I was talking to someone the other day about how our own little bubble may feel like universal reality, but that it isn't necessarily so. This certainly applies to me as well. I appreciate the work that you do, and have certainly never said that no men show up or no men do this work because I know some others who do, but I've also had some pretty shocking and awful experiences around supposedly progressive male allies really in truth, being unwilling or unable to confront their privilege, or to show up in any way other than extremely superficially - and then turning on me and other women in very nasty ways. And, that being said, that doesn't mean all men would do that, but there are a certain percentage of Joss Whedons out there, it seems.

I don't have any doubts about your actual commitment, in part because you aren't an American. I just finished reading a book by long time advocate Jackson Katz. He and his team have worked a lot with high school and college athletic departments, the military, and other similar groups teaching bystander intervention skills, but also making standing up for an equality culture part of leadership in these organizations. So much of male bonding (in the US at least) revolves around sexualizing and denigrating women, and resisting that or speaking up can come with a lot of social consequences. But, if you can get the team leaders, coaches, superior officers, older students, etc., on board with leading a different type of culture and making that aspirational and cool - or even if they don't buy in philosophically, at least to see it as a part of their job to be a leader in maintaining this kind of atmosphere, then you can start to change the culture.

There was a lot of good stuff in there, but the problem I see is that he and his team have been doing this work for 30 years, and although I think it has some had some real positive impact in certain pockets, I don't know how much it has really impacted the culture as a whole. I'm intending to do more research into some of the successes he's named and see if I can flesh out a more positive story because every woman I know is just really fucking tired right now, and pretty darned disillusioned that any of this can ever get any better. What we primarily feel is the weight of the backlash, rather than the small amount of progress that triggered that, and it's exhausting.

I (and my women friends) do anti-racist work, and anti-homophobia work because it's the right thing to do. I'm not free until everyone is free. I have a hard time understanding why more men don't feel the same about gender equality.