You can jump into almost any MC space online or offline, and it feels like a battle of the sexes is brewing. The girls’ spaces are growing, and not everyone is down with that. While this is a controversial topic, when you dig a little deeper, it’s not as much of a problem as it first seems. Considering the MC culture’s origins, it’s unsurprising that it values protecting women. Men protecting women they care about is instinctual, and many rules and protocols surrounding women exist to facilitate that protection.
But to the people outside a club’s inner circle, that signals importance and weakness. Women are often seen as targets. Add to this the fact that we’re not trained in the same protocol, tradition, and discipline as the men are, so now you have the perfect setting for women to become the club’s biggest trigger for war. Think about how many beefs were fought over women or the attack on them.
That education gap keeps popping up. So now women, especially known women, become a target for law enforcement (this happens in civilian life too), a target for other clubs to use, to extract information, to attack, to spark a battle.
That’s before we get to issues like pillow talk, emotional volatility, ego, and jealousy. When we talk about this, we assume it’s about men not wanting women in male spaces, and that is a part of it, but the surrounding issues go much deeper, and each time it circles back around to education, discipline, and perception.
Let’s take a minute, though, to acknowledge the current landscape, whilst I write this for women inside male 1% clubs, that is my field of expertise: male-dominated hierarchies and diamond clubs.
Things are changing. The female clubs are growing in number, the landscape has changed, and the acceptance of that is going to vary depending on what set you’re in, locality, and your club and the people in it.
There are social clubs, support clubs, female motorcycle clubs, following protocol, structure, and traditions like the male MCs. So, do some of these women go harder than the male MCs? These women are capable. There are even places where there are female officers in male clubs, and while I don’t support that. I support the female and male clubs working together in harmony. I’ve seen it done and think it can work well as we move forward.
The success of some female clubs that support diamond clubs does prove that we can overcome the liability with the right education, discipline, and structure. Moving forward in this way works, but only if it stabilises the culture.
Let’s go back to the liability issue for a moment, because there are still plenty of MC members who perceive women as a liability. You’ll hear it’s a man’s club; women have no place in it.
Behaviour plays a large part in this. We’ve talked about external war, let’s talk about the other side, the brotherhood is seen as complete and total loyalty, this mysterious force that binds a club together, so when more than one is/or trying to smash on the same girl, its other seen as the ultimate betrayal. There’s no faster way that I know of to start an internal war.
The problem is that some of the protocol and traditions we hold dear as a culture remove the female from responsibility, rules like all issues must be dealt with by her partner. That same protection for women excuses them from being held accountable. Don’t get this twisted, though, because the men will back their bros in everything, so women do bear consequences sometimes.
But the female rule of “never be alone with your man’s club brother” is often forgotten. Yes, the girls have hierarchy and rules too, and a lot of the situations like this that lead to women being seen as problematic, we could bypass if we held tighter to our code.
If your man’s bro is trying to hit on you as a woman in the life, consider it your responsibility to shut that down straight away. Don’t get me wrong, there are and always will be passarounds, but that’s different because they are not claimed partners, and that’s their end goal to become claimed.
We could dive into all the issues one by one, but the truth is this: by demonstrating more discipline and responsibility as females next to the club, we can sidestep many of the issues that would label us a liability.
You are always going to have those guys who feel the females are trying to take over their world, so drawn to that hardline perception of no women in the club life, and no female clubs. One of the biggest issues is when woman respond or act from ego trying to match the ego of the men, it’s important when you are regulating your behaviour to remember ego driven responses or actions usually come with a high level of intensity, and it feels fast like the urge to scream, when you feel that take a second to ask is this going to stabilize this situation or make it worse.
If you want to learn how to take more responsibility and move correctly inside motorcycle club culture, with loyalty, discipline, and structural intelligence, you can stabilise your club and not become a liability. I am here for that.
Belinda Sharland