What Distinguishes the Men Who Get It from the Men Who Don’t

Many men who claim to be feminist allies are actually part of the problem

I don’t like to make hasty judgments, but I’m 99% sure this guy doesn’t get it. Photo via Canva.

On our third date, the man who would become my husband told me, “You get it.”

The “it” he was referring to was the experience of being Black in the United States of America. He wasn’t saying that I understood every nuance. He was saying that I struck him as humble and curious and eager to listen — and this surprised him. It wasn’t an experience he was used to having with white people.

Twenty years and two kids later, I don’t fully “get it” and never will. When I venture out in the world, I still do so in white skin. I still catch myself making racialized assumptions, I still put my foot in my mouth, and perhaps most crucially, I still benefit from white privilege.

“Getting it” is not a definitive, perpetual state of enlightenment; rather, it’s a definitive, perpetual state of seeking to understand. Over two decades, I’ve read books and articles; validated, rather than questioned, my husband’s direct experiences with racism; shared dozens of stories online to bring attention to these experiences¹; started an equity committee at work; and written more than one letter to white educators and supervisors to advocate for my husband and children.

I’ve done this work for years on end, and I’ve done it all imperfectly. That’s because there’s no other way to do it.

It strikes me as the epitome of irony that when it came to my husband “getting it,” this work was never reciprocated. He is a progressive man who sports long dreadlocks, paints his nails, and likes to wear kaftans because he finds pants restrictive. He supports female political candidates and a woman’s right to choose. He bemoans the despicable behavior of men like Harvey Weinsten and lauded the #MeToo movement.

And yet. Just as many progressive white people fervently insist they don’t “have a racist bone in their body,” many progressive men insist that they are not, could never be, part of the problem. The misogyny and sexism are always Out There.

These men fancy themselves enlightened when it comes to “women’s issues.” They believe themselves to be involved, modern fathers doing their part. They insist that they are feminist allies, even if they’re reluctant to openly associate themselves with the F word.

And oh, how fervently the wives of these men wish this were true! It’s only now, as I find myself wading knee-deep through a messy divorce, that I’m coming to terms with the fact that I spent 20 years bound to a man who had virtually no interest in taking accountability for his blind spots or exploring his male privilege.

It’s not that I was entirely oblivious to this dynamic during our marriage. But it has been a bitter pill to swallow, and perhaps even more bitter for a progressive woman like me who was sold the promise of equitable partnership and believed I had snagged myself one of the “good ones.”

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So, what does it mean to “get it?” Let’s start with what it doesn’t mean:

If you’re a man with a female partner who insists your relationship is equitable because you do half the chores, you don’t get it.

If you’re a father who has never stopped to consider how your children’s sock and underwear drawers get replenished as they grow bigger, or how their medical appointments get made, or how their school forms get filled out, you don’t get it.

If you’re a man who claims to see this invisible labor but who believes women make too much of it and perennially overthink things, you don’t get it.

If you’re a man with a female partner and you insist that she's just “naturally better” at household and caretaking labor and should therefore do more of it, or serve as default Delegator in Chief, even when she also engages in paid labor, you don’t get it.

If you’re a father who believes he deserves the praise that’s heaped on him when he takes the kids grocery shopping or “lets” his wife do things without the kids, you don’t get it.

If you’re a man who believes your paid job makes you far too Busy and Important to be proactive around the house, you don’t get it.

If you’re a man with a female partner who simply assumes her job is more flexible and less demanding than yours is, you don’t get it.²

I could go on (and on) but equally important is what extinguishes the rare breed of “man who gets it” from the many, many men who don’t. Here are three defining features:

1. Men Who Get It recognize the intrinsic value of so-called “women’s work”

This first point is crucial and often overlooked, even by feminists. Mainstream feminism has long fought for entry into traditionally male domains; meanwhile, the domestic labor, the care labor, is either shunted to second shifts or pawned off on underpaid housekeepers and childcare providers.

We are all conditioned to recognize work outside the home as “more important,” as the “real” labor that drives the economy and the all-important GDP.

When men like Shane Meyer-Holt flip the script, it reveals just how flawed and ridiculous this line of thinking is. In his Substack story, Lifters, Learners, and Social Glue, he says:

If investing energy into care and connection to maintain social bonds is the glue that holds us together as humans when things start to fall apart, then who are the real freeloaders? (Emphasis his.)

To lean on old tropes, could it be possible that the 70-hour-a-week 90’s stockbroker, who has no time or interest in anything beyond the vortex of corporate life, has actually been leeching for too long off the hard “glue-work” of his stay-at-home wife, the local volunteer librarian, and less busy friends who tend to the networks of care that keep everyone afloat and will tend to his grief when the market crashes?

In a footnote to this second paragraph, he concedes:

I say all this knowing that as a man I wasn’t socialised to feel primarily responsible for so many elements of connection that make up the Living Human Web. I certainly haven’t resolved all of this, but as someone who has spent a long time working in care, being a part-time stay-at-home parent, fostering relationships of depth and vulnerability and doing difficult work on my interior life, I can attest to both the joy and effort that this has required.

It is this kind of awareness and this kind of humility that distinguishes a Man Who Gets It from a Man Who Doesn’t.

Men Who Get It are willing to challenge limited, outdated narratives around in-home versus out-of-home labor. They understand that misogyny and sexism begin in the home — yes, even homes where progressive men reside — and that the trivialization of what we’ve historically deemed “women’s work” is a primary driver of gender inequity.

So if you’re a man who groans about his wife’s standards when it comes to care labor, or the way she nags you to “help out” around the house, or how much fuss she makes about things that “don’t really matter,” then you are part of the problem.

In deluding yourself that the only reason she does more for the family is because she’s better at it, or because she cares more, you are essentially saying it’s okay for her time and labor to be exploited for your benefit. And by assuming the role of grudging, and often clueless, helper, you are not really helping. Instead, you’re trivializing and devaluing the critical care work, the connection work, the domestic work, that enables our society to function.

And let me tell you, it would function a heckuva lot better if more men also cared about care.

2. Men Who Get It speak up

In late April 2020, I stumbled across an article in The Nation entitled, “The Men Pushing to Open the Economy Clearly Don’t Need Child Care.”

The story was both funny and infuriating, and it resonated deeply with me. At the time, my son’s preschool and my daughter’s elementary school were both closed indefinitely. My partner was taking advantage of a seven-week furlough to watch them while I worked from home.

I loved having a “house husband,” but we both knew the honeymoon would soon be over. Once he was called back to his hand therapy clinic, I had no idea what I was going to do. I knew I’d likely end up doing what so many other parents, particularly mothers, were doing — juggling child care and Zoom school and full-time work, while slowly losing my mind because, as the author of The Nation article put it, “being a full-time teacher is incompatible with being any other kind of full-time employee, even if you are working from home.”

When I finished reading the article, I Googled the author, Elie Mystal, to learn more about her and was shocked to discover that “she,” in fact, was a man. As an advocate for working parents, I’d read quite a few articles about our broken child care system in my time, and never — I repeat, never — had I once read one written by a man.

Sure, the Internet is a big place, but a cursory search will show you that the topic is covered almost exclusively by women. The fact that men rarely speak up about child care, despite the fact that 92.5% of fathers work, should be surprising. Except that it’s not. Though 72.1% of mothers also work, child care is still seen as a woman’s job — whether it’s providing the care (on an underpaid or unpaid basis), finding the care, or coordinating the care logistics.

The rare men who do speak up don’t just do it from an altruistic standpoint. Their agenda is not just to “help out” the womenfolk who are so often dismissed and silenced when it comes to issues that disproportionately affect them. Because these men recognize the intrinsic value of care work, they understand that they would also substantially benefit.

After all, wouldn’t fathers in the United States enjoy the same rights that men in Sweden have — that is, 240 days of paid leave after their child is born? At the very least, wouldn’t they enjoy four or more weeks of paid time off, a benefit granted to fathers in 47 other countries? Wouldn’t fathers like to pay less than 20% of their income on child care and save or invest that money instead?

Wouldn’t fathers like to feel secure in the knowledge that they are leaving their children with a qualified care provider who isn’t distracted by the stresses of food insecurity, as one in three currently are? Who enjoys the financial stability and societal respect they deserve as part of a vital industry that comprises the backbone of our economy?

Wouldn’t fathers in heterosexual relationships like to have partners who suffer less stress, maintain a stronger sense of self, and as a side benefit, also maintain their sexual appetite and appeal?

Wouldn’t all men, regardless of their parental status, appreciate the opportunity to stay financially afloat should they have to take time off work to care for a sick family member? And wouldn’t all men benefit from the $57 billion we could pump back into our economy if we didn’t have to account for the “cost of lost earnings, productivity and revenue from a lack of good child care options?”

If the men in Washington started to feel pressure from their male constituents around these issues, I can guarantee that the United States would finally be able to join the other 186 countries that offer federal paid leave. And I can guarantee that among other high income countries, the U.S. approach to financing child care would no longer be an “outlier.”

In explaining why he is unapologetic about speaking up for the value of care work, child and family policy expert Elliot Haspel says in his Substack story, Child Care Has a Branding Problem:

I sometimes think it is instructive to consider the case of an 85-year-old stricken with Alzheimer’s. The care being provided to that individual produces little future economic value. There is no educational element at play. And yet, I would argue that such care—as painful, labor-intensive, and heartbreaking it may be–is immensely valuable.5 There is meaning in dependency, and as Elissa Strauss and others have written, dependency is not a one-way street: if someone is dependent on you, you are tethered to them. If we lose the core concepts of care, whether care of children or care of spouse or care of neighbor or care of the elderly, we lose some of ourselves. Hence my devotion.

So there are two options: abandon care language altogether, or work explicitly to elevate and reposition care in society. I come down on the side of repositioning. (Emphasis his.)

Though Elliot doesn’t specifically address how the historically gendered nature of care work drives its so-called “branding problem,” he is unapologetically assuming responsibility for speaking up to elevate and reposition the importance of it.

This is a Man Who Gets It.

3. Men Who Get It go to bat

Men Who Get It don’t just speak up — they also stand up. This means calling out the many, many men who, at best, make ignorant comments about women and who, at worst, actively promote violence and hatred.

If there’s one thing I learned from a 20-year relationship with a Black man, it’s that other white people are far more likely to listen to me when I call them out for doing or saying something racist. That’s because most white people, even the “good” ones, aren’t really conditioned to take the experiences of Black people all that seriously, especially if a Black person is asking us to take some level of accountability.

My someday ex used to point out how white people who fawn over famous Black authors, academics, and politicians — you know, the folks who have “earned” their credentials — still often refuse to listen to their Black coworkers when they talk about inequitable treatment in the workplace. He also expressed frequent dismay at how few of his white coworkers (read: basically none) were willing to support him when blatant mistreatment took place.

I’ve similarly felt confounded by how few men jump into the fray when a woman is being bullied, dismissed, mansplained to, and/or blatantly threatened. As a woman who writes online about gender equity, I’m frequently on the receiving end of this treatment — and while there are certainly men out there who leave positive comments on my stories, it is very rare for men to come to my defense.

That’s why a comment thread on a Medium article entitled “The Evil Matriarchy” recently caught my attention. The article, written by a man, attempts to make the claim that women are primarily responsible for our own exploitation. To which Medium author John Werth responds:

Matriarchy is the wrong word, we don't have one. This is women jockeying for position within a patriarchy, a very different matter altogether.

The author, Dave Tieff, replies:

Yup. I made it up. As it turns out, you can do that…

And John says:

The word has existed since forever, you didn't make it up. Matriarchy has a meaning, you applied it to an American society that has no such thing…

We can certainly have a valid conversation about whether or not engaging with the Dave Tieffs of the Internet is worth our time, but even if John didn’t convince Dave of anything, it is highly possible he inspired another man reading the comment thread to think twice about the article’s “made up” premise and deeply flawed assumptions.

Men simply aren’t conditioned to listen to women when we talk about our own experiences or defend a fellow woman. We’re just whining and/or getting hysterical over nothing. When men say exactly the same thing – maybe less shrilly? – other men are more primed to listen.

John is a Man Who Gets It. Dave is a Man Who’s Not Even Trying to Get It. We need more Johns to call out the Daves. The Daves probably won’t listen, but at the very least, the Men Who Think They Get It might just pause and reconsider.

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The Daves are pretty easy to spot and avoid, but it’s the Men Who Think They Get It that worry me the most, especially as I grapple with the prospect of eventually re-entering the dating pool (ugh). I have absolutely zero interest in trying to convince a Man Who Thinks He Gets It that he actually doesn’t, or in attempting to inspire a Man Who Thinks He Gets It to deconstruct his own entitlement.

As Maggie Smith put it in her divorce memoir, You Could Make This Place Beautiful, these men are wolves in sheeps’ clothing. And Maggie and I aren’t the only progressive women who have found ourselves married to them.

To reiterate: A Man Who Gets It doesn’t automatically “Get Everything,” nor will he never say all the “right” things, nor will he never have blind spots when it comes to his privilege. He is simply a man who recognizes that women experience marginalization inside, as well as outside, the home, that silence serves no one, and that domestic and caretaking labor are worthy of his time and advocacy.

He is a man who is willing to ask difficult questions and accept difficult answers. He is committed to the journey, even when it’s hard or scary, and accepts there is no definitive moment of arrival in the realm of eternal enlightenment, but many smaller opportunities for enlightenment along the way. He understands that these opportunities are not just beneficial for the women in his life, but intrinsically beneficial for him too, even when they demand that he give or do more.

A Man Who Gets It probably doesn’t even think of himself as a Man Who Gets It. He is too humble and self-aware for all that. But it’s important for the rest of us to elevate the male voices that are promoting the value of care work, urging other men to care about care, and calling out the men who degrade and dismiss women by promoting false equivalencies and trivializing our social and economic contributions.

These men may seem like unicorns. Unlike unicorns though, they do exist. The challenge is in figuring out how to breed more.

1. Here’s a sampling of the stories I’ve written about my vicarious experiences of racism: I Thought I Understood Racism. Then I Married a Black Man; My Husband Punched a White Man and Nearly Spent 20 Years in Prison; and My Husband Doesn’t Feel Like Being Black Today.

2. A fascinating study outlined by Darcy Lockman in her book, All the Rage, revealed that men who are doctors and have wives who are lawyers claim their wives’ jobs are more flexible, while men who are lawyers and have wives who are doctors, make the same claim.