Speaking for Men

I apologize. I apologize to all the women of the world who have been hurt, directly or otherwise, by men, by male privilege, and by the pattern of patriarchy which has characterized history and pre-history since our species first emerged from the muck and mire on this far-flung clod of dirt. I furthermore presume to speak for all men, past, present, and, likely, future for some time to come, in offering this apology. It is offered without qualification, without explanation, and without rationalization. A sincere apology doesn’t begin with, “I’m sorry you…” A sincere apology starts with: “I’m sorry I…” Or, in this case: “I’m sorry we…”

I’m sorry we have oppressed you. I’m sorry we have brutalized you. I’m sorry we have objectified you. I’m sorry we have subjugated, diminished, demeaned, assaulted, beaten, raped, and killed you. I’m sorry we have denied you your basic human rights. I’m especially sorry that we continue to do so. Even the best of us are guilty. Even I am guilty.

I have enjoyed male privilege my entire life. Just as the color of my skin has endowed me with white privilege, so has my physiology endowed me with male privilege. And just as I can be blind to my white privilege, I can also be blind to my male privilege. A day or two ago I saw something online which took us to task for the manner in which we frame gender privilege linguistically. We tend to speak of “the number of women raped,” and, “the number of women assaulted.” But we should be speaking about “the number of men who rape,” and, “the number of men who assault.” This is not mere semantics. Our choice of language reflects how we frame our fundamental understanding of the world around us. The descriptors we choose reflect our world view in a manner which cuts to the very core of our beings. The fact that both men and women couch this gender inequality in terms of the passivity of women, as opposed to the activity of men, is a lucid illustration of how deeply ingrained the institution of patriarchy is in our culture. In many ways, our language is our world: it does not merely reflect it, but it reinforces and, by extension, actually plays a role in creating and sustaining it.

We need to change how we speak about these issues. If we, as men, can become aware of how we speak about gender inequality, we’ve taken at least a first, necessary step in eradicating it. Speaking for myself, I know it will be very difficult to change my habits of speech. But like any bad habit, it can be changed, and I hope we can all start to call one another out in this regard. What’s “normal” is what we say is normal, and what we say is normal is governed by our speech. Together we are capable of creating a new normal. We should.

But how did things get to this point? When I look back on my own life, I can see how so many social factors came into play in creating this distorted world view. I can see how I absorbed so many subliminal messages, most of them bad. But there were a few good ones — a scant few — which, I believe, helped me to avoid becoming the kind of man we see in the White House right now, or the kind of man who has just been appointed to the Supreme Court.

I don’t want to be misconstrued as excusing, in any way, the behavior of even the least offender. When I look back at the social climate in which I was raised, I stand aghast. I realize that, as a child, I was fully immersed in a culture of misogyny. I was incubated within it. I could no more divorce myself from it than I could have avoided the amniotic fluid in which my fetal development took place. Nor do I believe that very much by way of progress has occurred since then. A quick survey of advertising, television, music, and films from 1968 and 2018 will quickly reveal how little has changed in half a century. Women are still portrayed as objects. They’re still portrayed — largely — as the primary raisers of children, the primary cooks, the primary cleaners. The big difference seems to be that now they’re expected to be sexy domestic goddesses and hold down careers as well. (For, presumably, a fraction of what their male counterparts earn.)

I was lucky, however, in a way that many male children of the 1970s were not. I had a positive male role model in my father. How precious and rare a thing was that!

I don’t ever remember my father sitting me down and explaining to me how women should be treated. He didn’t have to do that. He demonstrated, through his words and his behavior, that women deserved the exact same respect, deference, and consideration shown to men. Although I can’t ever remember the subject being discussed explicitly, as such, in hindsight it occurs to me that the most compelling lessons in this regard were those times when my father and I were alone and he could have said anything. He could have let his guard down at such times, had he been putting up a mere front. But even when we were alone, the tone of his language, the manner in which he referred to my mother, my aunts, my grandmothers, my sister, my cousins, and every other woman in our lives, made the lesson perfectly unmistakable: Women are to be treated as equals in every way. That was the lesson that my father imparted to me, whether he meant to or not.

Does that mean I was without fault? No. There was the usual adolescent “locker room talk,” which is probably as ubiquitous now as it was then. My friends and I would often speak about girls in school in overtly sexual terms: who was hot and who was not, and why. But that’s where, for me at any rate, it ended: private talk, never revealed to the girls in question, and certainly never acted upon. Except for once.

I wish I could say that I never engaged any act of sexual assault, but that would be a lie. When I was in junior high school — I would have been 14 or 15 at the time — there was an single incident in which, following a classmate up a staircase, I grabbed her butt and gave it a squeeze. She did not protest, but that’s beside the point. And, as in a now much more infamous case, beer was involved, but that’s beside the point too. The fact is that I did it in a calculated manner. And because I was raised by a father who instilled the proper values into me, I immediately felt wretched, dirty, and evil for having done it. Which is why it was never repeated.

Nonetheless, in looking back on my life, from the perspective of 2018, I can still identify other moments of ambiguity. It was — and is still — considered normative for a guy to make a “pass” at a woman he’s interested in becoming more intimate with. There were certainly times during my life when I leaned in for the kiss, or else tried to transform the friendly hug into the impassioned embrace, and was rebuffed. I always respected that rebuff and took no to mean no. But was it right for me to cross that line, without a verbal warning, to begin with? I think not. I think part of the new normal needs to involve asking for consent explicitly. And that’s awkward. We have grown up with this weird ethos of the guy making the pass, but unfortunately, that leaves the woman with no choice. Sometimes such a pass is, indeed, welcomed. But what about those times when it isn’t? Doesn’t that, also, count as a violation, even if it is unintentional? And it’s so easy to avoid: simply ask for consent. And if a man finds this prospect daunting, perhaps that’s a clue that he should spend some time in self-reflection before inflicting himself upon another human being.

This is, indeed, a difficult time for men. To that extent I will agree with our wretched, shameful excuse for a President. But not for the same reasons that he espouses. This is a difficult time because even those of us who are of good conscience must face the fact that we are harboring unseen malignancies which must be identified, exposed, and excised. In this I can confidently speak for all men.