“Now, Old Dinosaurs are wondering how to negotiate with an oncoming asteroid. Current or former Stupid Young Men are in a state of panic about their imminent introduction to the concept of “consequences,” leading to the question: what, precisely, is the age when men are expected to take responsibility for their behavior?
The answer, with any luck, is “The Digital One.”...
You haven’t learned the language — they didn’t offer it at your school — and you wish you knew how to ask basic questions, like where is the nearest station, and how much is that sandwich, and do you know the name of a good defense lawyer? You wish you knew how to translate simple ideas, like: I’m hungry, and I’m lonely, and my entire life I’ve let my fear of women’s rejection control my behavior and that fear seemed so overwhelming that it didn’t matter who got hurt as long as I didn’t have to feel it and everyone else seemed to agree and now I don’t know who to be or how to act, or I think there’s a train leaving soon and I might need to be on it...
How do we deal with suspecting what we suspect, with knowing what we know about our own past behavior? The very first thing we must do is to continue to know it — to actively know it, rather than filing it away in the spam folder of our collective consciousness. We must stay here, in this difficult place. We must look at what we have done and allowed to be done to others, without flinching or making excuses...
Men who believe they cannot change are already being shown up every day by the growing number of their fellow male humans who have changed, who are changing. We can rewrite the sexual script of humanity. We’ve done it before...
I promise you will survive our rage. We have lived in fear of yours for so long.“
This is so well written. For some reason it gave me a piece of hope; I’ve been spending the past few weeks just waiting for the other shoe to drop, waiting for the backlash, waiting for a slurry of op-eds about feminist witch hunts, and questioning whether this is a “celebrity trend”, and asking whether it’s “fair” to sink someone’s career, and generally giving people an out if they don’t want to deal with adjusting their perspectives on sexual assault. I guess I’m waiting for the status quo to have an equal-and-opposite reaction that leaves us where we started, minus like 7 guys in Hollywood (except, of course, they would still be around in their million dollar houses, they just wouldn’t be involved in making movies).
But for whatever reason, this essay made me feel like maybe the structure is changing, maybe (maybe) the cat is out of the bag and no one is going to be able to yank it back in.
Unfortunately, I think my feeling of hope comes from seeing a woman who still has a lot of energy for the emotional work of supporting confused men, and I’m really worried that it’s this kind of energy that’s going to be needed to maintain this revolution.
FB: This essay is magnificently written and structured “Nobody wants to be having this conversation, but we need to have it. Avoidance of this conversation has shaped our culture; cultures are defined not only by the stories they tell, but also by the ones they don’t. It’s the negative space that gives definition to the picture we have of how men and women ought to live together — and that picture, of course, is the work of a series of old masters.
We have built entire lives, families, and communities around the absence of this conversation. And yet here we are, having it anyway. So let’s deal with some common queries, the very first of which is: how do we handle what we know now about how women have been treated for so long?”
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