juarez puts it, “People tend to think about intersectionality as adding up all their oppressions and their privileges to know where they are. In reality, when you add masculinity into Nativeness, they aren’t simply adding a privilege to an oppressed category; you are radically changing both” (Plank 2019, 249). To say that men of color experience discrimination, injustice, and oppression only and always in virtue of being people of color and never in virtue of being men of color is to presume a narrowly additive conception of racism and sexism (Spelman 1988, 114; Mutua 2006, 22).

We can see these tensions in Tommy Curry’s critique of mainstream feminist philosophy in his book The Man-Not (2017) and Olufemi Taiwo’s (2018) critical defense of intersectional feminism in response (see also Pennyamon 2015; Oluwayomi 2020). Curry argues that scholars generally and intersectional feminist theorists specifically fail to do justice to Black men and boys and the material conditions of their lives; over and again, he says, they marginalize, pathologize, and erase Black American male experience. Taiwo agrees that it is too simple to assert that Black males are disadvantaged by racism and advantaged by sexism: “the intersection of Blackness and maleness is poorly theorized by analogy to, say, whiteness and maleness” (2018, 7). But he is less convinced by Curry’s opposition to intersectionality. In fact, “against the advice of the text itself, I read The Man-Not as a work of intersectional theory,” he observes. “I suspect this conclusion will be equally unwelcome to the author and the overlapping sets of scholars that the book makes it its business to criticize” (2018, 8). As Taiwo sees it, Curry is not solely to blame for the tension and confusion here; intersectionality is even more complicated than many advocates and critics would seem to appreciate. “It will take difficult and complex empirical work to sort out what our generalizations should be regarding different intersectional categories of people,” Taiwo argues, “whether Black males or any other” (2018, 9). The good news is that a more expansive and empirically grounded intersectional feminism can not only accommodate Curry’s insights about the undertheorized and mischaracterized experiences of Black American men and boys, but actively center and build around them (see also Crenshaw 1991, 1258; Mutua 2012, 341).

Recognizing that men can be targets of intersectional gender oppression does not mean that all men experience gender-based oppression, nor does it deny that men taken collectively pervasively and systematically enjoy gender-based privileges and entitlements. What it does mean is that while some men’s allyship masculinity may derive primarily from constructive grappling with our male privilege and ignorance, for others it is more complicated. This again is a benefit of recognizing feminist allyship masculinities pluralized and characterizing allyship in a way that emphasizes difference but does not assume that allies by definition can never also be targets of the oppressive systems to be dismantled.

What Men Can Know

It is a fool’s errand to look for something that all and only men know, as much it would be to seek something equally universal and ubiquitous across all women’s knowledge. Fortunately, feminist epistemologies offer more nuanced accounts of the relation between gender and knowledge. What these varied philosophies have in common is a recognition that social locations make an epistemic difference, and that gender is a significant aspect of social location. Who we are and how we are positioned in the world affect the experiences we are likely to have, observations we are likely to make, and how we interpret those experiences and observations (Code 2006).

When it comes to knowledge and ignorance in a world shot-through with gender discrimination and oppression, there is not necessarily one main way this works. Many contributions to the recent literature on epistemic injustice identify various ways that people are wronged in their capacity as knowers generally, and specifically how identity stereotypes and social structures can underwrite gender-based epistemic wrongs (Fricker 2007; Dotson 2011; Pohlhaus 2012; McKinnon 2016). Recall the pointed critiques in Chap. 2 from Wollstonecraft (1792) and Macaulay (1790) on how gendered education deprives girls and women of training and understanding of traditionally male domains. Macaulay is especially perceptive about how boys and men are left ignorant of the skills and knowledge required in traditionally feminine domains because of their own highly gendered and incomplete education. More recently, feminist social epistemologists have built upon Charles Mills’ (2007) account of white ignorance to show how gendered gaps in knowledge are not simply the passive result of attention paid elsewhere: sometimes ignorance is actively constructed, where the not-knowing is itself the point (Alcoff 2007). We might also recall John Stuart Mill’s discussion of epistemic arrogance and other intellectual vices in boys and men in gender inequitable societies. Marginalization of female voices not only erodes their epistemic agency and deprives the world of their insights, but also overinflates the regard that boys and men have of their own intelligence (Rossi 1970, 218).

Feminist standpoint theorists advance this analysis further, showing how social and epistemic privileges are inversely related under patriarchy, heteronormativity, and other oppressive systems. It is not just that oppressive systems deprive marginalized people of valuable epistemic resources and devalue their perspectives (though standpoint theorists recognize these things too) but further that marginalization enables a better understanding of social reality within an oppressive system. This epistemic privilege is not automatic, Alison Wylie (2012) argues. Developing a standpoint is an achievement, the result of sustained critical reflection on gendered experiences rather than an essential or inherent female way of knowing (Toole 2021). As Sandra Harding explains, a feminist standpoint begins and is grounded in women’s experiences, a starting point for critical inquiry in contrast to androcentric inquiries that treat men’s lives as their presumptive basis (1992, 450; see also Harding 1990, 1991; Hirsch et al. 1995).

One lesson to take from this varied work is that men and boys are not exempt from the effects of the fraught relationship between gender and knowledge. Men are not only responsible for the harms of epistemic injustice but also negatively impacted by them: sometimes as victims of racial, ethnic, class, or other identity stereotypes, and even when not as victims, epistemically worse off due to credibility mismatches and unfilled gaps in understanding of significant social experiences. Men’s intellectual virtues are stunted by gender inequity, and our ignorance of the fullness of the world and human social experience of it is actively constructed. And because men are not just men generically, because gender partially but does not on its own fully constitute our social locations, men’s knowledge and ignorance is further affected by white supremacy, heteronormativity, and other oppressive systems. For some, our ignorance is constructed as a shield to protect our race, class, or other unearned privileges; some are marginalized and subjected to epistemic injustices by white supremacy and heteronormativity; and some have intersecting, overlapping, and conflicting experiences as both beneficiaries and victims of oppressive social systems in their complicated, confusing, sometimes contradictory manifestations.

Consider the situation of men who are members of a community in which sexual harassment and discrimination are endemic problems, yet who do not believe that they have seen these things themselves. Other men in this community do recognize that they have witnessed sexual harassment and discrimination, of course; some have been targets themselves. On first analysis, these men might treat their absence of personal observation as counterevidence against the pervasiveness of sexism in their community, and might say as much in community forums. In this case, the norms of allyship masculinity ask such men to consider how their gendered social positions as men may be relevant to their not-witnessing sexism that exists in their community. “Is my not-witnessing better understood as counterevidence or as a sort of gendered ignorance?” one should ask. Allyship masculinity also means considering the significance of one’s testimony of not-witnessing sexism in its social-epistemic context, namely, in response to others’ testimonies of firsthand experiences of sexual harassment and discrimination. “What is the point of my not-witnessing testimony?” we should ask ourselves. “Is it making a constructive contribution to our collective understanding, or is it instead obscuring the issue?’ Different men will answer these questions differently, given the specific details of their lives and their specific situations.

To be sure, testimonial injustice, testimonial smothering, and other forms of epistemic violence are not unique to men nor are they limited to gender oppression. My claim here is not that virtuous listening is uniquely constitutive of allyship masculinity. To the extent that existing patriarchal systems serve to configure our experiences differently along gender lines, allyship masculinity asks men to consider how our distinctively gendered experiences make a difference, for better or worse, and take these considerations into account in our beliefs and actions.

Part of allyship masculinity, then, is being mindful of how one’s particular social position as a man within a patriarchal society affects one’s knowledge and ignorance, and how these epistemic effects may be different for one’s allies including differently positioned men, women, and non-binary people. Here someone might rightly note that women and non-binary people should also be mindful of how their own areas of knowledge and ignorance are affected by their social positions under patriarchy. This is indeed true. How then is an epistemic mindfulness distinctly constitutive of not just feminist identity generally but feminist masculinity specifically? There is theoretical and practical overlap between men’s and others’ feminist allyship, to be sure. Taking a cue from the ideal of androgyny, we might imagine a future in which people should be mindful of how their social locations might affect their knowledge and ignorance even though gender identity no longer factors into that awareness. In the unjust meantime, however, the fact that one is a man rather than a woman or non-binary person is explanatorily significant. It makes an epistemic difference, even as the difference it makes is not the same for all men.

Given the imperative from feminist standpoint theory to start research from marginalized lives, how if at all can men contribute to knowledge-making from social locations where we ourselves do not live? Call this the methodological-epistemological challenge for men’s feminist allyship. Some men might despair (or alternately delight) in the apparent implication that we are excluded (or excused) from participating in research projects from marginalized lives. But this implication need not follow: the methodological-epistemological challenge is notable but not insurmountable. For one thing, the diversity among men means that many of us are already part of historically marginalized communities whose needs, values, and ways of life have been historically excluded, objectified, and misrepresented by Western science. The feminist call to start research in women’s lives aligns and overlaps with postcolonial calls to start research in the lives of Indigenous peoples and people of color worldwide (Harding 2008). Furthermore, for all the emphasis put upon the inverse relationship between social and epistemic privilege, standpoint theory is neither separatist nor relativist in its aims or methods. In contrast to those at the top, Harding explains, “the activities of those at the bottom of such social hierarchies can provide starting points for thought–for everyone’s research and scholarship–from which humans’ relations with each other and the natural world can become visible” (1992, 442–443). After all, standpoint methodology is not for individual women to ground their thought exclusively in their own specific social locations, nor for women collectively to agree on a single ideal woman’s life from which to begin. The idea is that everyone involved (including but not just men) will contribute to research that at least sometimes starts from lives that are different from our own. This is not necessarily a cause for skeptical concern, as Uma Narayan explains. “Our commitment to the contextual nature of knowledge does not require us to claim that those who do not inhabit these contexts can never have any knowledge of them” (2003, 314). Harding herself has long made it clear that men are neither excluded nor excused from the collective enterprise:

Men’s thought, too, will begin first from women’s lives in all the ways that feminist theory, with its rich and contradictory tendencies, has helped us all—women as well as men—to understand how to do. It will start there in order to gain the maximally objective theoretical frameworks within which men can begin to describe and explain their own and women’s lives in less partial and distorted ways. (1992, 457)

Following Harding and Narayan, men can take up the methodological-epistemological challenge of knowing across gender difference. We do not have to be driven to do so because of our anxieties, tempting as that might be, but because doing so enables more accurate knowledge of human lives including our own. The work of knowing across difference is neither downplayed nor dismissed, but rather embraced as a collective project with considerable social-epistemic potential.

Still the preceding discussion should not obscure the fact that starting thought in women’s lives can be a challenge for men raised to take androcentrism for granted. Reckoning with, meeting, and even failing at this challenge are themselves constitutive practices of feminist allyship masculinity. Overcoming bystander paralysis and contributing to collective thought that begins from women’s lives is a start, but this alone is not enough. Having goodwill toward one’s feminist allies is also a good thing, but this alone is not enough either. “It is a commonplace that even sympathetic men will often fail to perceive subtle instances of sexist behavior or discourse,” Narayan reminds us. “Sympathetic individuals who are not members of oppressed groups should keep in mind the possibility of this sort of failure regarding their understanding of issues relating to an oppression they do not share” (2003, 314).

Narayan’s warning need not spur a retreat to skepticism or relativism, but rather a reiteration of the need for accountability in allyship across difference. In interviews with dozens of men active in gender violence prevention, Messner et al. (2015, 162) notice a difference of opinions on the politics of accountability. Where men like Paul Kivel (1992) see a close connection between allyship and accountability to women, other men do not seem to see it that way. Of anti-violence groups working exclusively with men, John Erickson reasons, “it’s just all men, I don’t think they’d have to be held accountable to anyone” (Messner et al. 2015, 167). “Am I accountable to women, like no? Yes? It’s just an odd question,” says Stephen Philp:

I feel like I’m pretty confident that I know what a pro-gender-equality behavior is, you know, like I’ve been doing this long enough at this point and I’m firmly established enough in my feminist identity that I feel like I’m pretty capable on my own at figuring out what to do, and because of a lot of my involvement, even at this point, involves women, I don’t feel like I need to explicitly get their approval. (Messner et al. 2015, 167)

Gilbert Salazar, also experienced in anti-violence work with men, voices some similar reservations about the need for accountability:

Being accountable to women, I personally don’t sort of—doesn’t strike me as something that seems very positive. Why should I be accountable to someone, anyone, not just women? I mean that’s really where my independence really wants to come in and I just wanna fight and be like, ‘Why can’t we be accountable to each other?’ (Messner et al. 2015, 167)

I am with Kivel rather than Erickson, Philp, or Salazar on this. But I do wonder if the disagreement here might turn on some questionable assumptions about what accountability involves as much as anything else. Being accountable to our allies means being open to, actively inviting, and learning from their critical feedback (see Goldrick-Jones 2002; Atherton-Zeman 2011; Pease 2017; Bourke 2020). It means recognizing allies as epistemic collaborators and knowers in their own right, not merely sources of information or useful instruments for furthering one’s own knowledge (Fricker 2007, 6; Dotson 2008, 58; Berenstain 2016, 570). But it does not demand epistemic deference to one’s allies nor treating them as if they are infallible, which Narayan reminds us “may reduce itself to another subtle form of condescension” (2003, 315; see also Taiwo 2020). Our different social locations do make a difference to relations of accountability, but it need not be a one-way street. Salazar is right to suggest that maybe we all need to be accountable to each other; where he goes wrong is in raising this as counting against men’s accountability to women rather than advocating it as a more complicated and ultimately more constructive web of accountability among feminist allies.

Putting Privilege to Work

There is work toward gender equity and undoing oppression to which allies across gender identities can contribute in similar ways, just as there are truths about the world which we can recognize in similar ways. Yet one recurring recommendation among those who write about and lead programs on allyship is that men should identify and take advantage of opportunities to put their privilege to work for justice.

When it comes to contributing to collective projects toward dismantling gender oppression, men are better situated to make some contributions than others, and sometimes better positioned than women are to make particular sorts of contributions. There are, as James Sterba notes, “many contexts in which men are good for feminism, that is, many contexts in which men can make useful contributions to the cause of feminism” (1998, 298). Sterba urges feminist men to argue for gender equality in spaces in which women are underrepresented and to actively use their male privilege to advocate for gender equality in conversations with those who extend greater credibility to men than women. Jonathan Ravarino (2013, 160) likewise argues that, “as men, we have unique access to other men. This same-sex dynamic means that men can be effective social justice allies in addressing sensitive topics” (see also Drury and Kaiser 2014, 643; Smith and Johnson 2020, 10). In addition to issues of credibility, men sometimes might be more willing and able to appraise their male privilege and complicity in patriarchal systems honestly alongside other, similarly implicated men. This is not to say men working with men or other such distinctively gendered contributions to dismantling oppression are more important than other contributions—far from it. But we can see how men’s committed, accountable, and reflective contributions to feminist work can themselves give meaning to a distinctively feminist sort of masculinity.

I raised concerns for Kimmel’s model of new masculinity in Manhood in America (1996) and Guyland (2008). But elsewhere Kimmel sees a distinctive role for men in a sort of Gentlemen’s Auxiliary of Feminism: “an honorable position, one that acknowledges that this is a revolution of which we are part, but not the central part, not its most significant part,” he explains. “It will be the task of a Gentleman’s Auxiliary to make feminism comprehensible to men, not as a loss of power…but as a challenge to that false sense of entitlement to that power in the first place” (Kimmel 1998, 67). Guyland includes examples of how men can make distinct contributions to undoing gender oppression. Kimmel shares the story of a fraternity member reconsidering his complicity in the “walk of shame,” as fraternity brothers gathered to heckle sorority sisters heading home on weekend mornings after hooking up. Inspired by Kimmel’s recent visit, this man found like-minded fraternity members opposed to the heckling. After discussion among themselves, they took their opposition to their fraternity, made their case, and effected small but meaningful local change (2008, 281). Kimmel sees in this man’s efforts a genuine attempt to get beyond the limits of his experiences and to stand against injustice as others experience it. Notice that this fraternity member did not oppose injustice in a generic way, but from his specific social situation within a highly gendered cultural institution. His experience of the walk of shame differed from the women who endured it, and his position in the fraternity allowed him an avenue for change that was unavailable to these women and other outsiders.

Opportunities and obligations to put gender privilege to work are not limited to the straight, white, cisgender young men of Guyland. In his own writings (McBee 2014, 2018) and in conversation with Liz Plank (2019), Thomas Page McBee describes the “shocking turn” of male privilege after coming out as trans: “when I spoke, people didn’t just listen, they leaned in,” McBee says. “It was as if whatever I said, however banal, was surely worth that strain of a neck, or the hurried quieting of all other thoughts.” This unearned clout was a blessing and curse: “more than once, I would catch myself midramble and wonder, ‘Am I mansplaining?’” (2018). “He suddenly was seen as part of a group he didn’t always whole-heartedly endorse,” Plank (2019, 21–22) tells us. “Armed with this newly found male privilege, Thomas suddenly felt a responsibility to effect change.” Among other things, this meant using his voice to highlight the often marginalized yet essential labor and unacknowledged accomplishments of his female co-workers. More generally, McBee (2018) says, “I got better at doing the things that, as a man, I had been recently socialized not to do: asking for help, giving credit for it and admitting that I didn’t have all the answers.”

In the concluding chapter of How to Raise a Feminist Son, Sonora Jha shares a powerful story in which her teenage son used his male privilege to advocate for her—not in a professional setting, but in a difficult conversation with Jha’s mother while traveling together in India. Jha’s mother adores her grandson, doting on him, calling him “a god” more than once. So when she completely denies her daughter’s painful experience and her testimony of sexual assault growing up in India (which Jha left as an adult, and to which her mother is urging her to return), the son comes to his mother’s aid. He uses his male privilege not only to coax his grandmother to take seriously a truth that she stubbornly denies, but more than this, to move her to empathize with her daughter as he himself does. “Maybe you can believe her this time?” he asks. “You will know you have raised a feminist son,” Jha (2021, 230) writes proudly, “when he uses the voice he has been given–some might even say the voice of a god—to be the best kind of ally.”

The imperative to put one’s male privilege to work toward feminist ends is an important part of what makes feminist allyship a meaningfully normative alternative to toxic masculinity, and yet actually putting this norm into practice may not be as easy or straightforward as it seems. “The act of using your privilege to dismantle the very system that confers your privilege can feel unnatural,” Smith and Johnson (2020, 36) acknowledge. The tensions involved in putting male privilege to work to feminist ends are not only psychological but also social, political, and economic. Consider the pedestal effect, where men working in violence prevention and similar fields “are frequently given more attention and respect, basically for saying the same things that women have been saying for years” (Messner et al. 2015, 138; also Atherton-Zeman 2011; Peretz 2020). The pedestal effect is not experienced uniformly by all men who do such work. It is racialized as well as gendered, such that men of color often receive more scrutiny and suspicion than their white counterparts or women in these fields (Messner et al. 2015, 143).

A related issue is what Christine Williams calls the glass escalator, wherein men who enter predominantly female professions in contrast to women who enter predominantly male professions “generally encounter structural advantages in these occupations which tend to enhance their careers” (1992, 253). Williams finds that while straight, white, middle-class men in elementary education, nursing, and social work may well face discrimination from those outside the field, this is not generally so for hiring, promotion, and other such evaluations that are made from within. “Men take their gender privilege with them when they enter predominantly female occupations” (1992, 264). (For intersectional analyses of the glass escalator phenomenon, see Wingfield 2009; Williams 2013.)

On the one hand we might see the pedestal and glass escalator effects as further opportunity for men to put their privileges to good ends, in this case, using that unearned celebration to draw more attention to important ideas and projects. But the privileges involved here are not limited to the messages conveyed or work done—it is not the messages nor the work that are put on a pedestal, after all. At stake are not only which messages are successfully conveyed in contexts where they had received no hearing, or even who gets intellectual credit and who continues to be ignored, but also whose positions receive funding, book contracts signed, lucrative consultations secured with academic, military, governmental, and corporate partners, and so on (Messner et al. 2015, 149).

Related to the pedestal effect and glass escalator for men doing what has traditionally been cast as women’s work is what we might call the master’s tools problem. Underlying the imperative to put male privilege to work toward feminist ends is the idea that such privileges, though unearned and unfair, are nevertheless useful—and not just useful to reinforce existing systems of oppression. Yet if we heed Audre Lorde’s (1984) warning that the master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house, can unearned gender privilege be used to dismantle systems of gender injustice? Try as we might, won’t these tools of injustice inevitably reproduce what they were made for? Consider for example embodied athletic masculinity, which Messner, Greenberg, and Peretz call “the adjustable power drill in the master’s toolkit” for anti-violence work with boys and men. Embodied athletic masculinity opens doors, lends credibility, and captures attention. “Is it possible to use this tool to dismantle the privileges of masculinity?” they ask (2015, 148). “Or might we expect that the use of the master’s tools will, at best, poke some holes in or file off some of the jagged edges of masculinity, while reinforcing the privileges of those who embody it?”

One option is to deny the premise and insist that the master’s tools can be put to new purposes. This seems to be Jackson Katz’s response:

I know this gets complicated and I appreciate that, and I’ve always been self-reflexively thinking about, ‘OK, I’m using hegemonic masculinity to deconstruct hegemonic masculinity,’ which is what I am doing. I always took that quote from Audre Lorde, ‘You can’t use the master’s tools to take apart the master’s house,’ and the first time I heard it I thought, “This is completely wrong, this is completely wrong.’ It’s like, Audre Lorde is a writer, she’s using the master’s tools—writing is the most dominant tool of the hegemonic culture—to deconstruct the master’s house. So it’s internally contradictory in addition to being problematic as a political strategy. (As quoted in Messner et al. 2015, 148–149)

For their part, Messner and coauthors agree that Katz has indeed used the master’s tools (including his own athletic masculinity) to gain access to the master’s house, specifically to male-dominated spaces like football locker rooms, frat houses, and military. This is no small feat: as Alison Bailey suggests, “Although the master’s tools may not be able to successfully dismantle the master’s house, they may be just the tools we need to gain access to its contents” (1999, 102). Once inside, do bystander trainings in the master’s house have the power to tear it down from within?

I cannot pretend to offer a comprehensive solution to the master’s tools problem, but it bears repeating that navigating this challenge is itself a constitutive part of feminist allyship masculinity. Grappling with, succeeding, even failing to put one’s male privilege to work in service of gender justice without thereby reinforcing existing configurations of gender oppression is itself a crucial norm of feminist masculinity, of what feminist men as feminists and as men should do. Others in social justice movements experience their own versions of the master’s tools problem too: Lorde, after all, put the challenge directly to an audience of white women ostensibly committed to working with women of color. And different men must grapple with this challenge in different ways, since the privileges that they might put toward feminist projects will vary across differently positioned men. Still I find it meaningful to see this challenge as itself part of the work of allyship masculinity when it involves distinctly male privileges toward feminist ends from within patriarchal cultures and institutions.

Like Alcoff’s account of anti-racist white identity, histories, and communities, one thing that drives my approach to allyship masculinity is the recognition that unearned social privileges in an unjust social world are not always something one can decline. Such privileges will be extended anyway, with or without the recipient’s approval. So as we grapple with the master’s tools problem, it may be useful to distinguish between forced and avoidable privileges: that is, between privileges that are inescapable and those that may or may not be operative depending on the circumstances, including what one does and how one does it. This is somewhat like William James’ (1896, 329) distinction between forced and avoidable beliefs, where the former can’t be avoided but must be held in one way or another. Forced privileges for many (which is not to say all) men in patriarchal societies include having one’s resume viewed favorably compared to an equally qualified woman’s resume, not having one’s words misconstrued or mischaracterized based on dismissive gender stereotypes, and having standard consumer goods designed to fit one’s needs, among other things. Avoidable privileges might include the power to interrupt women without consequence, raising or projecting one’s voice to garner more attention and credibility, owning property, holding political office, etc. This is not to say that forced privileges are better or worse than avoidable ones, nor that avoidable privileges should always be avoided because they can. Indeed, sometimes they should be exercised toward feminist ends.

It might also be useful to distinguish between zero-sum and nonzero-sum privileges, those that benefit the recipient at others’ expense and those that benefit the recipient but without necessarily harming others (Von Neumann and Morgenstern 2007, 238; Mutua 2006, 35; McKinnon and Sennet 2017, 3). We can identify many zero-sum privileges that men in patriarchal societies tend to enjoy at others’ expense, including the aforementioned gender-biased evaluation of comparable resumes, holding political offices barred to women, institutional privileges in sexual harassment and assault cases, or even something as mundane as the default thermostat settings in an office environment. Other privileges that men enjoy benefit them and are indeed gendered in a patriarchal society but also would be beneficial in a gender-equitable world (McIntosh 1988). Nonzero-sum privileges may include having medicines and goods made to fit one’s needs, having the freedom to walk at night without fear of sexual assault, or having one’s words successfully and accurately communicated as intended.

Last but not least, we might distinguish between applications of male privilege that destabilize unjust distributions of gender privilege and systems of oppression generally and those that tend to reinforce them. This last distinction may be especially useful to defend Lorde from Katz’s charge of internal contradiction. Which are the tools that will never dismantle the master’s house: merely something the master happens to use toward his oppressive ends? Something made to be used for these ends? Or something that cannot or probably cannot be used successfully without furthering or reproducing these oppressive ends? I submit that the last of these is the temptation that Lorde illuminates and the temptation we must avoid. When she urges white feminists not to fall into the trap of building solidarity around women’s similarities and ignoring their differences, what makes this a master’s tool in the third sense is that doing so will inevitably reproduce the presumptive prioritization of the experiences of the most dominant members of the group, just as it does when men insist that social justice movements must transcend what “divides” us, that we should not get distracted by so-called women’s issues or other “special interests.” Writing meanwhile is a tool in the first sense. Katz is correct, of course, that the written word is widely used by the hegemonic culture—but that does not mean writing cannot also be put to radically different ends, as centuries of human history can attest.

The call to put our privileges to work seems most compelling when the privileges in question are avoidable, nonzero-sum, and destabilizing, cases in which we conceivably could refuse to take advantage of some privilege and yet as feminist allies we have good reason not to. Forced privilege cannot be avoided (though we may sometimes fool ourselves otherwise) but can be directed toward destabilizing or reinforcing ends, as for example when a man uses the fact that his words will most likely be accurately communicated to a certain audience to argue for the credibility of women or non-binary speakers whom this audience has misjudged, or instead uses that misjudgment to sell one’s oppositional position. Most troubling is when men put their privileges to work in ways are avoidable, zero-sum, and reinforce a patriarchal status quo.

What should we say, then, about embodied athletic masculinity in gender violence prevention and Katz’s self-described “use of hegemonic masculinity to deconstruct hegemonic masculinity”? Some elements of embodied athletic masculinity like an ex-linebacker’s height and general build will be present no matter what one does or refrains from doing. Meanwhile many other elements can be evoked selectively and situationally: not just height and build but how we hold ourselves, myriad choices made in both verbal and nonverbal communication, interactions with and reactions to others, the stories we tell and how we choose to tell them. Men capable of embodying athletic masculinity so understood might not do so deliberately, but at least some of these elements are optional privileges that may or may not be used, and may or may not be used to various ends.

Part of what is interesting about embodied athletic masculinity is its uneasy relationship with toxic gender configurations. If hegemonic masculinity can be used to deconstruct itself, as Katz says, the project will be necessarily limited, one part of hegemonic masculinity used to destabilize another: for example, when core values and rhetoric drawn from men’s sports, fraternities, or the military are celebrated and reified in service of the specific goal of encouraging men as men to prevent violence against women. The larger point of dispute between those who use and those who criticize embodied athletic masculinity in men’s active bystander trainings seems to concern how much of hegemonic masculinity needs to be dismantled. Do existing cultures and institutions such as collegiate and professional football, fraternities, and the military only need to be reformed, or does taking gender-based violence and gender-based systems of oppression generally seriously mean these paradigmatically toxic masculine cultures and institutions must be utterly dismantled? For those who believe the latter, the call to use hegemonic masculinity against itself is a master’s tools problem: tempting because its hegemony makes this seem like the only option, but ultimately reinforcing rather than destabilizing the oppressive structures that feminists are allied against.

Relational Allyship and Accountability

Being able to distinguish between different kinds of male privilege may give us some guidance in navigating the master’s tools problem for feminist allyship. But part of this problem is that it is not always easy to know whether a particular privilege we enjoy is forced or avoidable, nor whether a particular privilege that we rely upon in our contributions to gender justice in the unjust meantime is coming at others’ expense. This is one more reason to underscore the relational aspect of feminist allyship masculinity, where the difference-in-common characteristic of ally relationships expands our collective resources for responding to the master’s tools challenge.

The last thing a man should do is to rely entirely on his own uncorroborated and unchallenged independent judgment about when and how to put his privilege to work toward collective feminist ends. Even in the best of times, the failure to expose our beliefs and judgments to external critique undermines their epistemic strength, and for men educated and enculturated in patriarchal societies our beliefs and judgments are epistemically weakened further still by having been systematically shielded from women’s criticisms and contrary arguments. The lessons from the previous section on epistemic injustice, ignorance, and accountability carry this warning further still: that what men don’t know may itself be a form of active ignorance constructed in our or others’ interests. These countervailing epistemic considerations should give men pause in trusting our unchallenged and uncorroborated senses of success in putting our privileges to work toward feminist ends without thereby reinforcing unjust social configurations. For that matter, we should also reflect critically on the decision not to put our male privileges to work toward feminist ends for fear of perpetrating further wrongdoing in the process.

The social-epistemic resource of trustworthy allyship across difference undercuts paralyzing conclusions about men’s feminist contributions that a strictly individualistic analysis otherwise would invite. As Kivel (1992), Atherton-Zeman (2011), and others argue, standing in relationships of accountability can be enriching rather than demeaning for men as feminist allies—contrary to Salazar’s worries, a positive thing indeed. Without accountability to other men, women, and non-binary people across social locations, men individually and collectively are all more epistemically impoverished, isolated within our partial perspectives, and so less capable of usefully contributing to dismantling systems of oppression.

Along with the epistemic benefits of differently positioned feminist allies sharing insights and perspectives comes the risk that ally relationships are vulnerable to gendered epistemic injustices. One relevant injustice is what Nora Berenstain (2016) calls epistemic exploitation, where socially marginalized and oppressed people are compelled to do the often undervalued and uncompensated epistemic labor needed to educate socially privileged people about the nature of their oppression. Does the relational approach to feminist allyship that I have advocated here presume that women and non-binary people should shoulder the heavy cognitive and practical burdens of educating men? Many men certainly seem to presume as much, that our interlocutors are compelled to answer our questions upon demand or take responsibility for our persisting ignorance (Berenstain 2016, 575; see also Lorde 1984; Jones 2004; Applebaum 2020). “Let me tell you what it feels like to stand in front of a white man and explain privilege to him.” writes Manissa McCleave Maharawal (2011). “Every single time it is hard. Every single time I get angry that I have to do this, that this is my job, and that it shouldn’t be my job.”

As a normative nonideal model for men in the unjust meantime, feminist allyship masculinity must affirm that it should not be oppressed people’s job to teach men about gender oppression and privilege. Whose job should it be? Taking responsibility for our own iterative education is among the norms of men’s feminist allyship. Rather than excusing epistemic exploitation as a necessary burden that men’s allies must bear in coalitional relationships, we recognize the labor of avoiding, anticipating, and ameliorating our own and others’ gendered epistemic injustices as constitutive of allyship masculinity, as part of what men can and should distinctively contribute to feminist work. What this does not mean is that individual men should keep our own uncorroborated, unchallenged counsel, nor that accountability to our allies should become a hypothetical exercise. This need not be either solipsistic or exploitative. For one thing there are men, women, and non-binary people for whom teaching about gender and intersecting systems of oppression is our job, and spaces in which asking questions that may have been answered many times before is a suitable part of the process. Furthermore, whether we are inside or outside a classroom context, it is one thing to listen to you and another to compel you to speak, repeatedly and on demand. The truth is that non-binary people, women, and men occupying social locations different than our own already are expressing themselves, already offer their constructive criticism, and have done so for a long time now. Their testimonies are available to be heard, even if we have not been listening or have not understood what is being said.

Finally, when feminist allyship is understood relationally, accountability to our allies becomes a dynamic activity. We acknowledge each other, listen to each other, stand up for each other, and along the way build trust. We make mistakes, yes, but we can also learn from our mistakes (or not) and in so doing give budding and potential allies further reason to invest (or shield) themselves in collaborating across difference. By our successes and failures in practicing feminist allyship from our positions as men within patriarchal systems, we show ourselves to be more or less trustworthy for differently positioned others. Realizing early opportunities for accountability lays a foundation for later, more specific and personal opportunities to learn from, engage with, and be accountable to our allies; missing these early opportunities makes deeper long-term relations of accountability that is much harder to build. Better understanding and being better understood are iterative processes. Like men’s contributions to feminist politics and emancipatory projects more generally, they may not be quick or easy, but neither are they impossible or unprecedented. There is work we can do, relationships we can foster, and histories of feminist allyship by those who came before us in which we can find guidance and inspiration.