I’ve been following the #YesAllWomen hashtag on Twitter from a distance. Not because of anything in particular, just because I haven’t looked at Twitter much in general for several days. Or much of anything, really. So I’m a bit behind in the news lately. Stuff is going on in my personal life. I don’t feel much like paying attention to society as a whole. Still, some of it does leak in.
For a great summary of what is going on, go here .
Better still, take some time and read through some of the tweets.
Some of the stories are very powerful. Even in 140 characters. A lot of men are being very supportive, which is not a bit surprising because most men (like most women) are good people.
But I think that a lot of men may be having a hard time understanding what women are so upset about. Because the statistics on how many women have been sexually attacked are hard to believe. Because the vast majority of men don’t knowingly harm women, and would hate to think they might be harming us unknowingly. Because I just don’t think most men can understand that even those of us who have not been raped live with a level of fear that they don’t simply because we are women. Because white men in particular don’t know what it is like to have someone assume that you do not know what you are talking about because your voice is higher and softer than their’s. Because men do not typically know what it’s like to have to be afraid of normal, everyday situations like walking alone in a park, answering the door or being out after dark. Because I don’t think that most men can really understand how frightening it is to know that any time we say no and he pushes back…we don’t really know if he is going to take no for an answer.
It’s not because we discount their feelings, their fears, their own experiences of powerlessness, rape and abuse. It’s not because we don’t realize that there are things about being a man that we don’t understand. It’s because we are talking about our own issues, not theirs. We aren’t attacking them, we are trying to make ourselves heard in a world in which people often seem not to want to listen.
It definitely isn’t because we think that all men, or even most men, are bad.
Yes, a few of us are being a little over zealous, but that doesn’t mean that these stories do not need to be heard.
But I’ve been following it at a bit of a distance because this is stuff that you don’t like thinking about too hard even if you are a woman. We all have stories of close calls, of times when men got grabby and we didn’t know how it would turn out, of being called whores or bitches because we said something a man didn’t like. Of maybe giving in when we really would have preferred not to because we didn’t want to find out how someone would react to our continuing to say no. Most of us have seen a fist clench even if it didn’t actually strike us.
And then…
Guilt.
It is really hard to complain too much about my lot in life when my life is so overwhelmingly good. It’s comfortable. I have more than enough to eat. I am safe, mostly. I have heat, and running water. I have a job that pays pretty well. I can do anything I choose to do without getting permission from one of the men in my life. I am, largely, my own boss. Many, if not most of the women in the world do not have all of that, and they live in societies where they are seen as “lesser than” simply because they were born female. They get killed or put up for adoption because their family wanted a boy. They get killed by their families to uphold the family honor if they do something against the laws of their society. Even if their violation is that they were violated themselves. There is very little justice in the lives of many of the world’s women.
So it’s hard to feel too put upon when a man doesn’t believe that I really am “the IT guy” or when I think twice about going for a hike in Forest Park alone. I’m not being raped and then killed by my family for dishonoring them.
But this isn’t about one-upping each other’s pain. It’s about getting everyone to understand each other better. It’s about getting people to understand that the violence isn’t just happening in a few isolated cases. It’s happening to us all, and all of us need to care about it or it will never stop.
Ultimately it’s not a male or female issue. It’s a human one.
I keep reminding myself.