So, Your Boyfriend’s Not a Feminist

cover art by Honey Simatupang

Becoming radicalized at my small liberal arts college was a blessing and a privilege, but also revealed my deep-seated bitterness. On one hand, I started to realize the systemic injustices occurring around me and to see how I could be a part of the solution. On the other, I became exhausted and resentful towards all the people these systems of injustice seemed to benefit; namely cis, white, heterosexual, upperclass men. These feelings erupted in my most intimate relationships, especially with my college boyfriend. 

Navigating these relationships can be complicated, but here’s my story. 

I think the first piece of the puzzle is understanding your own personal definition of feminism and how that will help you establish boundaries in your life. For me, I began to realize that feminism meant actively educating myself on issues impacting all women and non-gender conforming people and trying to take action to better society. The pitfall being that as I realized my own shortcomings, I became obsessed with recognizing the same faults in my peers—this quickly festered into a sinkhole of resentment.

I recognized being angry towards my boyfriend and the other men in my life was not constructive, but it gave me a high to have someone to project all of my patriarchal rage onto. Luckily, my partner was patient and attentive as hell. My boyfriend was not an overtly sexist person, but he did not quite fit into my definition of feminism; I did not see an active pursuit of knowledge or even growth in empathy. He never had to think about carrying mace in parking lots or worry about losing the right to control what was done to his body. These things weighed on me constantly, and in a horrible way, they were what taught me empathy for others. I wondered how I could make him understand this pain. 

Most of this came to a head when he joined a fraternity. Initially, this seemed harmless, but as I began to second handedly experience the efforts of the group to encourage blind solidarity, brotherhood, and loyalty, I understood the lasting harm this would do. I began going off about his frat constantly:

the brotherhood events that turned into blind allegiance to men who were total creeps; the compliance with men who had questionable morals in every sense; 

the lack of questioning even the most basic wrongdoings, 

 being trained to automatically take the side of the institution or whoever the most dominant leader was at the time. 

He took every outburst as a personal attack as if I was seeking to destroy his newfound identity. All I wanted was for him to take a critical eye to the process he was being pushed through. Understand how frats were perpetuating rape culture, toxic masculinity, archaic power dynamics. It seemed to me he was on the worst possible trajectory. How would I ever get him to be “woke” at this rate? I had to find a new way to get through and fast. This was when I became truly obsessed with trying to fix him. I stopped considering how I played into the process and focused all my energy and frustrations on him. I projected my own sense of helplessness in solving systemic injustice onto a 20-year-old boy who really had no more of an idea about how to better the world than I did.

My lecturing became incessant, pushing him further and further from my actual goal of recognizing systems of injustice. It came to a point where I told him this relationship had reached its capacity if I didn't start seeing any forms of activism from him.

 I asked him, “What was the last feminist thing you did?” He sat puzzled for a minute before responding he had listened to an economics podcast with a female economist guest. That was how the conversation ended. I didn’t have the energy to even explain to him why that was wrong why that wasn’t actually feminist. That's when I began to realize I couldn't just give him the reasons why something was sexist, racist, or ableist; he needed to develop that line of thinking on his own. I realized I needed to let go of control. 

This comes to my next piece of knowledge having gone through the cycle of radicalization, resentment, and anger which was realigning my intentions of being in a relationship. I had never wanted to go into a relationship with the intention of “fixing” someone, but my dynamic with my partner had devolved into that of the project and the designer. I spent hours angrily laying into men and ranting about every microaggression I experienced. It may have made me feel better, but it certainly was not driving him into any action but only towards wanting to manage my emotional outbursts. He in turn came to understand the symptoms of the problem, but not the actual root. He could see the anger and frustration living in my new radical reality was causing, but he didn't understand it as anything more than an exhaustive use of energy. I wanted to encourage him to understand it as an energizing force; while I was exhausted every time I ranted to him I also felt energized and emboldened. I wanted him to experience that same sense of urgency in needing to fix our society even just in the microcosm of our college.

I couldn’t fix my partner, but only encouraged and challenged him to better himself just as I hoped he would do for me. I still haven't struck the perfect balance with my partner, but this relationship taught me the importance of letting go of what I can't change and helped encourage me to focus more on my own activism. Ultimately I learned to recognize when I was unfairly taking my resentment out on him and how to harness those powerful emotions into real action, or at least the pursuit of meaningful action.