#GAReads | Male Allies Aren't Going to Save Us
"Male Allies Aren't Going to Save Us":
The male feminist is a recent phenomenon that most women have never seen before. We imagine a male feminist is handsome, woke, and sophisticated — think Justin Trudeau, Barack Obama, or even the Feminist Ryan Gosling meme. Yet to no one’s surprise, some men have seized the opportunity not to benefit women, but for themselves: using selfies at the Women’s March as their Tinder profiles to get more dates. While it’s taken women almost 200 years to overcome the stigma of the feminist label and rebrand it as something positive, it’s lent a seemingly instantaneous halo or “pedestal effect” to men. Watching this phenomenon at play gives one a sinking feeling — are we making tangible progress by integrating men, or are we falling prey to the same gender dynamics we’re working hard to move away from? There seems an inherent imbalance when what’s taken women centuries of erasure, trauma, and systemic bias to reach becomes a trophy men can gain with a single tweet.