Ijeoma Oluo's Blog, page 2

The Women Who Saved Me

I’m 9 and my mom is trying to wrangle me into standing still. She is trying to make my wrap skirt look graceful over a pair of shorts. The shorts are there because, despite my mom’s best efforts, I cannot be trusted to keep this skirt tied throughout the day. As my mom carefully folds the length of brightly colored Nigerian fabric over my hips, I whine, “Do I really have to wear this to school today?”

My mom, a white lady from Kansas — still grieving her husband and my father, who went home to Nigeria and never came back — takes a deep breath and looks me in the eye and says, “It is Nigerian Independence Day and you are Nigerian.” She finishes my skirt and moves on to tying my headwrap.

__

I’m 12 and there’s a naked man asleep on my backpack. I’m going to be late for the bus. I’m going to miss school. Because this man — this man who has ruined so much of our lives — is passed out on our couch completely naked. He’s the first grown man I’ve ever seen naked in real life and I know even at 12 that this means that there is something shamefully wrong happening in our house. My backpack is under his naked ass.

I stand there, frozen, unsure what to do. I don’t want to wake my mom. I don’t want her to know that I’ve seen this. I don’t want her to realize that for some reason her life right now has her telling her sometimes-boyfriend/sometimes-dude-who-lives-in-our-detached-apartment-garage-when-his-roomates-kick-him-out that he needs to get his naked ass off of her daughter’s backpack so that she can go to school.

I call my friend Darnesha, desperately whispering my predicament over the kitchen phone.

“I’ll be right over,” she says.

She shows up, yanks the backpack out from under his ass like it’s something she does every Tuesday and hands it to me. She looks at him, shakes her head, and laughs at his snoring body.

“Loser.”

__

I’m 13 and I’m absolutely miserable. I’m a poor, nerdish, tall, chubby, black teenager in a white Seattle suburb. And I’m in middle school. I’m in the advanced program in school and I haven’t turned in a single assignment all quarter. My teachers are sending home worried letters. My mom is reading my diary and scouring the liner notes of my favorite CDs to see if there are clues to my depression in the lyrics.

And my art teacher has made a space for me.

She has given up her planning period to create a class for me and one other kid. It says “Independent Study” on my class schedule. He’s the gay kid and I’m the black kid and we’re both kids whose only friend is art.

She buys us all the colored pencils and paint we want. She brings in feathers and boxes and beads. She brings in an entire cow hide.

I make collages about how lonely I am. All my self portraits are painted in blue.

She looks at my collages and says, “The problem isn’t you. The problem is this place. You’re stuck in a very small world right now, because you’re a kid. But every year your world will get wider. And even though you are always going to be a rare bird, there are too many people in this world for you to not find your people one day. Just wait.”

I hold on to that until it comes true.

__

I’m 19 and I’m talking about a shitty dude again. We’ve been dating for a few weeks and he’s already taking up all the space in my brain with his manipulations.

As I talk to my friend about our problems, her older sister cuts me off.

“You’re more interesting than this,” she says.

“What?” I say, taken completely by surprise.

“I SAID: YOU. ARE. MORE. INTERESTING. THAN. THIS.”

I feel like I’ve been punched in the stomach so I decide not to hear her.

__

I’m turning 21 and I’m still with this shitty dude, and we have a baby. I haven’t left the house in weeks, but my family has flown into town for the holidays and my cousin is getting ready with me to celebrate my big 21st birthday.

My husband is stomping around the house. He’s complaining about the mess we’re making. He’s complaining about how I did the dishes. He’s asking why I have to go out and why we can’t just live clean lives like he wants us to. He asks if I should really be going out when I have a young son at home. He talks about the breastmilk I’ll have to throw in the trash if I drink too much.

“Stop it,” my cousin finally says, “Just stop.”

“Stop what?” my husband asks, incredulous, “Stop caring about my family?”

“Stop trying to ruin this for her,” my cousin says, looking him square in the eye, “I know what you’re doing. You are mad that she has friends and family and you don’t want her to have anyone but you. You’re trying to ruin her evening. You’re trying to make it so that it’s not worth it for her to have a life. It is your wife’s birthday and we are going to go have fun and she is going to go drink and you are not going to ruin it for her.”

__

I’m now a few days past 21 and I’m begging my husband to give me my son back. He’s ripped my son out of my arms because I went on a walk with my cousins and didn’t bring my cell phone with me. He didn’t know where I was. He didn’t know where his son was. Now our son has a wet diaper and this is my fault that I let him sit in a wet diaper for 45 minutes while I pushed him in his stroller. He says that I am a bad mom and I don’t deserve our son.

I do not like the look in his eye when he’s holding my baby and I beg him to give me my son back. I’m begging in front of my entire extended family, still here for their holiday visit. People are gently urging him to give my son back to me. He hands me the baby and storms out. I clutch my son to me and I don’t feel embarrassment or shame — nothing but relief.

My mom walks up to me, puts her hand on my shoulder and gently says, “Honey, I think you’ve tried hard enough. You can let go of this now.”

My cousins take me shopping for bedding and dishware and trash bags and everything else I need. I call my landlord and ask if he has a vacant apartment I can move into.

“One that your husband can’t get to?” He says immediately. I’ve never discussed my marriage with my landlord. I didn’t know how obvious it was.

“Yes.” I say.

He calls me back after a few minutes to tell me that he found me an apartment across town that I can afford. No deposit.

“I took the liberty of telling him that he’s not allowed to burn your stuff. That if your belongings aren’t boxed up and ready for your family to pick up, that he’ll be violating his lease and will be evicted. It’s not technically true, but he’s not going to look it up,” he says.

My cousins help me move my stuff in. I have a bed, a crib, a chair, some clothes, and dishes. I spend the entire night painting my son’s room blue with a border of brightly colored stars. I spend the next day painting the livingroom pink.

My great-grandmother comes by to take me for a walk.

“I was still pretty young when my husband died — in my fifties,” my great-grandmother says as we slowly walk around my apartment complex, “A lot of people told me, “You can marry again.””

“But for thirty years a man told me what I could and couldn’t do. For thirty years I lived with someone else’s anger,” she didn’t look at me, and her voice didn’t change from it’s grandmotherly, conversational tone, “And when he died I swore that I was never going to live like that again. And for over 40 years nobody has told me what to do. I’ve lived my own life.”

She patted me on the shoulder and we walked in silence for a while.

__

I’m 23 and I’m trying to explain to a friend about the bad night I’d had. How the man that I had broken up with, but had not gotten my key back from yet had shown up in my bedroom at 1am. How I’d said that I wanted him to leave but he didn’t. How I’d said that I didn’t want to have sex but we did.

“That’s rape,” she said.

“No, I wouldn’t call it that,” I started to protest, “It’s just — “

“No, Ijeoma,” she said firmly, with pain and shock in her eyes, “That is rape. You said no and he didn’t listen to you. That is rape.”

I pause and let my defenses of him die in my throat.

“Maybe, maybe it is,” I say.

__

I am 26 and I’m back in school. I’ve got a little boy in kindergarten and we have a tiny apartment and rats have eaten through all of the cupboards. We have no money, no car. I’m at school full time and I’m working from home in the evenings and I’m exhausted. I have no friends and no time but I’m doing well in classes, and my son is happy. I know that being older than most of the other students, and being a mom, I don’t really fit in. But that’s not all. I’m studying Political Science and in this very liberal and progressive group of students I feel very distinctly that there’s a reason why I’m not connecting to my classmates the way that others are. I feel distinctly that there’s a reason why so often the curriculum that is being taught makes me feel invisible. But everyone is saying the right things. Everyone is talking about fighting “the man” and fighting “the white supremacist patriarchy,” so…maybe it’s just me.

“This place is so racist,” my professor says to me in a thick French accent.

She’s a white professor from France, who specializes in African history and the impact of colonialism on countries once ruled by France. She’s on loan to our university because her husband has taken a job here. She has a son the same age as mine. She asked if maybe we could get the kids together or have some coffee. When we’re sipping our coffee and I ask how she is liking the Pacific Northwest, this is what she says to me.

“This place is so racist.”

“Hmm??” I say. This is not the response I’m expecting from a white, French woman.

“This whole place,” she continues with a look of disgust on her face, “Everyone here is racist. None of the white people here want anything to do with people of color. Everybody here looks down on the Indigenous people here. Everybody here clutches their purses around black men. All of the politicians act like people of color don’t exist. But nobody will admit it. Everybody is just pretending that they love black people and brown people and they don’t have any black or brown people in their lives. I’ve seen racism. I’ve seen firsthand how horrible French people are to black and brown people. But at least they will say it to your face. This here will drive you crazy.”

I nod my head and think to myself, “Ahh….yes…that’s what it is.”

__

I’m 32 and my 12 year old son is home from the hospital. I’m terrified and confused and I don’t know how to help him when I can’t seem to breathe. I’m calling doctors and specialists and I can’t find one who will work with him — or I find one who will work with him but they won’t take our insurance.

I have no resources and no help and I sit in my car in the driveway before entering the house gasping for breath saying to myself, “This isn’t about you. This is about him. Help him. You can fix you later.”

I wipe my tear-stained face and try to pat down the puffiness of my eyes and walk back into the house trying my best to look like the confident, dependable mom that my son needs.

My friend asks me to come get a drink with her. It would make her feel better, she says, to spend some time with me. I know that is not actually true. Her mother has just died unexpectedly and I can see my son’s battle bringing it all up in her. Her pain is very fresh and true. But she still tells me that I’m helping her as she asks me how I’m doing. And I cry and cry and rage and she doesn’t tell me, “It’s not about you.” She just cries too and buys me another drink and eventually we’re laughing about how ridiculous we must look, bawling in this grubby bar.

__

I’m 33 and I’m trying to write. I have this urgent need to say something. To make this about me for once. And I’m having a panic attack. I’m going to write about my life. I’m going to write about things that matter to me. I’m too old to start writing. This is too self-indulgent. I don’t have the right. I’m pretty sure I’m a horrible writer. I’m bawling as if with my words I’m committing a great crime. And yet, part of my brain is saying, “You have to do this. You have to say something.”

So I ask my brother if he’ll read what I wrote. He gives it to his girlfriend, who is a writer. She tells me that it’s really great. She asks if she can show it to her editor. My brother assures me that she’s not lying. That it’s really a great piece.

I say okay and then I hyperventilate for two days.

The piece goes live and the world doesn’t end. Some people really like it. Some people don’t. Some people tell me that I don’t have the right to talk about these things.

But I didn’t die, and I have more to say, so I keep writing.

I finish another piece and I’m convinced that it is the worst thing that anybody has ever written. And it doesn’t have an opening paragraph. I stare at the Word document for two days and I can’t come up with an opening paragraph. All the rest is done, but it kind of bursts onto the page like it’s interrupting something more interesting.

I ask my friends on Facebook, “Does anybody want to read this awful thing I wrote?”

A handful of women volunteer. I don’t know them well at all. They are busy writers with careers and families and still, they volunteer. They read through my piece and give gentle pointers. One woman finds the opening paragraph buried near the end of the piece. None of them tell me that it is the worst thing they’ve ever read.

I submit the piece to a website that another woman recommends. It’s accepted. It gets reprinted in TIME magazine. I feel like I’m getting away with something that I shouldn’t.

I have more words in my body and I keep writing them. I’m still convinced they are all trash. I’m still convinced that someone will say, “Have you noticed that Ijeoma is a horrible writer?” and the spell will be broken and everyone will realize that they’ve been tricked and I’ll never write again. With every piece I still ask, “Does anybody want to read this awful thing I wrote?” and the same women raise their hands.

Eventually I leave the “awful” part out.

Eventually I don’t have to ask anymore.

One day, after about a year and a half of writing publicly. After a year and a half of waiting for someone to tell me that they’ve all finally realized that I’m a shit writer and that it has been selfish of me to take up their time with my words, I start to think of what my friend’s sister said to me when I was 19.

It keeps popping into my head randomly — interrupting my obsession with the judgements of others that only I can hear.

“You’re more interesting than this.”

And I finally get it.

Want To Be A Part Of A New Project?

I’m working on a new project celebrating the ingenuity and creativity of Hustle in communities of color. I want to build a space to appreciate all of the ways in which we get by in a world that doesn’t want us to get by. I’m tired of POC being shamed for the moxie that would be lauded in white people. We are surviving in a world that actively works against us. And our resourcefulness in this world is one that we shouldn’t need to rely on so heavily, but it is also something that we should never be ashamed of. And the world needs to see how hard we work to survive.

I want you to be a part of this project! Were you a young kid of color who found ingenious ways to make some coin in elementary school? What were the cool systems of barter you used in community to meet your needs as a struggling parent? If you have a story of hustle that you want to share, here is the info you need to be a part:

Send your story idea/pitch to me at writewithijeoma@gmail.com. In the subject line, write “Hustle: (a quick title for your idea)”Write a brief summary of the hustle you’d like to include and a sentence or two of why you think it would be good for this project.Include a link to your previous work or a writing sample — NOTE: you do not have to be a published writer to participate. I only want a link or writing sample so that I can get a feel for your writing style.Your race or ethnicity is important to this pitch so please include it. I’m looking for stories of how POC use creativity to survive in a white supremacist society. So, if you are a white person who used a lot of creativity to survive, this doesn’t mean that your story doesn’t matter, it just means that it is not a fit for this particular project.Your story of hustle can’t be one that harms or exploits others. If you got by by being an asshole to other people, we aren’t going to celebrate that here.I’m self-funding this entire thing for now, and don’t currently have any plans to monetize this project. So, the measly $50 per selected essay I have to offer will come from my own pocket until this project is established enough for me to decide if I want to seek out additional funding. For now, it’s just to get these stories out there.Not every essay will be selected. Not everything will be a good fit for this particular project, and even if it all was a great fit — I don’t have that much money. If your pitch isn’t selected, this doesn’t mean that your writing or ideas are bad or that your story doesn’t deserve to be told.If you want to participate in editing or image work on this project, I’ll be putting out posts for people who want to put in some time (also, for a sadly small amount of pay) be a part of that process. Keep your eyes on my facebook page for updates.

I’m excited about this project and I hope you are too! If you have any questions or comments, leave them in comments below.

In The Midst Of #MeToo, What Type Of Man Do You Want To Be?

Who decides what men are? Is it decided by decree? By popular vote? Or is it decided by you, individual men?

A little while back I was talking with a man I knew about consent. He was commenting on an article I had shared earlier that day on men who get women drunk in the hopes that it will increase their chances of getting laid. He sat in my living room and told me that he took issue with the essay’s insistence that this behavior was predatory or abusive. I was a little surprised at how I could know someone for multiple years, and they could claim to be longtime fans of my work, and they still could not get why this sort of very common behavior wasn’t okay. As a woman who had experienced this sort of pressure and manipulation multiple times, it was clear to me, from how it made me feel, that it wasn’t okay. I decided to ask him a few questions.

“Hey, so if you know a dude at work and you think it’s cool and you want to hang out but he doesn’t really want to — he wants to go home, but you just keep buying him beers so he’ll stay — would you say that he really wants to hang out with you?”

“No,” he admitted, “But — ”

“Okay, and so if you kept buying him beers, knowing full well that if you did not buy him beers he would leave because otherwise he wouldn’t want to hang out with you, and at the end of the night he felt sick and angry and liked you even less than when you first asked him to hang out but he wasn’t into it, would you then call your buddies and brag about the awesome hang-out time you just had?”

“No,” he said, no longer trying to interject.

“And if you thought that was the only way you could get people to hang out with you, to get them drunk so that they wouldn’t say ‘no’ as strongly as they would otherwise, would you feel good about yourself as a person? Would you consider yourself a friend?”

It was clear by the look on his face that no, he would not, so I concluded my questions with one more.

“So, if you wouldn’t dream of coercing a dude against his will to hang out with you and still call it a ‘fun hang-out session,’ why would you coerce a woman to sleep with you and still call it consensual sex? Why don’t women get the same basic respect in sexual intimacy that you afford your bros while watching the game? Is that the type of man you want to be?”

When You Can’t Throw All Men Into The Ocean, What CAN You Do?

As I watch countless men (and sadly, quite a few women) jump to the defense of other men who have been outed for their coercive, demeaning, and abusive behavior towards women; as I watch them debate the fine points of whether or not a woman said no loud enough, whether her “I’m not comfortable” was strong enough, whether she was at fault for being mistreated by not yelling, or hitting, or running — I want to ask them all this question: Is this the type of man you want to be?

Because in this debate, in this long, harmful, regressive debate of how hard women should have to fight against a man who does not seek affirmative, enthusiastic consent in order to not be at fault for the ways in which men choose to ignore their bodily autonomy, men are showing me and women everywhere what type of men they want to be:

Men who do not care about what the women in their lives want.

Men who want the company of women but also do not care about whether or not those women enjoy their company.

Men who cajole, convince, guilt, and annoy women into having sex with them.

Why Should You Become An Establishment Member For $5 A Month?

Men who believe that victory lies not in the enthusiastic consent of their sexual partners, but in the tired, resigned, and often scared surrender of unwilling partners.

Men who believe that the bodies and wills of women are to be conquered.

Men who are fine with women entering into dates with them knowing that the only way they are going to get out of having sex with them is if they fight against it with everything they have.

Men who think that spending an evening feeling sexually frustrated over being aroused by a woman while not being able to have sex is the worst possible outcome for a sexual encounter.

Men who would settle for a woman leaving a sexual encounter with them feeling violated, hurt, and betrayed, than have no sexual encounter with that woman at all.

To Raise A Feminist Son, Talk To Him About Aziz Ansari

You aren’t just defending an individual in these debates. And you are not defending men as a whole. You are defending this behavior. You are fighting for its continuation, and the continuation of the harm that it does to countless women. You are fighting for your right to be the next man who chooses to ignore multiple verbal and nonverbal signals from a woman saying that she does not want to have sex with you. You are fighting for your right to be the next man who calls a car for a crying woman who you’ve made to feel degraded and used. You are fighting for your right to be the next man that she’s talking about when she tells her friends about how traumatic her evening was.

That’s the man you are fighting to be. That’s the type of man you are fighting for your sons, your cousins, your friends, and your son-in-law to be.

Is this really what you want? Are you willing to own that? To openly say it and still have any self-respect?

I hear so often from men who are astounded that we would ask for so much. Affirmative consent?? We’ve gone too far! We’ve lost our grip! We aren’t dealing in reality!

But who decides what men are? Who decides how men should act? Is it decided by decree? By popular vote? Or is it decided by you, individual men?

You are fighting for your right to be the next man that she’s talking about when she tells her friends about how traumatic her evening was.

Right now, in the midst of this rising discussion around sexual abuse and assault, you — men — have the chance to look it all right in the face. You have the chance to look at the type of men you have been. You have the chance to look at how you’ve been treating women and how you define your relationships with them. You have the chance to re-evaluate what you deem “victory” or “defeat.” You have the chance to determine for yourselves what you consider to be a healthy and satisfying sexual or romantic encounter.

You have the chance right now, while it’s all being brought up, to decide that the way you’ve been is not the way you want to be. You have the chance to decide that you do not want the women in your life to fear you, to survive you, to endure you, to resent you. You have the chance to decide that you do not want to dominate, to conquer, to overcome, to defeat the women you claim to love and respect. And you have the chance to decide that you no longer want to associate, through your words and actions, with men who do want to continue to be this type of man.

You get to decide that now. You get to hear about the way in which women have been harmed by men and decide to be a better man. You get to defend that notion of a man. You get to debate for this change. You get to fervently argue that you will no longer accept this old, abusive notion of manhood. You get to choose a better path.

Or you can keep arguing to uphold the way things are.

But know that with whichever way you decide, you are telling us, and yourself, what type of man you want to be.

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In The Midst Of #MeToo, What Type Of Man Do You Want To Be? was originally published in The Establishment on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Dear Al Franken: I’ll Miss You, But You Can’t Matter Anymore

Right now, many would have you be another reason why we wait. You would be another reason why we harbor abusers.

Dear Al,

I don’t know if you remember me, but I snapped this selfie of us a little over a year ago. I was at the airport, waiting to board a quick flight from Seattle to Portland, when some middle-aged soccer-dad-looking white dude started waving and pointing frantically at his wife.

“Look!” he tried to whisper as loudly as possible as he pantomimed at a row of chairs a few feet away. His wife looked up at what he was pointing at, then looked at her husband and shrugged, disinterested. In absolute desperation he turned to me, since I was…there and obviously eavesdropping.

“SERIOUSLY. LOOK OVER THERE!” He mouthed at me and I looked where he pointed and right across from me, about 10 feet away, there you were. Al Franken. In real life. I just about lost my shit.

You saw me staring at you like I might actually explode and you kindly waved me over. I don’t know what it looked like to you or anyone else there — a 6-foot-tall, fat, black, 35-year-old woman blubbering like a dork about how much she loves you and how she’d had copies of your books since she was 15 years old, and how you kept her laughing through a Political Science degree — but I didn’t care. I’ve been fortunate enough to meet a few celebrities in my life, but meeting you — even thinking about it today, it makes me feel a little starstruck.

When I finally got up the courage to ask for a picture, as we were waiting for our luggage to be unloaded after the flight, you smiled and said, “sure.” You looked like somebody’s really nice dad. As we took a picture you said, “I really don’t like Mike Pence.” It was such a simple, yet weird, and yet completely accurate thing to say, and I thought I would die from happiness. I immediately changed my profile picture to the selfie of us and basked in the jealousy of all my political nerd friends.

Al, I’m so very sad at you. Is that a thing? I mean, I’m mad at you too, but mostly, I’m very very very sad at you. How fucking stupid and selfish of you to ruin yourself for us like this. We really needed you.

Al, I’m so very sad at you.

When the first allegations against you came out and your name started popping up on social media, I started googling, while a voice inside me was repeating a prayer of, “no, no, no, no, no, no, no.” When I saw the picture of you groping a sleeping Leeann Tweeden with a smile on your face, I closed my laptop and just said, “Fuck.”

I wasn’t shocked. I’m a woman in America. I stopped being shocked at finding out that men I admired and respected were capable of being predators by the time I graduated from second grade. I was…embarrassed. I have spent much of my adult life around the comedy crowd. My brother is a former comedian, and some of my dear friends are comedians. Your behavior didn’t seem at all shocking for the world of comedy — a world where today if you were to have a beer with just about any comedy dude, he would eventually tell you that he doesn’t think that anything Louis CK did was a big deal. In a profession that is seething with its hatred of women, you would have been considered one of the good dudes. One of the safer dudes. But these dudes are assholes. Young, gross, assholes.

I look at the smile on your face as you grope a sleeping woman like you are a 13-year-old misbehaving boy and she’s a cardboard movie cutout and not an actual human being, but you aren’t 13 in that picture, you’re 56 years old. And she’s a person. A person whose body you are using for a shitty joke. You were a 56-year-old man gearing up to run for U.S. Senate, and you still felt perfectly safe treating a woman like shit.

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I’m not surprised you felt so safe doing it. I’m not surprised you also felt safe trying to kiss other women without permission, or grabbing their asses or boobs. I’m just deeply disappointed that you wanted to. I thought you’d be good enough to not want to.

I live in Seattle. Right now I’m surrounded by good liberal men who are lining up to say how much they believe women. Who are clamoring to express their outrage at the horrific stories they are reading as so many women say #metoo. But some of these men — a lot of them — are abusers themselves. A lot of them have taken advantage, forced kisses on unsuspecting women, groped women, exposed themselves to women, tried to manipulate women into having sex with them. While they are expressing their outrage, they are secretly hoping that their name won’t show up in a woman’s story. They have an opportunity right now to start to make things right. To come clean, take responsibility, and begin the work of growth and redemption. But they opt for just playing the role of a hero instead. They collect praise for saying all of the right things while kicking aside their victims.

Al, you could have done the right thing so many times. When you were condemning Trump for his abuses against women, you could have held yourself accountable as well. When you were offering support to women at the beginning of the Weinstein allegations and encouraging them to come forward, you could have decided to save your victims the pain of coming forward against you. The path to redemption then might have looked different than it does now. But you didn’t, and that really sucks. So now, it’s harder. Now, we all pay a little more.

When You Can’t Throw All Men Into The Ocean, What CAN You Do?

Because you were elected to represent the people of Minnesota, and in your power and fame you represent so much more. You are a part of the story of sexual abuse and assault in this country now. And as much as so many of my friends want to blame the “political operatives” of the right for your demise — you did this. You and your hubris and your feelings of entitlement to the bodies of women did this. You did this to yourself and us.

As the reports surfaced last night that you were planning to resign, I was trying to explain to my 10-year-old son why I was so sad about this. I explained that I had really admired you and had for most of my life, and I thought you were a really great Senator. But you had really mistreated some women, and you hadn’t been honest about it. And because we need Senators who respect women, and Senators who are honest and take responsibility for their wrongdoing, you had to leave. And now we all had to pay. We had to pay because as a society, we had been so permissive of the violation of women that even you — yes you, Al — thought that it was okay to treat women like objects.

My son asked, “So….is it a good thing that he’s leaving? Or bad?” And I answered, “There’s nothing good about any of this. But if he didn’t leave, it would be worse.”

Due Process Is Needed For Sexual Harassment Accusations — But For Whom?

When I was sexually abused, nobody believed me, because they preferred to believe that I was a liar than to believe a man was an abuser. When I was sexually harassed, people believed me, but they preferred to see me suffer in silence than to hold a man accountable. My humanity would need to wait for a more convenient time. So often women are told that when you look at the big picture, their humanity is just too inconvenient. When Donald Trump, a man with multiple sexual assault accusations against him — a man who admitted on tape to assaulting women — was elected president, tens of millions of Americans decided that the humanity of all of the women of America would have to wait until their guy wasn’t running for office.

And now Al, many in my own party are trying to convince me that the humanity of your victims needs to wait until a more convenient time. It needs to wait until we get the Senate back. It needs to wait until Trump is impeached. It needs to wait until Roy Moore is defeated. There will always be a reason to wait until a better time to do the right thing. And right now, many would have you be another reason why we wait. You would be another reason why Democrats don’t live their values. You would be another reason why we harbor abusers. And I would have never wanted that for you, but more importantly I do not want that for your victims.

You have an opportunity now to be a part of a new story, a story of justice and accountability and growth, and I’m glad that you are taking it.

Many in my own party are trying to convince me that the humanity of your victims needs to wait until a more convenient time.

You are not falling on your sword. You are not a martyr. You are not being heroic. And you are certainly not a victim. You are facing consequences for your actions. Consequences that hurt us all a lot. Not because they exist, but because you were able to rise all the way to U.S. Senate without facing them. So maybe this is what we, as a society and as a party that has always pretended to be better than this but never actually was, deserve. I’m sure you will not be the last hard loss on our path to redemption.

I don’t hate you. I haven’t deemed you trash and discarded you. I’m not getting rid of that picture of us. I’m not throwing out your books. But you can’t matter anymore. You can’t be a priority anymore. Your career and your power and what you could have been in the Senate cannot be the focus anymore. This last, long essay will be the last time I place you — and my feelings about you and my hopes for you — at the center of this. Because we’ve centered men like you for too long. There are women who can pick up where you left off. There are women who can go even further. And maybe now, now that we’ve shown that it might actually be possible to hold men accountable for their abuses against them, they will be more encouraged to do so.

I’m going to really miss who I thought you were, Al. And I really hope that one day you’ll be that person — I certainly think it’s possible, even probable. But right now, it’s time to see what women can be.

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Dear Al Franken: I’ll Miss You, But You Can’t Matter Anymore was originally published in The Establishment on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Due Process Is Needed For Sexual Harassment Accusations — But For Whom?

Due Process Is Needed For Sexual Harassment Accusations — But For Whom?

After USA Today asked me to write about not believing in due process, I wondered: How often are we being suckered into a side of a debate that we shouldn’t even be having?

The first time I remember being sexually harassed at work was at my second job ever, working at a bookstore. There was a man there who always tried to work sexual innuendo into every conversation we had. He’d find excuses to touch my back or arm, and try to give me massages in the breakroom. He was constantly winking at me, licking his lips. He would bring a gym bag to work, and sometimes, when we were in the breakroom together, he’d unpack the bag like he was organizing it. He’d talk to me about his workout routine, how important it was for him to stay in shape so he could maintain his sexual prowess. Then he’d bring out a bottle of KY Jelly, and he’d slowly and deliberately place it on the table. Staring at me.

Sometimes managers would be in the room, pretending not to hear. Occasionally a manager would shake their head at him and tsk tsk, like he was a naughty child. He was not a child. He was 32. I, on the other hand, was a child. I was 17.

I had spent most of yesterday thinking of this recent flood of public sexual harassment allegations against rich and powerful men. While so many talked of the downfall of these men, either in shock at their depravity or in sympathy for their careers now sidelined, I couldn’t stop thinking about how much of my professional life had been spent navigating gender discrimination and sexual harassment. I thought about all the women (and some men, and gender non-conforming folx) that these men harmed, who would never get in-depth profiles discussing the tragedy of what they lost, exploring what they could have been if not for these men and the system that enabled them and so many other abusers to torment their victims with such ease.

So You’ve Sexually Harassed Or Abused Someone: What Now?

But now, with only a small handful of high-profile men finally facing some repercussions after years of abuse, there is already an effort to slow down. Is this becoming a witch hunt? Is this becoming a sex panic? Are innocent men at risk of being wrongly accused? Today’s headlines seem to be either dominated by the men who’ve been flaunting their abuse of women for years, even decades, with explicit details of all of the horrors they were allowed to inflict upon women — or about the men who might be at risk for being “unfairly” accused. The men who are now “scared to even talk to women” lest they be accused of sexual harassment. And the women…the women are forgotten completely.

I was in the middle of such ruminations when I got an email from someone at USA Today, offering a writing assignment.

“The Editorial Board plans to publish a piece arguing that the reckoning on sexual harassment is healthy and overdue, but every case is different and the accused deserve due process. If you are interested, we would love to have you write the opposing view,” they said.

The opposing view. I furrowed my brow trying to understand what they were asking. An opposing view to whether a reckoning on sexual harassment was healthy and overdue? An opposing view on whether each case is different and the accused deserve due process? I replied with a request to discuss further via phone.

I’d never interacted with USA Today before, so while waiting, I looked up the representative who had contacted me. She appeared to be a low-level employee who was tasked with putting stories together. It was unusual, as I’d almost always been contacted by editors directly when they wanted me to write a piece.

Now, with only a small handful of high-profile men finally facing some repercussions after years of abuse, there is already an effort to slow down.

She called just a few minutes after I sent the email. I asked her to please give me more details about the editorial that they wanted me to rebut. “We are going to write about how we think it is a very good thing that women are going forward,” she began and basically repeated the same thing she had said in her email: individual cases...due process…etc. “Would you be willing to write the rebuttal to that?”

I paused for a second, thinking of how to best reply.

“No, I can’t write a rebuttal to that because of course I believe in due process,” I answered, deciding not to delve into the side discussion of how due process is a legal term that doesn’t usually apply to private employment, “But I’d be happy to write a response.”

I told her that I’d be happy to write about how the fixation on “due process” for these men was an attempt to re-center the concerns of men. How the question itself was absurd, because if there’s anything these stories show, it’s that these men in their years of open abuse were given more than just due process — but the women, many of whom had tried bringing this abuse to those in authority years before, were given no process at all. I said I’d love to write about the countless women whose careers were ended by coming forward with the abuse they faced, about the countless women whose careers were never able to get off of the ground because of abuse and gender discrimination. Due process. Women would love ANY process. They would love to even be heard.

The woman from USA Today said she would take my ideas to the editorial board and get back to me.

Due process. Women would love ANY process. They would love to even be heard.

While waiting for her to call back I thought about a coworker of mine from years back, when I worked in marketing. She was smart, hard-working, funny, stylish, and social. She had been at the company longer than I had, but I was promoted past her in a few years. I remember talking to one of my mentors, an older man, about my frustration over her seemingly stalled career.

“She’ll never get promoted because she’s all tits and ass,” he said. “All the guys talk about it. People can’t take her seriously. You, you prefer to be known for your brain. That’s why you get promoted.”

He said this in an almost fatherly way, like I was supposed to be proud. But I knew my friend showed up to work every day with the intention of being known for her brain, just like I did. I just had different fashion sense and social anxiety.

When You Can’t Throw All Men Into The Ocean, What CAN You Do?

A few months later, my mentor and I were traveling for a work conference. We’d had a long dinner at the hotel restaurant and I’d thoroughly enjoyed nerding out over marketing strategies with someone I looked up to. Suddenly, while I was in the middle of talking about an ad campaign, I felt a hand on my knee. My mentor was staring at me with a look I’d never seen before. I stopped speaking, stunned.

“What are you doing?” I asked.

He stared at me for a second longer and then removed his hand.

“I should call it a night,” he said, and left to his hotel room.

His words from a few weeks earlier rang through my head.

“You prefer to be known for your brain.”

I started to become excited about the opportunity to write this piece for USA Today. To shift the focus of this conversation on a large national platform back to the women who’ve been harmed. To be able to directly counter the efforts of so many news panels and op-eds to stop women from coming forward before too many men are held accountable for their actions.

I was excited to shift the focus of this conversation back to the women who’ve been harmed.

USA Today called me back about five minutes later.

“I ran your idea past them,” she said, “But what they really want is to write that they believe that it’s great that these women are coming forward but that they believe in due process, and they want you to write that you don’t. They want a piece that says that you don’t believe in due process and that if a few innocent men lose their jobs it’s worth it to protect women. Is that something you can do?”

I almost couldn’t get a reply out, I was stunned by how blatant their request was.

“No,” I said, “No, it’s not.”

We ended the call and I just sat frozen in my chair for a few minutes. Did this really just happen? Was I seriously just asked by the third largest paper in the nation to write their “feminazi” narrative to counter their “reasoned and compassionate” editorial? Was I just asked to be one of the excuses for why this whole “me too” moment needed to be shut down? Was I just asked to be their strawman?

I remembered one tech job I’d held that was particularly saturated in sexual harassment. Where engineers would literally high-five each other after propositioning a woman in an elevator. I remembered how the women who went to HR were forever labeled “humorless bitches” by the men who faced no further consequences for their actions than a quick meeting telling them to “cool it down.” I remember accepting lunch with a coworker only to discover that this had somehow meant that I’d accepted a date. At 1 p.m. on a Wednesday. Over Chipotle.

On Spacey, Weinstein, Milo, And The Weaponization Of Identity

On my last day there I had an exit interview with HR, as was standard process. The HR manager didn’t ask me if I’d faced any harassment or discrimination in my role, even though I personally knew of at least five female employees who had come to her with complaints of sexual harassment.

Instead, she looked at me and asked, “Do you think you deserved your last promotion? Or do you think you were given it because you are a black woman?”

When I left the meeting, a manager nervously walked up to me.

“Are you leaving because I sexually harassed you?” he asked.

I blinked for a moment. Stunned. I remembered the engineer who used to come by my cubicle almost every evening after almost all the other employees were gone, while I was working late. I was very pregnant at the time and had gotten the job while in early pregnancy, and enough managers had hinted that they were sure I was just working there to get insurance coverage and maternity leave. Once I’d duped the company out of three months of half pay while I bonded with my new baby, they were pretty sure I’d never be seen again, having scammed them all into paying for my reproduction. So I worked late every night, even though I was a single parent with a little boy at daycare waiting for me, in order to prove that I deserved to be taken seriously. And once 6:00 p.m. rolled around, this engineer would saunter over. One night, after telling me once again how he’d slept with enough women over the years to make Wilt Chamberlain jealous, he leaned in closer and peered down at my pregnant belly.

https://medium.com/media/5c0baf004f395b6ee42a6e3e7902f994/href

“So….” he asked with a sly pause, “Are you planning on delivering vaginally?”

So on my last day, I stared at this manager. A man I’d considered safe. An ally. Even a friend. A man who was now asking if I was leaving because he’d sexually harassed me.

And I answered, “Honestly, the way things are here, I didn’t realize that’s what you’d been doing this whole time.” And I tried not to cry.

But yesterday, I was asked to write that I do not believe in due process. I was asked to write that I believe we should just immediately fire all men accused of sexual harassment. I was asked to write that if a few men are harmed to protect women, it’s worth it. As if that’s a real threat. As if that’s a valid fear. As if, in this world, a power shift of that magnitude is even within the realm of possibility. As if a lack of due process wouldn’t first come for women, trans people, and people of color. As if due process isn’t the one thing so many men and their enablers in this society are working so hard to avoid.

Yesterday, I was asked to write that if a few men are harmed to protect women, it’s worth it. As if that’s a real threat.

And all I could say was, “No, no I can’t.” And even in that, in my financial ability to say no and risk burning that bridge, I’m one of the lucky ones.

USA Today ran their editorial last night. I found it this morning. At the bottom of the piece they have a note in italics:

“USA TODAY’s editorial opinions are decided by its Editorial Board, separate from the news staff. Most editorials are coupled with an opposing view — a unique USA TODAY feature.”

But so far, for this piece, they don’t seem to have an opposing view to publish. At least not the one they wanted. Without it, without their extreme feminist scapegoat to compare themselves to, their editorial looks anemic, lackluster. It looks as weak and pointless as it is, if not as manipulative as it attempted to be. This time, they failed.

But I can’t help but wonder how many have succeeded? How manipulated this broader, international conversation on sexual harassment has been in order to so quickly shift the conversation to protecting men from the consequences of their actions, before the names of the women they’ve harmed are even known? I can’t help but look at the profession I’ve chosen and love and wonder how much of it, like every other job I’ve found myself in since I was a teenager, is actively working to harm women and protect those who harm women?

How often are we manipulated into prioritizing the abuser over the abused? How often are we being suckered into a side of a debate that we shouldn’t even be having?

How often are we manipulated into prioritizing the abuser over the abused?

These last two days, I was able to see one of the ways that this manipulation works in a shockingly brazen display. I don’t know if it’s because they had so little respect for my work or my intellect, or for my integrity — or if they just thought that as a feminist I’d jump at the chance to flush “due process” down the toilet. How often is this happening in ways that we aren’t able to so easily see?

I hope to be able to continue to write in a way that focuses on those harmed by abuses of power and privilege. I hope to continue to write with integrity and honesty. And I hope that we all can try to read with the same focus and the same integrity. And that we can all work together to be more aware of how we are being manipulated and distracted and misrepresented and shamed into believing that we do not deserve to be centered in conversations on our oppression. That we do not deserve to be heard. That we do not deserve justice. That we do not deserve “due process.”

Due process is long overdue.

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Due Process Is Needed For Sexual Harassment Accusations — But For Whom? was originally published in The Establishment on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

So You’ve Sexually Harassed Or Abused Someone: What Now?

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There is a path forward, past denial and scandal and shame.

Are you a man who has been outed as a sexual harasser or abuser? Are you a man who is reading about all these rich and powerful men being brought down by their past transgressions and hoping and praying that the gross shit you did that violated the humanity or autonomy of another human being won’t be brought to light? Are you a man who is right now swearing that you’ve changed, that you are not the foolish man you once were and you are appalled by your past actions, but also you remember them differently, but also you’d like us all to be able to move forward?

Are you a man who has sexually harassed, abused, or assaulted someone and you do not want to be that person anymore? Are you a man who wants to genuinely move past the wrong you’ve done?

There is a path forward, past denial and scandal and shame. There is a path to genuinely being the better person that you want to be. I’m writing this sincerely. I’m writing this because sexual abuse and assault is so very common in our society that chances are, someone I know and love and respect is reading this and knowing that they are guilty. I’m writing this because if we don’t find a way forward, this will keep happening. Even if you never harass or abuse or assault another human being again: If you don’t try to make this right, this will keep happening and you will have helped to enable it.

When You Can’t Throw All Men Into The Ocean, What CAN You Do?

Are you ready to get started? Here are some first steps you can take.

1. Stop calling your victim(s) a liar.

Don’t slander them, don’t ignore them, don’t try to intimidate them. Don’t try to get your buddies to vouch for how you would absolutely never do anything like this. When you hurt someone, and then tell them to their face that you didn’t hurt them, you are hurting them all over again. Do not make your victim carry this alone.

2. Don’t wait to be accused.

If the person you harmed has not come forward publicly yet, do not just wait in terror for them to do so. Do not force them to take the risk to their reputations, careers, and peace of mind that victims take when they come forward with abuses against them. If you can first come forward to the person you abused in a way that would not add further harm to them, do so. And then be honest with others. If you harassed someone at work, go to your boss and to HR. Come clean with your community. Come clean with your sons.

An important note: Unless you have the permission of the person you harmed, you absolutely must protect their identity and any personal details of what happened that might cause further harm to them to hear or to have their community hear. Anything you do must place the wellbeing of the person you harmed as a top priority. A simple statement of, “I did this, and it was a violation of this person. It was not okay and I’m very sorry” is a good start.

Why Should You Become An Establishment Member For $5 A Month?

3. Pause before immediately saying what a better person you are now.

Oh, you just got called out for sexual harassment or abuse but you’re a better person now? How much better? Better because you aren’t harassing or abusing people anymore? Better because when you think about what you did you feel bad? How much better of a person were you before someone had to be brave enough to publicly discuss the pain you put them through? How much better of a person were you when they were carrying the pain of what you did every day but you got to pretend like it didn’t happen? You might be on the way to better, but you haven’t earned the right to make any public declarations of reform yet. Keep reading.

4. Understand exactly what you did.

If you know you did something wrong but part of you is still thinking, “this wasn’t really that big of a deal,” then you need to take some time and do some research. Research how sexual harassment impacts victims. Research rape culture and the lasting effects of sexual abuse and assault. Listen to survivors. Listen to them and respect their ability to interpret what happened to them and the impact that it has had on them. Believe them.

You might be on the way to better, but you haven’t earned the right to make any public declarations of reform yet.

5. Face the consequences.

Do you deserve to lose some friends? Yes. Do you deserve to lose some respect? Yes. Do you deserve to lose your job? Yes. Do you deserve to go to jail? If you assaulted someone — yeah. If your teenager was stealing from work and got fired for it, if you were a halfway decent dad you’d likely tell them to be glad for the opportunity to learn from their mistakes and to realize that actions have consequences. Well, what you did was worse, way worse — even from a business perspective. Even if it was “just” sexual harassment. You stole the productivity of the person you harassed, who from then on had to try to do their job and deal with your gross ass at the same time. You likely made anybody else who was aware of what you did feel unsafe, which contributed to low morale and higher turnover. You made your employer look bad. You spent your work hours playing grab-ass instead of doing your job. On top of just being very shitty and abusive you wasted company time and resources and you deserve to be fired for that.

If you ever want young men to believe in personal accountability you will take these consequences respectfully, gratefully even. Yes, it does indeed suck if you will now find it harder to feed your family but understand that YOU DID THAT. You, not your accuser, not your employer, not an “angry mob” on the internet. You did that. You did that to yourself and your family and your community. Apologize to them for what your actions have brought and know every day that you are not the victim.

If you don’t face any of these consequences, consider yourself a lucky beneficiary of a society that doesn’t give two fucks about sexual abuse and assault victims, and know that you did absolutely nothing to deserve such luck.

On Spacey, Weinstein, Milo, And The Weaponization Of Identity

6. Use your power for good.

Hey, remember how you felt so powerful and entitled that you were pretty sure you could sexually harass someone and nothing would happen to you? Remember how you were pretty sure that you were so well liked and respected that nobody would believe sexual assault accusations against you? The power that you had in order to be able to do this gross shit? It’s power you can use to actually stop this gross shit.

Hey, you hold the careers of other people in your hands and that makes it really easy for you to tell a woman that you’d ruin her if she spoke out about your sexual harassment? It’s literally just as easy to tell the dudes you work with that you’d ruin THEM if they sexually harassed women.

Man, people really like you and look up to you so you have the perfect shield for your past sexual abuses? You also have the perfect platform to start talking about your struggles with toxic masculinity and encouraging other men to do the same.

The power that you had in order to be able to do this gross shit? It’s power you can use to actually stop this gross shit.

Are you the dude who all the other dudes try to impress with their sexist jokes? You can be the dude who says, “hey man, that’s not cool.”

And if you for one minute used your power (and even if you’re an unemployed dude looking around his studio apartment saying “what power,” trust me, you have some over at least one person in your life) to harass, abuse, or assault someone and you are not now using that power to fight the harassment, abuse, or assault of others — you are not a man changed. You are a man with a debt that you must pay.

7. Do not expect forgiveness.

Yes, you may be doing this to be a better person, but it does not mean that others have to see you as a better person. The things we do cannot be undone. We must find other ways to get as close to making things right as we can, but if you’ve harmed someone, you have no right to expect to be seen by them or anyone else impacted by you actions as anyone other than the person who harmed someone. You have to live with what you did as long as they do.

This does not mean that you have to beg for forgiveness for all eternity. It means that you will have to find a way to move forward while also carrying that burden with you. It will remind you of why your work now to fight the culture that makes sexual abuse so prevalent is so important. It will remind you to not be complacent, to not abuse your power, to resist the lure of toxic masculinity. It will fuel your fire to reach out to other men you care about so that they, too, will not harm others and have to carry around the harm they caused forever.

When Forgiveness Isn’t A Virtue

And to some people — to a lot of people — you will likely be seen as a better person, because you will be a better person. But you will never have a right to expect or demand that.

We have a serious sexual abuse and assault problem in this society, and as a perpetrator of some of that abuse, you have an increased obligation to help fight. You are not alone. There are millions of men around the country looking at their past behavior and wondering what they can and should do about it. You can help them follow the right path by taking the first steps yourself. This is not easy. This open accountability for the wrongs you’ve done is very painful to go through. But it’s nothing compared to the pain you’ve caused your victim(s) or the harm your silence does to society by continuing to uphold a culture that makes this abuse so easy.

You can never erase this, but you can repair some of the damage done, and the damage your inaction is currently doing. You can be a part of the solution. And you have to be. You owe it to your victims. You owe it to us all.

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So You’ve Sexually Harassed Or Abused Someone: What Now? was originally published in The Establishment on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

When You Can’t Throw All Men Into The Ocean, What CAN You Do?

When You Can’t Throw All Men Into The Ocean And Start Over, What CAN You Do?Credit: Scott Ruzzene/Unsplash

This society is broken, abusive, patriarchal trash—and not just in little pockets or in dark alleys and frat parties.

I was just commenting a few weeks ago about how at least once a month a woman will reach out to me to let me know that a man I’ve worked with, socialized with, or even considered a friend, is an abuser. These aren’t tales of one incident, it’s almost always a pattern of abuse quietly shared by multiple women who are scared of being publicly known. Occasionally these are stories from women who made their accusations VERY publicly known—but they were quickly and violently shouted down by their own community and, almost immediately, the accusations were forgotten by everyone except for the women who had been abused and cast out.

These aren’t famous people. These abusers are local artists, activists, teachers. But many have found themselves in places of even minor prestige or power and used that power to abuse women—and keep them silent about it. Even in a group as small as two — say, in a marriage — certain men will use their power to abuse women (and many men and non-binary people as well, who are often silenced with the added shame of the “feminized” nature of sexual assault).

And along with all the ways in which women are constantly reminded of how unsafe and powerless they are when someone in their circle is revealed as an abuser, we now also have a spate of very high-profile and widely admired men who are being outed as serial abusers.

Weinstein, Tambor, Hoffman, Louis CK, Seagal, Piven, Spacey—maybe it would save time to just start keeping lists of men we admire (I’m aware that not many have admired Steven Seagal in a while, but the point stands) who aren’t sexual predators, and then slowly cross their names off as every news story breaks until we all explode from rage and frustration and disappointment.

Maybe it would save time to just start keeping lists of men we admire who AREN’T sexual predators.

This is, I’m 120% sure, just the tip of the iceberg. For every victim who takes the monumental risk to come forward and is actually heard, there are almost certainly countless others who can’t or aren’t.

I hear time and time again from men who want me to make it clear when talking about rape culture that not all men are rapists. I hear time and time again from men who want me to believe that it’s only a few sick monsters committing all the rapes, and also that maybe women are all lying and there are no rapes. These are often the same men who also try to say in the same breath that “boys will be boys” and that men can’t control their desires as long as women continue to stubbornly exist in their corporeal form.

Men See Themselves In Brock Turner — That’s Why They Don’t Condemn Him

And no, as a mother of two boys I cannot believe that every man is a sexual predator and that every little boy is destined to become one. I would not be able to get out of bed in the mornings. But as a survivor of multiple sexual assaults, as one of the 20% of all women in the U.S. who report being victims of sexual assault (and this is not including sexual harassment and other ways in which women are made to feel unsafe in their bodies), as a citizen of a country that elected a man who proudly admitted on tape to sexually assaulting women as president, I will say this: This society is doing everything it can to create rapists, to enable rapists, and to protect rapists.

This society is broken, abusive, patriarchal (and white supremacist, ableist, hetero-cisnormative) trash. Not just in little pockets. Not just in dark alleys and frat parties. It’s fucking rotten through and through and has been forabsofuckinglutelyever.

This society is doing everything it can to create rapists, to enable rapists, and to protect rapists.

I have not yet figured out how to drive all men into the sea. I’ve considered maybe taking a boat to the middle of the ocean to start shouting about the wage gap to see how many men would try to swim over to tell me that it doesn’t exist. But I’m very fond of a few men (including the two I gave birth to — nepotism, I know) and I also get really seasick on boats.

So if we can’t drive all men into the ocean and start over, do we just throw up our hands? Do we just excuse this rampant abuse as “locker-room talk” and “locker-room groping” and “locker-room rape” and “locker-room forced witnessing of masturbation”? Do we continue to insist that we do not have a toxic masculinity problem and these are just isolated cases of sick individuals who are abusing women and let everyone else off the hook?

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I absolutely cannot give all the answers. I do not have all the answers. Women more capable than I have died trying to find a way to fix this.

But I do know this: Every single sexual abuser is 100% responsible for their actions and there is nobody else to blame than the person who is choosing to violate another person.

And I also know this: This entire patriarchal society is responsible for every single sexual assault that occurs.

Both of these things are 100% true at the same time, and if we want to battle rape culture—if we want to finally end the brutality that so many women have faced for pretty much the entirety of history—we have to start addressing both of these realities at once.

Every single sexual abuser is 100% responsible for their actions and there is nobody else to blame than the person who is choosing to violate another person.

We have to face up to the fact that from the moment we get that sonogram and a doctor points to an imperceptible squiggly thing and says that it’s a penis, we start indoctrinating our assigned male children with massive amounts of toxic masculinity. We hand them toy guns and tell them not to cry and define their success through life by how well they can dominate others. We make countless movies where their only “romantic” goal is to find a way to get a woman who does not want them to sleep with them anyway. We show them image after image of men in nice suits, cigar in hand, a dead-eyed beauty draped on each arm and say, “This is what you should strive for. This is victory.”

But as a society, we don’t want to take responsibility for the abuse we create, enable, and strengthen. Because most of that responsibility lies with men and so many of them are very invested in keeping things the way they are — especially because they haven’t quite reached their life’s goal to be successful enough to be able to violate the consent of the most beautiful of the trophies we also know as women without consequence. Yes, everyone contributes to the patriarchy in some way — even women—but about half of us have had no say in the rules of the game, have never had a chance at winning, and have been given just as little say in whether or not we will play. For many cis, straight men, to fight the patriarchy is to risk discomfort. For the rest of us, it’s to risk your livelihood, your health, even your life.

Why Demanding That Rape Victims Report Assault Isn’t Helpful

As a society, we also don’t place responsibility on the individual men who are, even with their societal conditioning and enabling, still choosing with their own minds and bodies and patriarchal power to violate the consent of others in a myriad of ways. Approximately 3% of rape victims will ever see their rapist spend a day in jail. And while 1 in 5 female college students reports being the victim of sexual assault, we have a president who is actively working to make sure that the choice to rape a classmate will not endanger a rapist’s chance at graduation.

We instead place the entire responsibility for the damage done to women… on women. Soon-to-be women who wear spaghetti-strap tops to school, distracting young boys with their scandalous shoulders. Women who let a man buy her a steak dinner but then are rude enough to not suck his dick for dessert. Women who get drunk at parties. Women who go to parties. Women who wear bikinis. Women who wear burqas. Women who choose to sleep with other people who aren’t that dude. Women who slept with that dude once but then didn’t want to anymore.

We instead place the entire responsibility for the damage done to women… on women.

Every day I’m trying to counter the flood of messaging my sons are receiving from television, music, movies, books, friends, and our own government that says that they have a right to a woman’s body. Every day I’m trying to counter the flood of messaging that my sons are receiving that says that overcoming a woman’s objections is romantic. Every day I’m trying to counter the flood of messaging that tells them that their manhood is defined by how many women they can have sex with. Every day I remind them that they are so much kinder, better, and just… more than these violently aggressive yet mewling combinations of bravado and entitlement that they see depicted as the pinnacle of “manhood.” And every day I’m reminding them that they are responsible for their actions, and that if they disrespect women, abuse women, violate the consent of women — I will be one of the first people in line to make sure that they are held accountable.

And every day I don’t know if it’s enough. Every day it feels like it isn’t.

But I have to try because I have no other choice. We, as a society, have no other choice. And if you’ve had the luxury to think that this is not an issue that you need to address because you aren’t “one of those guys” I suggest you pay attention to how hard so many of us women are fighting to save ourselves, our sisters, our daughters, and our sons. And get to work.

Or get in the sea.

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When You Can’t Throw All Men Into The Ocean, What CAN You Do? was originally published in The Establishment on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.