This was recited as a 6.5-minute monologue into my phone while driving on November 1, 2017, immediately after #MeToo started. Reading dozens of stories or rape, abuse, and harassment left me raw, infuriated, and clear-sighted. I made minor edits for clarity and used the punctuation I felt conveyed my expression, rather than making it strictly grammatical.
Patriarchy is a system that gives more power to men and allows men to control women's bodies, money, power, legislation, and so forth and so on at the expense of women. Patriarchy-- and its sibling misogyny-- is part of our culture. If you've grown up in our culture, you've participated in this system whether you like it or not. Even if you're a woman you've participated in it because it's part of our culture and how we understand the world, how we expect things to be. It takes quite a bit of uncomfortable work to realize that this is what's going on. It takes even more work to undo those patterns that we're accustomed to. I don't want every guy to give some mea culpa of "I did this, I did that," or --alternatively-- "I've never done anything to make a woman feel unsafe." I don't want to hear some list of "I thought she was into it but then she said she didn't want it," "I don't know, why is she lying?" Instead of all of that nonsense, I'd rather have men acknowledge that we live in a misogynistic patriarchy that (whether they like it or not) they have participated in-- to the detriment of half of our society. Because of patriarchy, women have not been believed, they haven't been listened to, they've been silenced when they've tried to speak up about it. They've been told: you're a slut anyway, you're probably just lying for attention -- all of these tired tropes are thrown at us in an effort to discredit the way that we've been describing our actual existence and our actual lives. Even though one woman isn't considered believable, now that a million women have spoken online, now we're credible; it's harder to ignore.
Since this is a society-wide issue, it is more than just looking at your own individual actions. I think it's incredibly important and instructive to look at your own actions and be more thoughtful in your actions moving forward, but it's not just what you do, it's also what you don't do. If you see someone being harassed, do you ignore it? If you hear your friends making disparaging comments about women, do you say anything? If you're watching my favorite movie, Beetlejuice, with your kid and you see Beetlejuice trying to kiss and grope Geena Davis' character while she is literally pulling away and saying no, do you just let that go as a normal 'some people are creepy' type thing, 'this is a thing that can happen,' or do you pause and say 'in 1989 when this movie came out, this was more normal in our society. But nowadays that's actually considered a sexual assault and it's really damaging and traumatizing to experience that. So while we think it's funny that he's doing it, it's actually really not funny when someone's doing it in real life.'? Do you comment on cultural things that are oppressive, or do you let those things slide by? So it's not only "what have I done?", because then it's too easy to say "I haven't done anything." You have to look at the culture that we live in because patriarchy is a cultural phenomenon. You have to do your part to change the culture that overwhelmingly benefits men. Part of that might be changing your own behavior, but as long as men are the ones who are the majority of syndicated journalists, op-ed writers, newspaper editors, publishers, translators, filmmakers, etc, as long as that power imbalance is in place unquestioned, then patriarchy is still going to have our society in its grasp.
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