Avoiding the Grief of Male Allyship

This is a message to myself as much as to any other man.

If you are a man who is working to be an ally because you pay attention to and speak out against harmful male behaviors towards women and non-binary people in the workplace,?thank you.?Take a minute with that thank you. It’s real.

But here is the next shoe to drop. And too often it does not. I believe many of us who are active allies do so from an emotionally disconnected space. We view "women’s issues" exclusively from the seemingly civil frames of the workplace. Allyship in support of women becomes a question of hiring or advancement, a question of elevating women’s voices. In viewing our allyship exclusively from within the policies and systems of a relatively protected workplace worldview, we intentionally insulate ourselves from experiencing the grief and sorrow a wider lens can evoke in us. A wider lens that fully acknowledges the epidemic of political, economic and physical violence that impacts women globally.

As much as we rely in the illusion of it, there is no magical separation for the women in our daily working lives from the violence women face all over the world. Not only are the women we know linked by blood and empathy to what is playing out everywhere, the worst kinds of violence are also happening right in our offices, on our streets, in our homes; hidden in plain sight by our unwillingness to experience the emotions our admission of such truths would engender in us.

If we are men, we have the very real privilege of walling ourselves off from experiences that women are forced to face from cradle to grave. We can choose to avert our eyes even from the ways that the universe of women’s trauma is hinted at even in our well-ordered workplaces, glimpsed in the momentary expressions of discomfort or anger that women quash to create the illusory emotional comfort so many of us brusquely demand of them.?

We can avoid feeling the grief of women’s pain by getting defensive. We give into the almost automatic urge to say "Boys and men are suffering, too." We give in to the urge to say, "What about women who do violence?"?

But we can only do this particular form of self-protection by invoking a false binary. Yes, boys and men are suffering. Men’s trauma must be addressed. But men’s trauma and our violence against women are intertwined in the most horrible and intimate ways. It can never be an either/or. It is an all or nothing.?

For us, as men, the key to understanding our own trauma lies in first recognizing its primary source. In our generations old dominance-based culture of masculinity, other boys and men bully and police us beginning in infancy to conform to a narrow set of rules for how to be a man.?

The result of such rigidly enforced conformity is that men face catastrophic levels of isolation and disconnection, oppressed by a culture of masculinity which pits us against each other in cycles of relentless competition and bullying to enforce the so-called rules of Man Box culture. Rules like don’t show your emotions, always be tough, never ask for help, and so on. And because we are bullied via the denigration of the feminine when we fail to conform, (What are you, a sissy? What are you, a girl?) we are also taught from infancy that girls and women are less.?

It's not easy for men to own our collective part in all of this. It’s much easier to default to “But what about men’s suffering…” I get it. I feel the urge to turn away, too, to shut it all out. For boys and men, growing up in our bullying and violent Man Box culture, such self-protection becomes reflexive,?ingrained in our strategies for staying safe. Our often-unconscious self-protection shows up in a myriad of ways beginning in infancy. We hide those aspects of ourselves that don’t fit the Man Box. We validate our masculinity via acts of dominance and control, which leads us into disconnection and isolation which causes yet more reactivity and dominance behavior. This is the ironclad closed loop of dominance-based masculine culture.?

But once we become fully conscious of the larger culture which shaped our identities, we are left with some tough choices. Do we continue to let such a culture define who we are, or do we break out of the Man Box? These choice points arrive daily if not hourly for us.

And the darkest truth is waiting just beyond it.?

Women are dying because men are killing them. We kill women on a vast spectrum, with our own hands from within the intimate and the interpersonal spaces we share with them, all the way up to allowing their deaths in the systems and structures we could easily change.?

Here’s just one example. In the US, we have the worst maternal mortality rates of any wealthy nation. Do any among us honestly think that’s on women? Pregnant women are dying here because men, who hold the reins of political and economic power can’t be bothered to ensure that they don’t. And now, many states are forcing all pregnant girls and women, no matter how young, to face that terrible risk by outlawing abortion. And that’s just one example.?

Until we, as men, collectively decide to create a world that institutionalizes women’s legal, economic, financial, political and physical security, the pain and suffering of the women of the world is on us. That is the pain that I grieve, every day. That I am both witnessing this?and that I play a part in allowing it to continue.?

But the first step for us is to FEEL the emotional impact of what is happening to women and girls in the world. Brothers, if our allyship isn’t driven by some degree by grief and sorrow for what women face, it is too safe, too well insulated. It is incomplete. It is from within that disconnected space of emotional self-protection, that millions of men allow the status quo to continue, when we should be ripping down our generations old dominance-based culture of masculinity for the sake of our own souls.?

Brothers, I understand. More than you can know. Opening ourselves up to the wellspring of women’s pain is terrifying. I don’t advise any man to take it on lightly. Even a glimpse past that wall of self-protection can trigger long-held memories of the pain of our mothers or grandmothers, pain from violence, either subtle or overt, we might well have witnessed as children. It can bring up violence against women in our own histories, histories we’d rather pretend never happened.?

The work we need to do as men, must include deep self-reflection, potentially years of therapy, joining a circle of men's work, possibly making amends, addressing our own wounds, finding forgiveness.?

Meanwhile, while we men mull over how we feel about all of this, girls and women continue to face bloody, ongoing violence, as do Black people, LGBTQI+ people, immigrants, people of other faiths, persons with disabilities, and so on.?

When we, as men, reduce our emotional experience of allyship to a list of tasks we check off in our workplaces, we are exercising self-protection from the larger truth of what is happening to billions of women and non-binary persons. Until we experience allyship from a place of deep empathy and emotion, through the lens of women's ongoing suffering globally, our efforts as allies in our workplaces will continue to be, on some level, avoidant of the painful experience of being fully human.

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Mark Greene is co-author with Dr. Saliha Bava of The Relational Workplace.

Mark coaches leaders of all genders to grow our rich human capacities for connection in more relationally intelligent ways. Learn more about Mark's books, coaching, and consulting. Visit: https://remakingmanhood.com

Mark is co-host of Remaking Manhood, The Healthy Masculinity Podcast . Available on all major streaming platforms.