It's About More Than A Few Bad Men

We live in a society that permits men to treat women like property (for a long time the status of many women was property either of her father or husband). We live in a society that permits men to treat women like play things. A society that views women as if they were less than. So when we talk about Harvey Weinstein and Louis C.K. and Bill Cosby and the depressingly long list of serial predators, we’re talking about more than a few problematic individuals. This is a systemic issue, a power structure that makes it easy for men to mistreat women. I think that’s what I’m missing in this conversation and all of these conversations about men who have done what for other men is the unthinkable, but for most women is unsurprising. 

I remember having a conversation with a male friend of mine and another female friend that began the shift in my perspective on men and women. We were talking about the different ways each group moves in the world—men as if they have a right and ownership over the spaces they occupy and women with caution. My female friend described the habit of looking over our shoulders when walking especially late at night. It was a behaviour so ingrained in me that I hadn’t even noticed it in myself though I certainly do it. Yet, it was something so foreign to my male friend that he was shocked at the very existence of the habit. He’s an evolved male, so didn’t do what is typical in our society and question our behaviour, our description of it or our certainty that it was necessary. He respects us as people and took our word at face value. Later that night my male friend and I walked home together and he noticed me do the shoulder check, when it was again so natural to me that I didn’t realize I’d done it until he pointed it out.

As women we learn through experience or from our mothers to proceed into the world with caution, especially if we are outspoken, smart or ambitious. Because the world will try to shrink us or make us into the image of what it thinks a woman should be. It will shame us, ignore us and use sexual violence to put us in our places, which is subservient to men especially men with power. But to be a man is to have power.

So it’s great when Jay Fielden, the EIC of Esquire, and other men of influence like him, call out the vile behaviour of predators and when other men start to re-evaluate their own behaviour around the women in their lives. Checking ourselves is a great start. So is calling out the behaviour and punishing it, which for so long we’ve been so bad at as a collective. But it won’t solve the problem, because this isn’t just a unique pathology among a few bad seeds.

Until we take a closer look at the way society views, positions and treats women, until we address toxic masculinity, until we realign our perceptions of gender and address the power inequities that exist in our society, things won’t change. There will be others. We’ll have a few more not-for-profits and personas non-grata, but no real change. The media will move on or get bored as it tends to even with the most important issues like the moral fibre and structure of our society. People will get back to life as usual and this will be a distant flare up in our memories. Though with a little more caution exhibited around these longstanding predatory behaviours.

We need to have the real conversations, we need to pay women equally for equal work, we need to root out the diseased behaviours and elements of society. It’s not enough to hold a few people accountable and move on feeling good about ourselves. It’s about using this shift (because men finally seeing the world through the collective experience of women is important), but understanding where these behaviours come from and addressing that. It’s about taking stock of and dismantling a system and ways of thinking within that system. Which is scary stuff. These structures feel safe because they’re known and benefit 50% of the population, but I’m certain there’s something better for us beyond this. 

I can’t claim to have all the answers, but I know there are people out there who do. Men and women who see the problem and have already begun to develop solutions. They need our support. Because the many men who have been identified through the revelations that began with Bill Cosby and Harvey Weinstein speak to an epidemic. These men and many like him had been doing this for decades. Because they knew they lived in world (not an industry, but a society) in which they could get away with it. For decades. 

I want to live in a world where future Brock Turners are imprisoned for atrocious attacks on unconscious women, where the thought of a female president (controversial as she may be) isn’t more reprehensible than a inexperienced fool, white supremacist and admitted molester of women. Where rape victims can feel confident coming forward knowing that justice will be served in their cases, where women have the right to choose how they treat their bodies without the threat of legislation and ideology constantly hanging over them. I want to live in a world where birth control is as accessible as viagra and where these desires are not seen as a threat in some way to men.

I want to live in a society that acknowledges its problems, but rather than deal with a few bad men, one that looks itself in the mirror and actually does something about it. So that girls and women generations from now can walk down streets by themselves and not do a shoulder check because some unconscious part of them knows they’re not safe. Don’t you?