Men Request Concrete Examples of Men Being Terrible

I recently wrote an article about why relationships with men are giving so many of us the “ick”. I then went on to describe how inequitable relationships have become unattractive to many women, particularly when the current political climate is starkly anti-women with attacks on both our voting rights and reproductive freedoms. It wasn’t a diatribe against men but rather a call to action for men to step up their game and help us smash the patriarchy that is so harmful to all of us. I even referenced how the male loneliness epidemic will only get worse when men opt out of the responsibility of participating in the fight for gender equality.

I knew when I wrote it that not everyone would agree. After all, it’s my opinion. I wasn’t speaking for anyone else — although I did mention that I’m seeing more and more women speaking out on this particular issue. I thought it was worth writing about because there’s a feeling among women that’s being consistently misunderstood by men.

Despite an entire article focused on relational and social inequity, I’m told that I didn’t give any concrete examples of men being terrible. It’s not enough to say that there’s a growing dissatisfaction among women who have primarily been tasked with much of the emotional and mental labor of relationships; now we have to prove it with data and specific examples that will be dismissed as outliers rather than routine experiences most of us know all too well.

Believe women.

How many women have to speak up to be believed? Apparently, it’s not 27, which is the number of women who have accused Donald Trump of sexual misconduct. The #metoo movement had much higher numbers, and yet there are still men who question the lived experience of women.

Believe women doesn’t mean that all women are honest, and no woman ever lies. Believe women means that we should give women the benefit of the doubt in allegations of sexual misconduct and abuse because of their prevalence in modern society. Instead of extending that benefit of the doubt to the man in question, we extend it to the person who is the victim of alleged abuse. Believe women doesn’t mean we’re trying and convicting someone in the court of public opinion. It does mean that we consider all allegations credible until we have good reason to believe otherwise.

When women write about a problem we’re observing, the point isn’t that we’re indisputably right. The point is that we’re raising awareness about a social or relational issue that could be creating problems in relationships. While I am open to respectful discourse, I’m not doing the homework of men on the Internet who refuse to further investigate the issue simply because they don’t think there is one. Opinion doesn’t trump lived experience.

Examining the case of the terrible man.

Let’s be clear: Our current President of the United States is a terrible person. He is a convicted felon many times over and a convicted rapist. He is a person who defies the Constitution, worships dictators, and is revered by hate groups. Yet, there were enough people who knew this and still voted him into office. There are even some who would argue that he’s not terrible at all, all evidence to the contrary.

So, no, I don’t need to give personal, real-life examples of men being awful. That wasn’t really the point of my article. Rather, the point was illustrating how dissatisfied many women are with the status quo of relationships.

I know that there are good men out there. I don’t have to be told that — repeatedly — in the comments section. I don’t need to see the examples. I can believe that good men exist and still call the problematic ones to account. I can talk about prevalent behavior that women see every day, and I don’t have to document the name and date of every incident to support my argument.

Listen first without crafting a counter-argument.

Contrary to the belief of some men who find themselves ranting in the comments, I do not universally write about men any more than Taylor Swift universally writes about relationships. It’s a misconception rooted entirely in misogyny. Instead, I am writing about my experiences and observations. That’s what writers do. We write what we know. If we do a good job of it, we help others feel seen and validated, or we give them another perspective to consider.

When I write about social issues, the comments section is often illuminating. There are always women (and a few good men) who speak up to acknowledge the points I’ve made. Then, there are the trolls who blindly rage in the comments with their name-calling and personal accusations (“cat hag” was a new one for me) interspersed with calls to stop holding men accountable. It’s never quite phrased that way, but it is the point.

There are even men who try to make the argument that women are fully equal in the United States using the oppression of women in other countries as their measuring stick. When is a little oppression okay? When does it become acceptable for women to remain second-class citizens as long as someone somewhere else in the world has it worse? It’s a frail argument, repeated so often as to be entirely meaningless.

If this feels like a rant, check your defensiveness.

Just because something makes a reader feel defensive does not make the words a rant. The reaction to my work is often not the point of it. But try explaining that to someone who has prepared their argument long before they’ve finished reading the piece they plan to shred in the comments.

Writing is supposed to make us feel something. Isn’t that the point of it? Unless we’re just endlessly seeking an echo chamber, we want to be challenged and intrigued by thoughts, experiences, and ideas.

Strong reactions require further inquiry. Why did it invoke those feelings? If defensiveness exists, why is that? Disagreement alone doesn’t make a person’s point of view wrong. It just means that we have our unique perspective.

But what we can never have is a unique perspective about someone else’s identity. I’m a white woman, and I can never speak for what it feels like to be a person of color. I grew up in the United States, and I can’t speak about what it is to be an immigrant. I’m not trans, and I can’t speak for that experience. While I can fully support and advocate for other people, my opinions will never have more weight than their lived experience of personal identity.

So, when a woman speaks up and says that this is her experience, no man’s argument is going to outweigh that. They might think they can imagine what our lives are like, but they can’t. We saw it with the #metoo movement. Men were astounded at how many women spoke up, but women have always known that sexual harassment and assault are everyday realities. I don’t know a single woman who doesn’t have a story. Not one.

And yet, men questioned our veracity.

No, I won’t be listing every single time a man in my life has been terrible. I won’t give up every single personal encounter to satisfy a man who is just waiting to dismiss my experience — or worse still, justify the actions of any man in the story no matter what he has or hasn’t done. I don’t have to come bearing receipts. My receipts are my experiences and the observations I’ve gleaned from them.

When I talk about men giving some of us the “ick”, this is what I mean. They question our experiences rather than listening to what we’re saying. They get defensive instead of asking themselves why that is.

It’s not every man, but it’s enough of them. We’re saying “believe women”, and they’re waiting for proof that they should while extending that belief to men without any proof at all. We don’t owe them proof, and that’s what is so hard for men like that to understand. They are not entitled to our blood, sweat, and tears. They are not entitled to the intimate details of our lives. They shouldn’t require personal sacrifice to see us as credible human beings capable of accurately reporting our experiences.