Red Hood

by Elana K. Arnold

“it is not your job to make boys happy.” You were already mad at yourself for saying yes, and the last thing you wanted was a lecture from Mémé, who always had some feminist axiom at the ready but didn’t seem to understand how the world really worked.

You basically accepted what he said, assuming he was embellishing a little, as guys sometimes do. This is something to contemplate later—why you believed Tucker, who you never really trusted, instead of Maggie, who had never given you a reason not to.

I don’t trust anything that bleeds for five days and doesn’t die. You heard some guys at school laughing at that line from an old movie. They thought it was hilarious.

He was the kind of boy who would rejoice over the birth of the lambs each spring, and cry over their slaughter each winter, and hum over the lamb chops on his plate that same night. He was a boy who took exactly what life gave him.

Before she was even in the ground, there were whispers about how she wasn’t a very good girl—not that she deserved what happened to her, of course, no one was saying that, but that if she hadn’t been out so late, way past curfew, and if she hadn’t been known to be so free and loose with boys, with men, then she would have been perfectly safe in her own bed that night.

“It’s not that we need more wolf hunters,” you say. “It’s that we need men to stop becoming wolves.”

“People used to believe that werewolves were created by witches. So, even way back in the fourteenth century, women were being blamed for men’s bad behavior.”

“Imagine how different our whole understanding of the world could be if women were reporting what had happened instead of men. History is recorded by those in charge, and in the Western world, that means almost exclusively by white men. That’s why I’m going to be a reporter.”

And it occurs to you how interesting that is—how people follow the stories that they are led to, and how quickly most people will fade away from a topic that they’re not repeatedly, consistently reminded about.

People aren’t pastries, divisible only into quantifiable sections. Maybe they are more like sourdough—indefinitely full of potential, able to share again and again, only to rise and grow and fill each space.

Crones were tortured and killed, the stories people told about them changed. Instead of being powerfully wise, old women in stories became powerfully evil.”

“But are people telling guys how to not harm girls? It’s one thing to tell a girl how not to get raped or harassed—is anyone telling the guys not to rape us or harass us?

“I’m tired of being quiet. I’m tired of keeping secrets. I’m tired of feeling ashamed for choices that other people make about me and for me. And I’m tired of being tired.”

Understanding is part of it. We need to understand what motivates and drives toxic masculinity. We must be willing to look for it and call it out whenever it appears, whether it’s presented as jokes or as something else. And we must act. When we see it, we must protect those who are its victims. We must tell the boys who hold these ideas—the carriers of this virus—to stop. To go elsewhere. To work on healing and educating themselves. This is how communities stay whole and safe. We all need each other. To see, to believe, to hold wrongdoers accountable. Women and girls are every bit as important and valuable as boys and men.