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Dear Women and Girls everywhere,
We stand with you.
It may not meet the standards of journalistic integrity to speak for hundreds of millions of men one has never met, but I feel confident I’ve just done that very thing. Who are “we”? We are the men who have never been accused of sexual assault, not because women have been fearful or reluctant to speak up about us, but because we have never sexually assaulted a woman.
We didn’t do it in high school or college. We haven’t done it at the workplace, or a bar, or a hotel, or on a date, or in our marriages. We respect Consent, intentionally capitalized because it’s more than just permission; consent is a genuine staple of sexual health.
In light of this, the ascension of Brett Kavanaugh to the Supreme Court was painful for us, too.
The men (and women) who voted “yes” and so easily discounted the gravity and truthfulness of Dr. Ford’s testimony do not speak for us. The men who continue to mock her and other survivors don’t speak for us. The men who are perplexed by the notion of hazy timelines and memory gaps, and who use them as exculpatory evidence don’t speak for us. The men who proclaimed Kavanaugh’s innocence on the basis of a woefully limited FBI investigation—-do not speak for us.
And we understand how this dark episode in American history has engendered feelings of fear and hopelessness. If a woman in the most high-profile of settings, being heard by the most high-profile members of Congress isn’t believed, then what chance is there for those women who don’t have access to the media, the means to hire expensive lawyers or the ear of the United States government? And it doesn’t escape us that the vast majority of men who commit sexual assault aren’t high-profile figures and, therefore, are not subject to the scrutiny that comes from national media attention. Who is willing to listen to the accusers of men that aren’t famous?
We are.
We are the men who believe you. The myriad of stories we’ve heard from you throughout the years, sadly, bear out the statistics of how common sexual assault is, and we know it can result in a lifetime of emotional pain. We understand how the trauma or the culture—-or both—-have made it so difficult to speak up. So it pains us how people will use the fact that you didn’t say something as some kind of proof that it didn’t happen or couldn’t have been that bad. These conclusions could only come from those who have never experienced this kind of trauma or its impact.
However, we’re far from perfect, and we know it. We can be insensitive, clueless, unkind, selfish and dumb. We frequently struggle to understand some of our differences with you, we often put our feet in our mouths, and sometimes we sabotage our own efforts to be closer to you. But we have never sexually assaulted women, and we never will.
We realize that we can make a difference by speaking out for and with you, and by continuing to believe you. But the biggest contribution we can make is to teach our sons, grandsons, nephews, friends, neighbors, and students what it really means to be a man and what never to do to a woman. Even those of us who were raised with a proper moral compass might still have some uninformed or skewed ideas about women and sex, and we can always benefit from any education that improves relational health.
For what it’s worth, and in these particularly bleak times, we hope this one immutable truth gives you a modicum of comfort: there are more of us than there are of them.
And we stand with you.
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Photo by Omar Lopez on Unsplash
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