Pas tous les hommes

You want to organize men. You don’t have to search for issues. The issues are part of the fabric of your everyday lives.

From Andrea Dworkin’s speech at the Midwest Regional Conference of the National Organization for Changing Men, 1983 in St Paul, Minnesota, printed in Letters from a War Zone, titled “I want a Twenty-Four-Hour Truce During Which There Is No Rape”

Nothing here is groundbreaking, but working with the door open invites us to think aloud. My experience isn’t unique, but sharing it hopefully invites introspection, sharing, and self-correction on the parts of my fellow men.

My paternal aunt passed away in Eldersburg, MD, in December 2014. She was born in 1937, dropped out of high school at sixteen, and soon after married (unofficially per my father’s memory) George, a man 14-ish years her senior. She gave birth to seven children before passing away at 77. She was my Aunt Sally, who as a child, I remember my father loving in a tragic way. Her obituary states that she was married only 54 years, as opposed to memory’s 61. Throughout my childhood, much of this was understated through transparency. Sally was the distant, beloved aunt, and her husband was a distasteful, untrusted, and nebulous man.

Then, in late Fall 2015, and I was a college sophomore when Ambra Gutierrez’s allegations against Harvey Weinstein first surfaced. I was naive, and shocked to learn that one of four women at my university experienced sexual assault. I shared my fresh shock over a family dinner later that week. I misunderstood my mother’s seeming disinterest, and I lacked the self-awareness to realize her apathy reflected she’d long internalized this truth.

That year I first heard about the Pikes’ “rape dungeon”^[1] from friends who rushed.^[2] I lived with a Pike, who feebly protested before falling back to describing “what happens when people drink.”

In Spring 2016, I’m studying in Lyon and following a Tinder date, find myself among a group of intersectional feminists from Edinburgh. In Austin, it was enough to simply be better than the rest of the Texas. The bar was subterranean. These new friends pushed me to grow past my radical feminist foundations, and I’m fortunate to have known them.

I’ve finished the semester abroad, it’s a midsummer Wednesday, and I’m driving back from team lunch with a few colleagues. One-the man who hired me and the two women in the car-is making a case that women’s place is in homemaking and not the professional workforce.

That Winter, a close friend and housemate proudly shared that following our program’s winter formal, he’d slept with a woman he’d crushed after for years. They’d been drinking, but he remembered it proudly and looked forward to a budding relationship. I later learn that she never spoke to him after that night.

It’s election season, I’m a rocking a Bernie tee and listening to Chapo Traphouse, and our third housemate espouses that rape culture, patriarchy, police violence, and class war must be commonly addressed by a worker revolution. It’s cool to disdain identity politics: Hillary ain’t an abuela.^[3]

Despite accusations of raping a 13-year-old ’94, Donald Trump wins the presidential election. Allegations continually emerge throughout, and after, his presidency.

It’s Fall 2017, and I was a senior when accusations against Weinstein were revitalized by Alyssa Milano. My younger brother would soon start his degree at the University of Houston, and I remember my mother’s discomfort with “yes, all men.” When my mother was a child, her grandmother volunteered at Amarillo’s rape crisis center. In my own childhood, they were role models of applied progressive politics, contrasting their regressive home state. Despite her lived experience and assertive politics, she worried for the potential of undue suspicion levied against her male children.

I moved to Leuven, Belgium, in February 2018. One of my new friends has started listening to Jordan Petersen. A regular at our internal student game night proudly declares that marital rape does not exist.^[4]

That same year, my mentor Bob Jensen retires from UT Austin. I’d known him from childhood, and his adult conversations on difficult and uncomfortable topics heavily shaped my views on gender and sexuality. A gap had grown between us as his distrust for what he called “transgender ideology” became a bullish disdain. With increasing difficulty I continued to engage him on pornography and patriarchy. I miss Bob, but remind myself that problematic and poorly-aged role models are best left in the past.^[5]

The pandemic hits the US in March 2020, and reconnecting with old friends sends me down forgotten roads. Weinstein is sentenced to 23 years’ prison.

Throughout 2020 I gathered receipts from old and deleted accounts, and in late Winter 2021 contacted a school district near my high school to report their employee Jeremy Christopher Cameron, a middle school orchestra teacher who attempted to groom me and a cohort of other high school aged boys. An investigation opens and he leaves the district before it completes. I’m was fortunate to have only ever messaged with him.

That Summer, Virgil Texas leaves Chapo following grooming accusations.

In December 2022, Andrew and Tristan Tate are arrested. In June 2023, they’re charged with—reductively—human trafficking and rape.

That Summer of 2023 I learn that someone dear to me was abused by a family member as a child. Her family strove to maintain appearances, protecting an abuser and silencing victims. In trying to understand, I learn to what degree these so-frequent cycles of abuse were unseen in my own extended and closer family.

It’s April 2024, and Weinstein’s conviction is overturned by New York’s Court of Appeals.

Two weeks ago, I conducted a whiteboarding exercise with a product design interviewee. Upon learning that motor vehicle crashes are the leading cause of fatalities for American teens, and furthermore that the fatality rate of young men ages 16-19 is three times that of young women in the same cohort,^[6] the candidate joked that a treatment was self-evident. Problems disproportionately caused by men beget solutions uniquely tailored to men.^[7]

Now in Fall 2024, we’re tracking the Mazan trial. Nine^[8] of Dominique Pelicot’s fifty co-rapists claim that despite Gisèle’s silence and lack of visible consent, they were duped. Dommage. While some may claim innocence, others blithely own up to their offenses while claiming they misunderstood their actions. This defense predicates on their entitlement to the charity and empathy of both their fellow men and larger community.

I return to old conversations with my mother. Some of these men claimed to have thought that Gisèle consented, purportedly having trusted Dominique to communicate her consent. One thought she was dead. The town’s mayor minimized the crimes against her. Each use the plausibility of their perspective—and their entitlement to relatability—to ignore the severity of her abuse.

I’m unsure whether it’s worse for her rapists to realize the extent of their crimes. If they realize and live with themselves, they’ve discounted her pain and believe that if not deserving grace, they deserve to move on. A lack of realization may be more honest—they aren’t pretending that they’re redeemable.

I’m further unsure to what degree trying to understand these men’s psyches is productive. Refusing to attempt understanding, however, prevents us from self-reflection. If the scummiest among us believe that their explanations are worthwhile, we must ask ourselves how they feel entitled to our empathy and understanding. If the worst men anticipate understanding from common men—by claiming “oh, I thought she consented”—and we comply, we’re culpable. We benefit abusers by prioritizing explanation over outcome.

“Yes, all men” is not misandrist; it’s cautionary.^[9] We are responsible as fathers, brothers, friends, and men, to reject our gender’s monopoly on violence and to smother any attempts at its weaponization. To address today’s lived reality, we must ostracize and exile the abusers among us. To make a better tomorrow, we must proactively teach the next generation that within Patriarchy, every man is capable of committing and defending rape and abuse, and so we must do better. Within Patriarchy, this behavior is not an aberration, and something we must prepare and discourage.

Yes, all men are guilty—guilty of being the kind of men who support the worst among ourselves.