After consultation, Gender Parity UK agreed the following principles to help prevent conflict and promote effective action.
General principles:
- Ask yourself : “Does the person I have just interacted with go away with more self-confidence and motivation to act or less?”
- Look for common factors with other individuals, not differences.
- Give feedback which builds self-esteem. Make positive comments and suggestions for improvement, don’t slap ideas down. Take extra care when criticising something already done.
- Do not use text, Twitter or email to criticise – always phone or talk directly.
- The problem may be big, but it is better to light a candle. It doesn’t matter if it’s a conspiracy or if they have a £10million budget.
- Action is almost always better than no action. There is no way to know what will be effective or when. Only a few actions are damaging. It is volume and repetition which is needed. Don’t wait till things are perfect.
- Allow others to have bad ideas. You may not agree with their proposal, but only discourage them on very rare occasions.
- ‘Nearly all publicity is good publicity’: both the ‘ridiculous’ tweet and the well-researched report.
- Create a good team, but, don’t prioritise your organisation over the activity.
Rationale for these principles
How did we get here?
How did we get to this point where men’s issues are seen as so unimportant? In whose interest does a child loses contact with his or her father on the basis of allegations alone? Why are BAME excess deaths from COVID19 highlighted, but not men? Why is the fact that 75% of suicides are male not a headline and a public scandal? Why, when people speak on these issues, are they so often vilified?
One central answer
There are, of course, many answers. These suggestions are based on observations of activists on men’s issues. While we do have some support from women, the central problem is: Men don’t speak up and stand up for themselves. We fail to respond. We don’t take enough action.
There is a famous quote: “The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing.” We could amend this to “The only thing necessary for the triumph of the anti-male narrative is for good men to do nothing.”
The value of a group
A group is only valuable if it achieves more than the individuals would achieve on their own. This means that the participants need to interact in ways which increase the energy of the others. (One exception could be the rare occasions where the action they propose is likely to have a significant negative effect.)
Self-sabotage
However, it is more than just not doing enough. There are dark forces which disrupt or destroy much of the activity and energy which individuals put into change. While these forces are by no means confined to men’s interactions, too many men spend too much energy trying to stop other men’s actions.
Listed below are some examples of ways we disable each other.
Active demoralisation
These are activities which so reduce a person’s self-esteem that they fail to act on an idea they have had because another person strongly discourages them for reasons which, on closer examination, do not hold enough water.
Examples : “No, that’s a waste of time.” Or “No, it’s been tried before and didn’t work.”
- We need to encourage one another and ensure criticism is constructive.
The critical text
It easy it is to be critical on-line and we often say things more harshly than we would face-to-face. Receiving such a written message can also be much harder than hearing the criticism in person.
- When you are being critical, phone or speak in person
The contributor who paralyses the group
We’ve all been in meetings where one member picked holes in several different people’s ideas and discourages the proposer. The whole group goes away discouraged and ends up doing less that we would have had we worked alone. On another occasion we had agreed some action and one member made phone-calls trying to stop any more action (as they wanted a different action on a different issue).
When giving negative feedback we need to follow the research about what makes feedback effective.
- Central objective of feedback: maintain or boost the listener’s self-esteem and motivation.
Teaching analogy: If a teacher tells Little Johnny that his work is rubbish, he is neither likely to improve it nor do better next time.
- In general: the answer is “Yes. What help do you need?”
The problem is very big, your action too small
Here someone discourages the activist by claiming the problem is huge. Examples: “You don’t realise its all part of a cultural-Marxist conspiracy. (or Deep State) Just contacting the media or politicians isn’t going to change that.”
Conspiracy theories
Perhaps because we have had our ‘red-pill’ moment and realised that much of what we have believed previously about gendered issues is wrong, we are more open to other conspiracy theories. The problem with them is not so much whether the theories are true or not, but because they contribute to inaction. If the conspiracy theory is true, then the ‘evil geniuses’ who are running it are far too powerful for us to tackle – so we may as well not bother.
The conspiracy is often less clearly defined, with the conspirators simply referred to as ‘They’. “When …name of group… got too active ‘they’ closed it down. You can tell this because we don’t hear from them now.”
- David beat Goliath. The Berlin Wall fell. The stream wears down the rock.
- ‘It’s better to light a candle than curse the darkness’?
We have differences, so I cannot work with you
Group A and group B are both working on the same issue. However, Group A will not work with Group B as it is not LGBT inclusive.
“I’m not getting involved in your project because you are not overtly anti-feminist, which I am. “ Versus. “I’m not getting involved in your project because you include anti-feminists.”
- We don’t agree on everything, but we can work together on this issue.
My way, not yours
This is a variation on the ‘not worth it’ and ‘been tried before’ attack. Here the person tries to persuade another (or group) to not do what they plan, but to do what they think is better – but never actually does it.
- ‘Compromise’ means not getting your way on everything.
This or that? Now or later?
Sometimes the discussion gets bogged-down in questions about whether to send to this person or that, whether we should write now or write later. In general, they main problem is lack of activity: not enough at all levels.
- Although quality is important, 20 unrefined letters may have more effect than 1 good one.
- Send in something now. Make that call. Write to the newspaper, the MP, the committee. Send in a revised/improved/different version later.
“The perfect is the enemy of the possible.”
People will claim that what is being done is not to a high-enough standard and so we should not proceed. (Often, the person making that claim will not help to improve the activity.) Some individuals have a ‘perfectionist’ approach in the life. Some perfectionists do keep going until it does reach their standard, but many self-paralyse and never fix the fence in their garden because they claim they cannot afford the highest quality option.
- The perfect is the enemy of the possible.
Focus on the organisation, not on the activity.
It is common for an organisation, which claims to have a certain aim, to spend so much effort on having a chairman, the committee, the newsletter, the website, the patrons, etc that they never actually work towards the original aim.
- Have a ‘who does what by when’ agenda, but, not too rigid.
Male psychology
While all these disruptions can be found in all organisations, men seem more prone to them.
One suggested reason for much of this is male psychology. Men have evolved to be competitive, to try to work their way up the male hierarchy, to try to be the alpha-male. Perhaps too many of us are so busy trying to move up the men’s-rights-activist hierarchy that we don’t realise we are damaging the very thing we are trying to promote.
- Value the success of the project, not of the person
Becoming more effective
With so many damaging ways to act, it is easier to see why men’s issues are making so little progress. Without intending to do so, we are sabotaging and demoralising each other and reducing our ability to act.
The principles at the beginning are to help prevent us falling into these traps and also make it easier to identify when we have.