We Don’t Need No (Male) Saviorism
I finished reading Speak with my English class and took off running, trying not to inhale my mask, backpack bouncing against my back. There is no pretty way to run with a backpack. I had a Zoom call with Bouchra and Clémentine, representing The Urban Woman in Belgium. We were discussing how men and women might collaborate to speed up gender equality.
Up until I started GoodMenders, I held a pretty strict no-social-media policy. I used Facebook to remember birthdays and made a LinkedIn profile because my college career office told me to. But, thanks to my business LinkedIn page, a shared connection pointing me to Clémentine’s blog post (“Speeding Up Gender Equality: on Men Building Better Men”), and my fancy new Instagram, here we were. 3,000 miles apart, six-hour time difference, #buildingbetterculture.
I had never met Bouchra or Clémentine before, and I will be forever grateful for their initiative and vision (they set up our call). We talked about how men and women are not enemies. We talked about how women are not looking to be saved and how male saviorism will not solve toxic masculinity. Rather, that would be a more manipulative way to control and degrade women. Roll the music of little kids singing, “We don’t need no saviorism. We don’t need no thought control.”
