A content note for any who have endured and survived any kind of abuse, I’m angry today and this touches on the horrific Cornell University case. Just a heads up for those who need a little advanced warning. I love you all.
Women do math that men never have to do.
The advanced geometry of a city street at night, the angle of shadows and the diameter of the streetlight glow they’ll feel a fraction of a percentage safer in, the physics involved the moment a hand finds its way to their shoulder or the small of their back. Science, too, as they must become chemists each time a drink poured becomes a drink handed to them in a bar or club and they worry of something dropped into it, or the rejection response that men invent and call primal when their advances are denied.
So too are they experts on silence. Their own when some small man demands it of them as they believe their voice carries more value, but another type as well. Another kind worse than the rest:
The silence of those who should be speaking up for them, with them, who should be a voice of opposition to the bullshit reductions and terrible atrocities they face. The silence of those who refuse to punish those who commit them, the silence of those who still do not teach the next generation to change.
I can still see the glow of the cell phone screen that had the messages on that Cornell University fraternity group chat that sparked a lawsuit and an absolute fever pitch of anger across the world. I can see the words, the absolute degradation of another treated like a joke, like a human being made commodity, made property. I see those who responded, those who the lawsuit says partook, but I see someone else, someone somehow louder.
I see the men who stayed silent. I see that deafening silence, the apparent refusal of every single other man to speak up and stop it. I see the resistance to rock their disgusting boats, I see the complete apathy towards doing the right thing.
I see her, too. The woman tossed into a sea of tumult and chaos against every shred of her will. I see her cast aside, abandoned by all those who did nothing.
I also see that NOTHING, where god dammit, I should see something ferocious.
We’re doing this, all of us, this whole society of men, and we always have been. I don’t know why it’s never gone away, I don’t understand the machinations that haven’t let this horrific and outdated and abhorrent ideal of masculinity die, but here we are, and here we shouldn’t be.
This is a furious letter to the men I know.
This is a demand, because pleas don’t work, because asking politely has never elicited a single meaningful change, clearly. This is me, SHOUTING at you, that we have to do better, we have to be better, we have to set better examples, we have to be loud about this. Now, and always.
We have to raise boys that become men who are actually strong, not just this pantomime of it that somehow we all have been hoodwinked into believing. We have to raise boys who respect women, and more, who refuse to be complicit when others do not. We need men who understand something simple but profound:
Women do not need saviors, they need men who are willing to break the silence amongst men.
Only men can do this.
We have to raise boys who not only refuse to laugh when the jokes begin at that awkward time between 8 to 12, but speak up and offer resistance to those making them. Who risk it the outcasting, who say NO when everyone else is saying Yes to the behaviors that have become obscenely normalized.
We have to raise boys that become men who understand true strength is speaking out when no one else will, it’s making a fucking change when everyone else throws their hands up in some pathetic surrender to the “way it’s always been.”
It is the way it’s been because WE, the men who CAN, and SHOULD, and for some reason still will NOT, have been turning a blind eye away from what’s happening until it actually happens to someone we know, someone we love, someone we call friend or family or lover.
What a disaster we’ve created, all of us “we” over centuries and centuries of passing down, either with intention or with apathy, such disfigured definitions of what it is to be a MAN. What it is to be masculine. These lessons of power, of persuasion, of acquisition, of aggression. Somehow, we’ve taught that to be a man is to take what you believe to be rightfully yours, to own, to control, to dominate.
This letter, this essay, is not one of pointing fingers at any specific reason we have done this. It’s not to blame any one group, not Hollywood not “that damn rap music” that shouldered the blame for so many things in the early ‘90s, because in truth, it’s not possible to blame any one thing. It’s all of it, it’s none of it, it’s just pointing a finger at the reality that somehow we’re still perpetuating by not speaking up against it.
By not educating those that follow us how to stop it.
This is step one of a thousand that must be taken. This is the first push towards some great change that must come. Men who do speak up, must teach others to do the same. Men who do refuse to stay quiet, men who do refuse to allow others to hurt, to threaten, to dominate, to control, need to be louder, need to be even stronger.
No longer can “not all men” be the bullshit line spouted by those who use their voices, because it’s not enough. It’s just not e-fucking-nough, and never has been.
We’re raising boys that turn into men that are capable of this, and what’s even more quietly nefarious is that we’re also raising boys who are capable of the silence when others do. It’s not enough to raise boys who turn into men who will not harm a woman, it’s not enough to lay your head on a pillow each night confident that your son would not do what those monsters at Cornell University did.
If you don’t KNOW, definitively, that your son, your boy, your young man, would have stood up and stopped it, you’re not doing enough. Period. Full stop. Forever.
Do more. Be better. Educate. Teach. And most of all, fucking Demonstrate the behavior you demand of them.
Somewhere in this country tonight, a woman is going to be holding her keys between her knuckles, taking a deep breath, and walking down the street to get into her car or unlock her front door. Somewhere, another is opening her own drink to guarantee to herself she won’t be drugged. Somewhere, another is trying her very best to let down ever-so gently a man who won’t stop “complimenting” her at the bar lest his ego make him angry.
Somewhere else in this ridiculous country tonight, someone’s phone is going to light up a dark dorm room or frat house or night club or bar. One small little glow in a house full of young men, and there will be a thumb hovering just an inch above it.
It’s one of our son’s.
What that thumb does next, however it responds, someone taught it.
I love you all.
Be good better.
Also: 1-800-656-HOPE or https://rainn.org
Help is available. You’re not alone.
No haiku this week because I don’t want to write a poem about this. I am tired of it, and I want something to change.
