Good men: we prefer the bear because you weren’t there.
A post in which I piss off men while acknowledging some truths.
Re the whole bear thing. CW sexual assault. I’m going to preemptively apologize for my grammar. As I write this, I have an 80lbs dog on me and I refuse to move for want of a keyboard.
Let’s talk about the bear.
I’m a victim of a lot of different kinds of abuse, a lot of it creative and deeply depraved. Stuff George RR Martin wouldn’t write. I still need surgeries to repair damage that was done to my body
If you gave me the choice of who I’d rather encounter in a vulnerable situation in the middle of the woods: I’d pick the bear.
It sucks, because I truly want give everyone the chance to be their best.
It all comes from my history of violence towards me. It’s simply not about men, it’s about what I know they’re capable of doing to me.
That knowing is born of hard experience, not something that is intuitively built into men. Which is to say, a lot of guys are hearing “men bad” in this when they should be fully understanding that this sort of hard experience is so common amongst women as to be a nigh universal.
Men. You aren’t bad. But you weren’t there. The good guys, the ones who wouldn’t hurt me, you simply weren’t there in the locker rooms and cars and living rooms. You didn’t stop them from passing me around as a child.
Your goodness has never shown itself to me with the force and voracity that the violence has. And I know, full well, you all know that violence because you fear it from each other too.
Simple put, you do not do your good as loudly, creatively, or honestly as the men who do the violence. You’ve prided yourself on being better rather than making things better. Your rebellions against the patriarchal attitudes of society have been personal and quiet growth on your part.
You have given me, and all other women, the *experience* that the good guys don’t show up until the damage is done. Amongst your ranks the most likely to act in my favor are those very special parasitic men who believe helping to heal my trauma will cause me to latch onto them sexually. They get to swoop in and play doctor to “earn” me. Their goodness relies on the badness continuing to exist.
I know there are good men out there. I know so many of them. But even those men weren’t there to stop what happened to me. So from my perspective, I cannot rely on the idea that you exist to risk it again.
Until y’all are so proactively good in private and public, until this world changes how it approaches women, this conversation will remain the same no matter how good you are. And you can sit privately and seethe about how you’re a good man and don’t deserve to be lumped in with the “rest,” but the rest showed up to act on their beliefs. You didn’t.
Think on that.
I pledge to do more. To be louder about the garbage in our society. To clean it up when I see it. And to be there for each and every person hurt, assaulted, oppressed, and more - I will believe you, I will unequivocally support you, and I will not try to ever silence you, but rather amplify your voice, and in fact be your voice when you can’t speak. I feel completely unworthy to do so, but I will do it. Each and every one of you deserve so much better, and all I can do is say I’m sorry I’m a part of the demographic that is AMAB, because they who have perpetrated these things are an embarrassment to me.
This is one of the truest and most important things I have ever read. Thank you, thank you for writing it.