Dear Men of America,
You have a big job ahead of you. We all do, but you are in a place to make a difference much more easily than the rest of us. You can blend more easily than we can.
Tuesday night, the country elected someone to the presidency who ran on a platform of bigotry and hatred. Now, you may not have voted for him, specifically. Maybe you voted Libertarian, maybe Green, maybe Democratic, maybe some other, smaller third party. It’s inconsequential right now. The country, in the states where it mattered most, looked at this particular individual and saw someone they liked- someone who has multiple women coming forward with stories of sexual assault, someone who incited physical violence against minorities at his campaign rallies, someone who doesn’t have the self-restraint to handle his own twitter account, someone who claims to support independently owned businesses but time and time again ripped them off to build his real estate business.
We need you to visibly stand up and help protect those that might not be able to protect themselves. We need you to be the good examples for our children. We need you to be a good example for other men as well. If his bad excuse for sexual assault really is just “locker room talk,” we need you to speak against it. You have access to places we don’t- closed door board rooms where someone might make a comment about the (female) presenter’s lack of smile, a gym where someone is talking lewdly about the figure of the girl on the treadmill, or hearing them using "gay" as an insult. You might be outside on a smoke break and your buddy might whistle at a woman heading home after a long day at work. A bar, and you see someone hitting on a girl who is very much so not interested, and then insult her based on her race if he gets turned down.
Especially now, women, POC, the LGBT+ community, and immigrants are on a higher alert than usual for people who don’t respect their basic humanity, people who only see women as a prize to be won, and people who aren't straight as less than human. Newsflash: we’re not. We are people beyond being sisters, daughters, mothers, wives, LGBT+, immigrants, POC. We have our own ambitions, thoughts, feelings, likes, and dislikes. We have our own problems that you've never had to experience. I’ve heard many times that women are difficult to understand. We’re not- we’ve had to learn to walk the line between standing up for ourselves without being too aggressive. We’ve spent years learning to doublespeak to save ourselves from the nice guy who just wants to buy us a drink, but really wants to get us drunk enough to not be able to say no, or decode the body language of the guy on the street who we couldn't tell what he was thinking about our presence. We had the roles of peacemaker in conflict, interpreter of body language, of the one willing to compromise to save face thrust upon us. We didn’t ask for it, and sometimes we don’t even realize how often we slip into our roles.
But perhaps, the most important job ahead of you is the most easily overlooked: the children. Kids learn the patterns of the world by watching and imitating. All around us are bad examples of gender relations, and they begin manifesting early on in childhood. I’ve seen onesies for girls that ask “does this make me look fat?” hanging next to boys onesies proclaiming them to be a “ladies man.” I’ve babysat little boys who had never been told that no, you can’t pull her hair because she’s your friend, you especially can’t pull her hair if she is your friend. In third grade, a male classmate of mine had his friends hold me down under the monkey bars during recess so he could try to kiss me. I punched him in the nose and was sent to the principal’s office for it. But his behavior didn’t stop- he never bothered me again, but I saw his friends egg him on when he bothered the other girls in the class. And I was too scared he would try again to intervene. Hearing "gay" thrown around as an insult made me incredibly apprehensive about coming out as on the ace spectrum- it was classified as a mental disorder until recently. But seeing myself as different, and different as "bad" was alienating for younger me.
Teach the children that this kind of behavior is not okay. But don’t just tell them- make sure you show them. Give their mothers, their sisters, the women in their lives the same respect you would give any other man. Hear them when they talk about how they feel, validate their gut judgements. Don’t interrupt them when they’re speaking. Encourage them if they show an interest beyond what’s considered “normal” for girls to be interested in. Make sure your teenagers know it’s not cool to pull bra straps and smack asses, and a drunk girl can’t give consent. That "faggot" is an insult because while witches were burned at the stake, homosexuals were thrown in with the kindling, and it's never a word that's okay to use. Don’t speak over them if you disagree, not every disagreement is an argument to be won. Make sure they know that no one is better than they are because of the color of their skin, and that their life experience is not the same as everyone else's.That it’s an irreparable breaking of trust if they show anyone something meant for their eyes only. Don’t just tell them to respect girls. That’s too vague to mean anything. Show them what that respect means. If they see the kind of rhetoric about women’s minds, bodies, and rights as normal, we have failed them. If they learn that it's okay to put other people down for their race or how they identify, we have failed them.
But I believe that it is not impossible to teach them to be a better future. We just happen to need you to help influence it.
