To the Men: Every time I write about misogyny, it's mostly women who show up. They share the piece on social media, leave comments, and send emails. Many of them comment on the fear and the pain, and...

25#

Πλήρες Κείμενο:

To the Men: Every time I write about misogyny, it's mostly women who show up. They share the piece on social media, leave comments, and send emails. Many of them comment on the fear and the pain, and that they forwarded it to someone who needed to read it. Sometimes they just say thank you, which is its own kind of heartbreak, because I haven't really done anything yet. I've written some words. That's all. But y'all, the men? I've gotta say, mostly quiet. A few likes, maybe some supportive comments. The occasional private message from somebody who wants me to know he agrees ... but it's hard swimming upstream. So, I want to pause here for a minute before I say anything else, because I think the silence is the whole story. ⸻ CNN published an investigation recently that I can't get out of my head. Reporters went undercover into online chatrooms and websites where men share tactics for drugging and sexually assaulting their wives and partners. Not strangers. Partners. Women who trust them. French lawmaker Sandrine Josso, herself a survivor of this kind of assault, called these spaces "schools of violence." She said she'd refer to them as an online rape academy, where every subject is taught. What really makes my stomach turn, though? Yeah, the data behind this isn't fringey. The World Health Organization reports that close to one in three women worldwide experience sexual violence from an intimate partner during their lifetime. One. in. three. And that number has barely moved in twenty-five years. I tell you this stuff because we have a habit, we men, of treating stories like this as news about other people. I know some of y'all are already shaking your heads."Not all men are like that. Don't lump us all together. Not every man does that." I've said something similar myself, felt it myself, which is why I want to call out that reflex and ask you not to do it this time. Don't back out the door yet. Over half the people on earth are counting on us to stick around and have this conversation. "Not all men" is a protest of innocence. It's a way of absenting ourselves from the conversation before it starts costing us anything. As I say, I understand the impulse. None of us wants to be associated with men who drug their wives. (God, it's disgusting even to type that.) So, I get that distancing ourselves from it feels necessary, even righteous. But here's what that move actually does: it re-centers our feelings in a conversation about women's suffering. The question stops being "what is happening to women and what are we going to do about it?" and becomes "but I'm one of the good guys, right?" But that's self-protection, not true solidarity. The harder question, the one that actually matters, isn't whether we've ever drugged anyone. It's what we've normalized and what we've laughed at, what we've let slide and what we've looked away from. It's whether we've said anything in the spaces where we have influence, or just stayed quiet because it was easier. Most of us have stayed quiet. I have. But just because we didn't lead the charge, that doesn't get us off the hook... 24#

Η επιλογή των posts/links γίνεται με ένα στατιστικό μοντέλο και μπορεί να μην απεικονίζει επακριβώς τη δημοτικότητά τους