Why Feminism Does Not Owe Men a Seat at the Table

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In recent times, there have been calls and arguments to include men in feminism under the guise that men are harmed and suffer under patriarchy. Though it is true, it cannot be compared to women’s subjugation and oppression based on their sex for millennia. Women have been on the short end of the stick, navigating this world in women’s bodies. These arguments may be well-intentioned, but feminism is not a movement for every marginalised group. 

Feminism sprang up because women suffered due to their sex, and since then, it has been an uphill fight to ensure women are free and seen as equal humans. So before we go any further, one question needs answering honestly: are the men asking for inclusion asking to do the work, or asking to hold the pen?

This subjugation has never lived in one place alone; it is embedded in religion, in education, in family, in the whole architecture of society women are born into. This happened in real time this month, when Prophet David Uche told women that even in an abusive marriage, if God joined it, they cannot leave; they can only separate while they wait for God’s instruction, a woman’s safety made conditional on a man’s timeline for permission. 

We watched it again when the University of Lagos handed female students a counselling guide telling them “Your dress is your address,” and when Ahmadu Bello University banned hugging, dreadlocks, and coloured hair on campus, both dressing up control as concern while never once directing a single instruction at the men these rules claim to be protecting women from.

 A woman is taught from the pulpit that her endurance is holy, taught on campus that her body is the variable to be managed, and taught at home, long before either of those, that her brother’s inheritance and her own were never going to be equal. None of this is new. None of this is rare. It is simply what it has always meant to be born in a woman’s body, in a world built by men who never had to think about any of it. Ask yourself this: if this subjugation is so total and so old, why is the first instinct not to dismantle it, but to negotiate who gets a seat at the table built on top of it?

Holding the pen means women remain at the centre of this movement, leading the fight and shaping the advocacy, while anyone else who wants to help does so as an ally standing beside the work, not behind the wheel steering it elsewhere. 

Every serious liberation movement understands this instinctively except, apparently, feminism. Black Lives Matter and Pan-Africanism both centre the specific group they exist to defend, and while other people can show up as allies, nobody expects those movements to hand over leadership to a white person simply because that person also suffered under white supremacy in some other form. 

Oppressed white communities like the Redhead ethnic group exist. White people harmed by classism, addiction, or systemic neglect exist. None of that buys them a seat holding the pen at a Black liberation movement, and no one seriously argues it should, because everyone understands that shared proximity to a system’s damage is not the same as living the specific oppression the movement was built to end. So why does feminism alone keep getting asked to dissolve its own borders in the name of inclusion? Why is it only the movement built by and for women that is expected to expand itself until the women inside it are no longer centred?

Patriarchy indeed harms men too: rigid gender roles, selective emotional repression, suicide rates that stay unspoken because men are taught pain is a weakness. That harm is real, and the men who raise it are not always acting in bad faith. But shared harm from a system does not equal shared standing to define the movement addressing a different manifestation of that same system. 

Patriarchy affects women and men differently, and the two cannot be conflated, because men, even while suffering under patriarchy, still hold privileges granted to them on the basis of their sex that women navigating the same system never get to access. There may be an intersection in the work of dismantling patriarchy, but intersection is not the same as inclusion. 

Men serious about smashing patriarchy and addressing their own peculiar harm under it are free to build a movement that centres exactly that. Here is the question worth sitting with: if the goal is genuinely to dismantle patriarchy, why is the energy going into demanding entry into feminism rather than into building the male-led movement that could do exactly that work? What does it say about the nature of the demand when the answer to male suffering under patriarchy is not a new movement, but a seat inside a women’s one? If men’s suffering under patriarchy is the real concern, why has no serious male-led movement risen to dismantle it, and why is the solution always to enter feminism instead of building that movement?

History has already shown us where this leads when women cede the pen. The American Equal Rights Association, founded in 1866 by suffrage leaders including Sojourner Truth, Wells, Mary Ann Camberton Shadd Cary, and Mary “Mollie” Eliza Church Terrell, alongside abolitionists including Frederick Douglass, was founded to fight for voting rights regardless of race or sex. 

When the Fifteenth Amendment debate came, male leadership within that same coalition declared it “the Negro’s hour,” prioritising Black male suffrage and setting women’s demand aside entirely. The final wording of the amendment prohibited denying the vote on account of race, colour, or previous condition of servitude, and conspicuously omitted the word sex. 

The betrayal fractured the coalition permanently in 1869, and women waited decades longer for what had been theirs to fight for all along. The mechanism is not complicated: the moment decision-making power sat with men within a shared coalition, women’s specific demands were the first thing sacrificed when they competed with a cause men chose to prioritise instead. 

This raises critical questions for introspection: When human rights conversations happen at the highest levels, whose rights get called urgent and whose get called divisive? Who has historically been told to wait their turn, and who decided when that turn arrived? The American Equal Rights Association promised women a coalition. The Fifteenth Amendment delivered men a vote and women a lesson. How many times does that lesson have to repeat before we stop calling the pattern a coincidence?

People can work alongside each other through allyship; feminism has done this with racial justice, with LGB advocacy, with climate movements, without ever becoming those movements. But allyship was never supposed to mean supplanting the people the movement was built to centre. 

Time and again, when women build spaces to centre themselves, those spaces veer off course the moment men take the steering wheel. Feminism loses the plot when it tries to include everyone while women face sex based oppression across the world, and we have not yet solved even a quarter of it.

Before you argue that feminism should include men, answer these questions honestly.

When was the last time a movement built to centre men was asked to restructure itself around women’s pain?

If allyship is genuine, why does it so often come with conditions, with demands for access, for leadership, for inclusion inside the very space built to centre the people the ally claims to support?

Women have been the footnote in every human rights movement that was supposed to include them. At what point does inclusion stop being the goal and start being the mechanism through which women’s specific demands are quietly deprioritised again?

The pen belongs to the women who built this movement and who still bleed for it. You are welcome to stand beside the work. You do not get to rewrite what it is for.