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Women Are Not the Enemy
🕑 Added 2023-09-05 06:57:46 +0000 UTCAs a child, I’d often hear stories about Mozambique’s landmines because the country is right on my doorstep. Photographs of blown-off legs and bloody torsos made the news all the time. The landscape was covered in them, so a walk through Sofala wasn’t like a walk on Muizenberg beach. The worst Muizies will give you are a few jellyfish. Sofala, on the other hand, could leave you with a lifelong disability. There were, of course, sections of the area that were safe, but the landmines were buried. You had no way of knowing when you might step on one.
This morning, @Sub-Not-Doormat posted this status:
"All men… yes, I said ALL… men are a danger to women. Not all of them prove it to be the case, but all of them are suspects."
Women who live in thriving rape cultures like mine are walking through another kind of Sofala. We don’t know who’s a threat and who is not. All we know is that we’ve been traumatised many times, and we might be traumatised again. The “who” of it is a mystery, so no matter how pleasant the scenery is, we’re going to feel anxious around men we don’t know.
This is not “hating men” any more than feeling anxious in landmine territory is hating Mozambique. I can assure you that Paradise Island is as exquisite as any Mediterranean island, but in the Eighties, you braced for an explosion nonetheless.
And so do we. No matter how beautiful you seem, we’ve got to tread carefully.
Men often find this inconvenient. They say it’s unjust to be distrusted when they haven’t done anything wrong. Sometimes they even want us to stop taking precautions so that they can have easier dating experiences.
Do you know what’s inconvenient? Rape. Sexual harassment. Hell, even those infernal safety precautions are exhausting. None of us want to bother with them, but experience has taught us that we have no other choice. We live in a landmine-ridden country, and blaming us isn't going to take the hazard away.
If I had to ask for anything from men, it would be understanding. Rather than pit yourself against us, join us. Become allies. Gain an understanding of our experiences. Choose to change rape culture instead of trying to change us. Stop blaming us for the landmines. We didn’t put them there. We are not the enemy. We just live in a war-ravaged world.
Comments
accidental sub
The thing people keep getting wrong is in thinking she's saying all men are dangerous. She's saying all men are a threat. It's a very different claim. All it explains is that we can't know. We have to be careful with all strangers who are men until they earn our trust. And the only reason we ever point that out is when the bad ones complain about our safety precautions. If they didn't, this post would never have happened. So it goes as such: Dudebro complains that a woman arranged a safe call on his date. Women explain that those safe calls are important because we don't know who the bad guys are. Dudebro expresses resentment about the fact that women treat him as though he's a bad guy. Women have explained this 5 million times and are now using shorthand because they are tired. Regular man reads shorthand and thinks woman meant "all men." We only explain why we need to be safe with "all men" because some men resent us for it.
This person's name is too hard to pronounce
This is so tricky. Getting out of the patriarchy requires a lot of persistent feminism. I imagine it can be exhausting battling against “nice guys” and other men who pretend they are on the feminism side, when they’re really diluting the message and insisting their pseudo-feminism is right and your actual feminism is not. I understand the woman who wrote that quote, I really think I do. But phrasing it as “all men” is not helpful and very clickbaity. It’s the stuff that platforms promote because it generates engagement. Yes, she rightfully feels threatened by all men. Yes, men (as a group) are dangerous to her. But every single man (individually) is not a danger to her, and I think it’s reasonable for some men to feel attacked by blanket “all men” wordings. I personally developed a lot of unjustified self-hate in my early life, in large part because of such blanket statements. Maybe it helped me become a better ally now, but I still don’t think anyone deserves to hate themselves.
