I’m home from Denver and the National Women’s Studies Association meeting. It was a great four days in Colorado, with the chance to connect with many wonderful colleagues and the chance to get fresh inspiration for my own writing, teaching, mentoring, and personal growth.

Though my own panel on men (with my colleagues Robert Buelow, Tal Peretz, and Brian Jara) was far less well-attended than last year, I was pleased with the discussion we had. (Our presentation was recorded, and I will have a link to it eventually.) We continued last year’s Atlanta discussion on the problems with and potential for men in feminist spaces and men in anti-violence activism.

Though I’ve got more to say about our panel discussion — including my focus on reconciling male sexual desire and feminism, the subject of so much of our recent debates around here –I want to start with the experience that deeply impacted those of us who presented in Denver.

Three of us were deeply influenced by a panel we’d gone to a day earlier, presented by Chris Linder of Colorado State University and one of her graduate students. Their presentation looked at the experiences of women who had worked with self-described male feminists on college campuses, mostly young men doing anti-violence work. Their research findings were sobering; Linder and her graduate researcher, Rachel Johnson, found that a great many women whom they surveyed reported serious boundary violations (including sexual assault) at the hands of male feminist allies. Anecdotes turned into hard data (the study is unpublished, but we were given a summary of the findings) and that hard data revealed that the problem of misconduct by men who claim to be doing feminist work is far more serious than we had previously imagined. Continue reading →