“You can’t even hit on a girl nowadays”
By: Sara Parton
Tags: Feminism, Dating, Men, Love, Sociology

Photo by Eliott Reyna on Unsplash

(This is the translation of my article “non ci si può più provare con una in discoteca”, realized with the help of the translator DeepL)

It is maybe not my place, as a female, to write about males and feminism. For the same reason I get pissed off if a male tells females how to live their womanhood — such as the completely male-composed Italian government commission that last year included barber shops but not beauticians in the list of “economically essential activities”.

It might not be my place, but still I’ve listened to some friends (straight white cisgender males) and elaborated some thoughts about what I heard. I write in the hope that this will lead to a broader conversation, not to resolve a complex issue that it’s competence of said white, cisgender (and so on) to address.

Feminism gets pissed off. Claiming the right to anger and not having to perpetually explain yourself is part of what it means to be a feminist.

However.

In front of this rage many males feel cut off. If I, a male, dare to say at dinner that “when I go to the club I don’t feel comfortable hitting on a girl” my female friends attack me, calling me insensitive and maybe even ignorant. So I stop talking about it. But this doesn’t mean that I stop feeling like “I don’t know what’s right anymore, the fear of a complaint for a harassment that I didn’t even realize I did is weighing on me”. I have a feeling that I can’t talk about, except with white male (and so on) friends who feel the same way because they share it.

This feeling is legit.

There is a response consistent with feminist thought, arguing that this feeling should not create self-isolation, but rather lead to self-questioning in order to eventually make the world a more livable place for males, females, and others. But I’m not here to lecture anyone, so I won’t detail that response here.

Rather, I’m here to say that there is a lack of space to express these feelings without being attacked. A space where we can process male discomfort — which does exist — consistently with feminist thinking. I mean “feminist” in the most inclusive sense possible: the will to fight the rigid categories of “male” and “female”, and the hiding, mocking or despising what doesn’t fit into one of those categories — such as male pain or sensitivity. Within this feminist discourse, it can happen that a straight male (and so on) feels accused. Accused of treating women badly, of having some original sin behind him (centuries of history where men had many more rights than women) that would justify the revenge of women today, who call themselves victims of an internalized male bias that men don’t even consciously know about.

The unfortunate result is that the aforementioned straight male (and so on) often decides that feminism is not for him, doesn’t represent him, and leaves it to women, in the best of cases. At worst, he becomes explicitly anti-feminist. I think this is an unfortunate turn of tables, and honestly a pity.

A pity because the battle against male discomfort, what some would call “reverse discrimination”, is actually a feminist battle. So it’s a shame that a male turns away from feminism because he experiences uncomfortable feelings that a certain kind of feminism actually struggles to overcome.

I don’t have any solutions.

Because I’m not a male, I can try to understand but I can’t experience male discomfort. That’s probably why it’s not a problem that feminists who aren’t cis men can solve. As a feminist cis-gender woman I only feel like taking note of the fact that often what I say can sound aggressive and intimidate an outsider who knows nothing about feminism, making him refractory to the topic. That doesn’t have to stop me from speaking out. The solution is not to “be less aggressive when I do feminism,” because what is perceived as aggression is part of feminist claims.

I wanted to acknowledge this reality that I unfortunately don’t hear much about. To acknowledge that many white males (and so on) are in a difficult position, where they are intimidated by feminism to the point of feeling discriminated against and attacked, if they try to talk about this frustration. Dog biting its own tail.

I hope that from recognizing the problem we can move on to processing it and finding a solution.