Until We Are Good Enough: To Hell With Men
We need to take responsibility fast
‘Fuck men!’ said a friend the other day. We were having dinner, and my friends — all women — turned to apologise in case I had taken offence. I hadn’t. However, I think that only a couple of years ago I may have had felt insulted. I would have argued that most men were decent, that it wasn’t fair to blame us all for the wrongdoings of some. I don’t think this is good enough anymore.
In truth, I had been blind. I had been misguided by all the good men in my life, by all the good men I had been surrounded with. Admittedly, I’ve always mostly studied and worked with women, but the men I grew up with were good. The thought of physically or psychologically abusing women would have never crossed their minds. Shockingly, to them, to us, women happen to be human beings first.
I had always believed that this was reason for hope, that if the vast majority of the men in my life were good, the vast majority of men in the world should be too. Of course, I knew the horrors of sexism, but they seemed few and far away, an aberration that couldn’t hide the fact that we were doing better as a society. But it’s no longer good enough.
I recently wrote an article about generalisations, about how useful they are for us to process reality. Generalisations are…