Men really can’t help themselves. They really can’t help but screw up a good thing, especially if it’s a progressive movement.
I don’t mean to suggest that men are actively sabotaging the mission of any movement they’re in. In fact, I’ve volunteered with many organizations, and there’s never been one man who has belonged to the group that just outright said, “I will fuck up everything you do to make sure this doesn’t succeed.”
That’s part of the problem, really. The way in which men do undermine a movement is much more covert, and a whole lot more damaging. Most other organization members – namely other men – likely don’t even catch a man’s disruption of group unity. If men were just outright with their sabotage, the threat would be much easier to identify, and the offending man could be excised from the group.
The way it tends to work out, really, is that men simply can’t see beyond themselves and put what’s best for an organization before their ego.
I doubt that the men who contribute to the discord and decay of a movement are aware that their own behavior has a negative impact on the mission and the other members because these men are simply behaving the way culture has instructed men to behave. That is to say, men do not reconcile their male privilege within a space shared with others, regardless of whether that’s other men, women, straight or queer people, etc. Even among men who identify as leftist, progressive, liberal, whatever, male privilege has an ugly habit of not gently instructing the behavior of men so much as it possesses a man’s actions as if he’s been infected by a zombie-ant fungus.
Reading Without Men 