Doing the work

Published 2026-07-03 A Personal Practice of Feminism Most men who call themselves feminists got there by agreeing with ideas. Agreement is the easy part. The hard part is the gap between a man's stated principles and his Tuesday afternoon: who he interrupts, what he laughs at, which household tasks he notices before being asked, and what his daughter learns from watching him. This article is about closing that gap, not through activism but through personal practice. It starts with principles, because behaviour follows perception; moves on to concrete rules of conduct at work, at home, and in fatherhood; and ends with the unglamorous engineering that makes change survive longer than a good intention. I write from the Netherlands, a few Dutch words and societal specifics appear along the way. The patterns they describe are not Dutch at all.

Feminism is a practice, not a badge The first trap for a man who wants to be a feminist is treating it as an identity, a label to acquire, defend, and expect credit for. Identity is static; it invites the question "am I a good one?" instead of "what did I do today?" Worse, identity-feminism tends to be performed for women, as a bid for approval, which quietly re-centres the man. Women notice this. It reads as another form of demand. The move is to drop the noun and keep the verb. The useful question is never "am I a feminist?" but "was that action feminist?", where "that action" is the meeting just run, the school email answered or ignored, the joke laughed at or not when no women were in the room. This framing has a second advantage: verbs are testable. Identities are not. Behaviour can be instrumented; a self-image cannot, and self-images are notoriously flattering instruments anyway. One more ground rule before the principles: any man doing this should expect to find sexism in himself. Not as a confession ritual, but as a base rate. He grew up in the same water as everyone else. Cordelia Fine's work on "neurosexism" is useful here, not because it proves men and women are identical, but because it shows how eagerly people absorb just-so stories about innate difference, and how thin the evidence for most of them is.

If a claim about "how women are" would be embarrassing said about people from one particular city, it deserves the same suspicion. The goal is not purity. The goal is noticing, and noticing faster each year.

Part I: How to see Behaviour follows perception. If a man's way of seeing women is off, no checklist of behaviours will save him; he'll follow the rules while radiating the old assumptions, and the mismatch will show. So the principles come first. There are six. 1. The default human is not male Simone de Beauvoir's core observation in The Second Sex still does most of the work: man is treated as the default, woman as the deviation, "the Other." He is the subject; she is defined in relation to him. Once seen, the pattern is everywhere, and Caroline Criado Perez's Invisible Women documents it with data: crash-test dummies modelled on male bodies, drug dosages trialled on male subjects, office temperatures calibrated to male metabolic rates, smartphone dimensions sized to male hands. The world is full of design decisions where "person" silently meant "man," and women absorb the cost as a personal inconvenience rather than a system failure. The personal discipline that follows: notice when maleness is being treated as neutral. When a woman's approach to a problem differs from a man's own, the default-male reflex labels her approach the marked one: emotional where his is rational, cautious where his is realistic, aggressive where his is assertive. The principle says there is no unmarked position. His way of running a meeting, arguing a design decision, or expressing frustration is also a way, not the way. She is not a variation on him. 2. Credibility is the currency The philosopher Miranda Fricker gave a name to something women have described forever: testimonial injustice, receiving less credibility than a statement deserves because of who is making it. It is the mechanism behind the familiar pattern where a woman raises a point in a meeting, it lands on silence, a man repeats it eight minutes later, and it becomes "great point, Mark." It is why women in technical fields report having to prove competence repeatedly that men get to assume once. This matters because credibility is the actual currency of professional life. Architecture decisions, incident post-mortems, hiring debates: these are all credibility markets.

A small, systematic tax on women's credibility compounds exactly like interest does, and after fifteen years it looks like "she just never quite became senior," which everyone then attributes to her. The principle: extend women the default credibility men extend one another, and then check whether that actually happens. Not "believe everything any woman says"; that is condescension wearing a costume. Rather: when a man feels the flicker of doubt at a woman's technical claim, the question is whether he would have felt it from a man with the same CV. Sometimes yes. Often, honestly, no. 3. Misogyny is enforcement, not hatred Kate Manne's Down Girl makes a distinction worth internalising deeply: misogyny is not primarily men hating women. Most sexist men love women, their mothers, wives, daughters. Manne argues misogyny functions as the enforcement arm of patriarchy: it doesn't punish women for being women, it punishes women for stepping out of role. The warm, wonderful woman who supports, nurtures and defers meets no hostility. The same woman becomes "difficult," "abrasive," "ambitious" (said with a curl of the lip) the moment she claims what men claim without comment: authority, anger, airtime, money. Manne's companion concept is himpathy: the reflexive sympathy that flows to men, especially likeable, high-status men, when they are accused of mistreating women. "He's a brilliant engineer, this could ruin his career" arrives in the mind faster than "what did it do to hers?" The discipline: watch the allocation of one's own sympathy. When a conflict surfaces between a man and a woman at work, notice whose disruption registers first, whose future draws the worry, whose account gets stress-tested harder. And notice the role-policing hiding in vocabulary. Any man who has thought "abrasive" about a woman can run the substitution test: same sentence, same tone, from a man. A well-known analysis of performance reviews by Kieran Snyder found "abrasive" appearing repeatedly in women's reviews and essentially never in men's. That word is doing enforcement work. 4. See the cage, not the wire Marilyn Frye's birdcage metaphor solves a problem that comes up constantly: individual sexist acts often look trivial, and dismissing them individually is always locally reasonable.

Examine one wire of a birdcage up close and it is impossible to understand why the bird doesn't just fly around it. Only from a distance do the wires resolve into a cage. No single wire holds the bird; the arrangement does. The interruption in one meeting is a wire. The assumption that she'll take notes is a wire. The client who addresses questions to the male junior instead of the female lead is a wire. The school that calls the mother first is a wire. Each one is survivable, deniable, "not a big deal," and each defence is technically true. The principle: when a woman says something small mattered, resist the urge to evaluate the wire in isolation. She lives in the cage; the man inspecting one wire and calling her oversensitive is missing the structure she is describing. The useful job is to hold the systemic view even, and especially, when the individual instance looks innocent. 5. Patriarchy is also men's prison Bell Hooks' The Will to Change is the book to start with, because it supplies the only motivation that survives long-term: not guilt, but self-interest rightly understood. Hooks argues that patriarchy's first act of violence is against boys. It demands they amputate emotional range, punishes tenderness, ridicules dependency, and leaves grown men with one sanctioned emotion (anger) and one sanctioned confidant (a female partner who becomes their unpaid emotional infrastructure). The terrain is easy to verify. A man can count his friendships in which he could cry, admit fear about his career, or say "I'm lonely" without engineering the confession into a joke. For most men the count lands between zero and one, and the one is their partner. That is patriarchy operating on men, and it explains why male feminism grounded in guilt collapses (guilt exhausts itself) while male feminism grounded in liberation persists. This is not charity work for women. It is also an escape. 6. No man is the exception The final principle guards all the others. Every man who reads this material concludes, somewhere quietly, "fortunately I'm mostly past this." That conclusion is itself the most reliable symptom. Bias research is genuinely contested. Implicit-association tests predict behaviour weakly, and mandatory bias trainings show little durable effect and sometimes backfire, so the science shouldn't be oversold.

But the honest version is worse, not better: nobody can introspect their way to certainty about their own fairness, and the feeling of being unbiased is uncorrelated with being unbiased. The sane approach treats sexist habit like technical debt in an old codebase: assume it exists in anything running this long, find it by testing rather than by vibes, and fix it without a shame spiral, because shame makes the incident about the man's feelings, which is, once again, re-centring the man.

Part II: Rules of conduct Principles decay without operationalisation. What follows are rules, concrete enough to be checkable, ordered by domain. Everywhere: the baseline rules The empty-room rule. A man's feminism is measured when no women are present. In the all-male channel, the drinks after sport, the group chat: what he laughs at, what he lets pass, and how he speaks about women's bodies, exes, and female colleagues is the real audit. No lectures required. "Not funny, man", said flat and unembarrassed before moving on, costs four words and does more than any essay, because men calibrate to other men. Silence is calibration too. The airtime rule. In any mixed group, the rule is to actually track, not estimate, who speaks and who gets interrupted. Research on conversational dynamics consistently finds men overestimate women's speaking time; groups where women speak roughly a third of the time are frequently perceived as female-dominated. Male subjective sense is miscalibrated by design. The fix for a caught interruption is simple: "sorry, you were saying," followed by genuine silence. Not as theatre. As debugging. The appearance-ratio rule. Comments on women's appearance are not forbidden, but the ratio deserves an audit. When a man's remarks to and about women skew heavily toward how they look while his remarks about men skew toward what they do, he is teaching everyone in earshot (including any child present) where a woman's value lives. No cookies. When a man does any of this well, no one owes him recognition, and fishing for it ("as a feminist, I…") converts the act into a status transaction. Do the thing. Say nothing about the thing. At work: what seniority obligates A middle-aged or senior man is no longer a participant in meeting culture; he is meeting culture.