No, Your Father, Brother, or Son Isn’t a Feminist. He’s Just Having Sex With One.
For me, a male feminist is a man educated very cleanly on a particular set of harms facing one gender, while carrying enough success or status to never truly face his own fear: suicide.
He speaks her fear fluently because he has never had to speak his.
The trouble is the thirty thousand excess male souls a year who take their lives are the best voices to do speak this fear, and they never get to. The dead don't articulate. They just add up.
Year, after year. So what happens? Others get to try to name it. "Male Loneliness Epidemic" is the academy's way of showing up late to gendered mass death, and giving it a catechism; that ironically and tragically sources the death back to the individual man, rather than exposing the cultural forces that contribute to it.
But for those of you out there that have been ravaged by that lack of language, let me just say to you: "It's not your fault."
You are valued.
We have to do the work of building that language ourselves.