It was International Women’s Day this past week. I have seen only a handful of men acknowledge and amplify. I’ve had this post drafted for a while now; time to get it out!
My friend’s husband understands: “Here let me exercise my white male privilege.” He steps up, takes the handlebar facing the toddler in the seat, and the supermarket shopping cart sea parts for him, when it did not for her.
He knows he can live a life free from conflict much more easily than she can. He can be ignorant more easily. He bears fewer social costs for any dissenting behaviors.
Certain people just have more power. “You should exercise.” Advice from the doctor carries more weight and influence than from the spouse. Teen peer more than parent. And fellow Cis-Het-Christian-White Male (CHCWM) more than anyone else. So men: how are you helping?
It’s more effective if you come alongside rather than come at. Berating, lecturing, or shaming fellow men to take a hard left from their stereotypes, implicit biases, and internalized misogyny hardly ever works. Rather, use your influence more quietly. Lead by example with your words and actions to the slow off-ramp of self-awareness, self-regulation and movement toward gender equality. Be gentle. Plant the seeds. Water, water, light, fertilize, water, light, water.. and eventually we can repot.
Scale your influence by connecting with other exemplary leaders. Culture change occurs mostly from the top down, and CHCWMs are the CEOs of American culture.
If you’re already there, ready to exercise your influence on behalf of women, to be the best ally you can be, decide how you will act. Start small, like at the gym. Find the muscles of upstanding and train them. Test them for stability, add weights slowly by stepping into discomfort more often; do not push through pain or cause yourself injury, but challenge limits—both yours and society’s. Recruit a coach or buddy—it’s always easier and better to train with a friend.
If you’re not there, start by noticing: fleeting facial expressions, shifts in posture, passing clouds of mood or vibe change—how are the women around you accommodating you and other men automatically, without anyone even noticing, much less acknowledging?
Awareness can be hard. It can incite guilt and regret, even shame and self-loathing. But that is not the goal. The goal is growth and connection. Allow the feelings in, sit with their meaning and discover how they motivate you. That’s what feelings are for, after all. Hold it all loosely, give it space to settle, land where it fits in the cracks of your bias, wedging open a door to being and doing better for your fellow humans.
Then attune to the next signal, the next, repeat. Once enough nuggets have accumulated, your pattern of change energy may emerge, unique to you. Your contribution. How can you show up in solidarity, where does your own privilege do the most good? How can you come alongside and nudge, steer your male peers toward the off-ramp, from implicit or explicit misogyny toward empathic and compassionate inclusion?
We have come such a long way, we women and the men who support and hold us up. We have so long yet to go, though, and we can only move forward with the alliance of all— men and women, and non-binary people alike. When society raises the floor of respect for any of us, it helps all of us. It’s not about conflict and competition. It’s about shared humanity. “I see you. I value you equally to myself and those like me.”
The only way out is through. The best way through is together. Thank you, our White Male Allies, for going together with us.
“I wish for more doors to open for you than to close or stay closed.”
I love middle age. At this point in life, I have accumulated enough experience to have earned real expertise, solid street cred in my domains of study and work. And yet, there is still plenty of ‘runway’ to do cool shit! That’s assuming I don’t drop dead tomorrow, of course. But even this, the keen and escalating awareness of my own mortality, makes my potential feel that much more exciting and acute.
I have had conversations with multiple friends about this lately. Many of us, especially in medicine, have lived what I would call a social norm-driven life: College, med school, residency, practice/research/academics, leadership. Date, marry, have kids. Launch kids into the same social norm-driven life. Color inside the lines, even if it’s not totally our nature–often not even noticing or questioning whether it’s our nature or not. Huh. Not good enough anymore, I think.
So much emerges now about the vastly, truly wide diversity of human nature, such as gender and sexual fluidity, psychology, physiology, and sociology. Narrow social norms taken for granted by generations, at least in the Western, ‘developed’ world, dissolve and disintegrate under scrutiny exponentially faster, it seems. It feels understandably scary in so many ways, for so many people. We have never been here before, never faced this much newness of both magnitude and volume, in the history of humanity. Anything new is uncertain, daunting. This much new is mind bending. I think we can figure it out, though, just like humans always have. If we can practice effective self-awareness, self-regulation, and communication in the face of high anxiety about the unknown, great things could ensue… though this is a great, big collective ask.
…So, what is this super cool shit any/each of us can do, whether we have lived a mainstream life thus far or not? As Mary Oliver wrote, “Tell me, what is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life?”
Some of us hear the Knock–a call, a whisper–to do something different, something new, something heretofore unimagined. For me it’s Book (well, I have imagined it for nine years, but hey, some of us also move slowly). For others it may be leaving an office job, exploring new creative outlets, pursuing long hidden or newly emergent dreams. Regardless, there is energy here. I have described it as pushing outward, broadening myself against the walls of a box within which I had not noticed I lived until now. The status quo feels newly small, constraining, unsatisfying. What I understood previously as black or white, open or closed, good or bad, right or wrong, feels ever less clearly dichotomous. Not only do I now perceive the gray, I feel pulled toward it. Touching it, experiencing it, feels liberating, expansive, an existential education that I could only think to seek by having lived this long a certain way.
The call, however, can come with no shortage of ambivalence, even conflict. For those who live with underlying depression or anxiety, this tension between the relative safety and security of the status quo and the freedom and exhilaration of answering the Knock may exacerbate symptoms significantly. When questioning my friend on the phone today about how she feels in her body when imagining the new thing, she could hardly attain, let alone stay in that sensation. Rather, her mind skipped ahead to potential negative outcomes, focusing on uncertainty and risk, bypassing said freedom and excitement. The status quo confines her, body, mind, and spirit; she feels it. Her dissatisfaction with it grows, causing agitation. I could also feel the tumult in her voice, like a roiling swirl of motion without movement, a frenetic vibration seeking resonance. I could only sit with her, from a thousand miles away, holding space. I could relate, help just by validating, even though I could not solve.
At the end of our call, I thought of the door analogy. Trying new things does not have to be all or nothing. We can go slow. There may be many doors to the new place to consider. We can check each for heat, sounds, vibrations from the other side, see which are un/locked. We can turn knobs and open slowly, peeking inside, possibly anticipate what we may find. We can back out quietly, leave it, come back later. No need to kick any doors in, potentially hurting others on the other side or causing recoil that slams ourselves in the face. We can examine potential costs, benefits, intended and unintended outcomes. And we can trust ourselves to handle whatever results from our deliberate and thoughtful decisions and actions. We can be mindful, intentional, honest, and authentic. This way, we will have less to regret, no matter what happens.
The Knock is Possibility. It is a signal of hope, light, and growth, both an uplift and a deepening. Sometimes we hear it only briefly before other sounds drown it out. When it recurs, however, I advocate for listening, following, finding its origin. We are only here for a short time. Fear and anxiety can be overcome; we can find our way to brave, new, big, wonderful things. There is no rush. And it’s probably better if we go together.
Healing Through Connection 