So this is one of those things that I’ve been grinding my teeth about for a long time, and I’ve said all of this before many, many times but I feel like it bears posting and keeping at hand:
Anyone whose response to any conversation about the sexual aggression, exploitation, abuse, harassment, and assault is “Not All Men!” needs to sit down, shut up, and not speak again until you’ve learned how to act like a decent human being.
Let me tell y’all “not all men” types a little secret that’s only a secret to you:
ALL women – ALL women, every single woman you have ever known – has personally experienced sexual aggression, exploitation, or assault at the hands or words or eyes of a man in her lifetime, and most of them have experienced it within the last five years statistically. ALL women, everywhere, including those so normalized to it that they themselves don’t realize that’s what’s happening.
Not just in “those countries” or “those states” or “that part of the whatever” or “those people.” ALL women. Every. Single. One. And I don’t have to ask them all; I’ll concede that if there’s a woman someplace who has never once in her life been in the presence of a man who knew she was female, then maybe she has escaped that experience.
I am telling you if you’re a man and you think I’m making that up, it’s straight up because the women around you think you at least might be, maybe, sometimes, part of the problem, if in nothing else than at least in being so obviously averse to dealing with realities you don’t like that people who love you avoid presenting you with them.
You probably need to deal with that internally before you go rushing to her to ask if I’m right.
TOO MANY MEN, which means “MORE THAN ONE,” engage in sexual aggression, exploitation, or assault against women, and until the number of men engaging in sexual aggression, exploitation, or assault against women is ZERO, the phrase “not all men” simply need not exist.
It is a defense purely of the male ego, almost universally offered by men who feel guilty about their own behavior but not guilty enough to sit down, shut up, and look within themselves for the keys to change it rather than just making the same empty noises as they wheedle for social approval with performative blather.
If you’re not one of those men and you’re saying that crap, the problem is not that you aren’t one of those men, it’s that in the very act of thinking now’s the time to say so you are much farther on your way to becoming one of them than you apparently believe yourself to be.
Thanks for coming to my TED talk, I’ve been John Henry.
