Not All Men--But All Women

Not all men.

Except for the man who raised me, who cursed affirmative action whenever a woman beat him out for a position. When I was old enough to have children of my own, it occurred to me that my father, not having a clue what to do with his own daughters, might not have known what to do with a woman in the workplace who wasn’t his underling.

Not all men.

Except for the boys in elementary school who forced themselves on the girls. I was small but fast. Still, I carry a scar on my chin from one of the days when I wasn’t fast enough. Then there were guys in middle school who would run their hands down your back checking for a bra strap. If it was there, they’d snap it. If not, they would grope us and pass judgment on our undeveloped breasts.

In high school, we moved on to the ones who copped a feel in the crowded hall between classes, from the safety of anonymity. Or the guys who assumed that going out on a date with them meant they got play, and “how far” to go was solely up to them. The guys who responded to my “no” by spreading gossip about how easy I was. I, a child abuse survivor who was afraid to kiss a boy and refused to “go steady”, had a reputation I didn’t even know about until after I’d graduated.

Not all men.

Except for my middle-aged supervisor who sexually harassed me daily. The flagrant abuse of his position went on for six months. When I took it to our superiors, I was told that they’d pay me a severance to quit instead, because he had more experience. It was then I realized I wasn’t the first and was not likely to be the last. I was nineteen.

Not all men.

Except the men nearing their thirties who kept asking me out at the tender age of seventeen. This included a man who, when he learned my age, didn’t speak to me for months, only to call me on my eighteenth birthday. Or my bank coworker, who asked me to accompany him to the company Christmas party, then gave me lingerie as a gift just over a week later as an enticement to go out with him again—Or the client who asked me out and, over dinner on our first date, admitted he’d been stalking me for a year. He’d volunteered to bring in his girlfriend’s business deposits multiple times a week just to have me wait on him.

Then later, the funny machinists at a later job, in another state, who played grab-ass when they got bored, assaulting us with metal rods that left welts on our backs, asses, and legs. Or the owner of that company who paid for everyone’s schooling—Everyone except me, because he already had put a woman through school to run the office and he didn’t want to pay for a woman to become a machinist, just the guys, every one of which was encouraged to pick up the machining skill of their choice on the company dime.

Not all men.

Except the ones online who send you unsolicited dick pics, take your friendliness as consent to demand a more intimate relationship, or harass you, even over multiple accounts as they break the Terms of Service and get suspended.

Not all men.

Of course, it’s not all men— Except when it is.

The greatest issue isn’t that some men harass women. The problem is that harassment of all kinds is so prevalent and pernicious that people refuse to call it predation. It’s “shooting your shot," “miscommunication” or “misreading signals.”

When I posted a thread largely consisting of these anecdotal incidents from my own life, the response was swift, overwhelming, and disheartening. It was quickly apparent that my experiences weren’t unique. To be honest, I’ve had less horror in even my most traumatic sexual assault than too many others. Women and men flooded the thread with their own experiences ranging from uncomfortable to agonizing.

One retweet contained the quotation:       

“We treat sexual violence like a thing that only happens to women once if they’re really unlucky. But if you ask for a woman’s life history with abuse, it often looks exactly like this.”

~Dr. Nicole Bedera

Not all men.

Except those who called me an "outlier" and chose to dismiss me instead of listening. Some suggested that I was “attractive as a victim” because of my personality. It was argued that I was responsible for what happened to me because of my choices, despite some of those happening before I was old enough to understand, let alone make a choice about it.

These arguments ignored the fact that most of my (related) experiences of misogyny were at school and in the workplace. Worse, they neglected the fact that studies, statistics, and ethics all agree on one thing. Victims do not cause sexual assault or harassment. Perpetrators of sexual assault and harassment, cause assault and harassment. Most of all, those people ignored the hundreds of women and men in the thread sharing their own experiences of the same and the nearly ten thousand who shared it because it spoke to them.

The fact that arguments of “not all men” most ignore, is that as long as women are considered a commodity, many men will invalidate some women for being sexually attractive, others for failing to be attractive enough, and we will continue to have to fight for basic bodily autonomy.

But not all men.

I didn’t write the thread to highlight my trauma. I don’t feel brave for sharing the abuse I’ve endured. What I’m ashamed of, what keeps me up at night, is the ridiculous percentage of my life spent trying to be what those men said I had to be; to be a good or right or correct iteration of a woman.

I despise myself sometimes for the indignities that I allowed myself to suffer to “get along”. I see some women even now, so desperate to feel equal that they’re willing to walk all over other people to do so and defend behavior as normal which we should be far beyond as a society and must demand better than.

Not all men.

No selfish choice made by predatory men in this society is about women—unless we’re the victims, at which time the full responsibility and burden become ours to carry.

This is the background noise for every choice a woman makes, whether consciously aware of it or not. Will we be safe? Who do we need to please, to placate, to appeal to? From fast food workers to boardrooms, a unifying thread that binds us all is one indelible choice. How much of myself can I allow to be seen, safely?

That choice defines whether we work ‘in’ the system or actively rebel against it, and either way, we will be punished for it. It simply becomes a matter of which punishment we think we can better withstand.

We know it’s not all men. Except that it is, essentially, as long as no one speaks up behind their closed doors or around their cigars and pints and camaraderie. No, not all men. It doesn’t take “all men” to force women into eternal vigilance. It just has to be enough to keep us cautious, expending too much energy on safety and survival to have any left to fight for men in power to finally treat women like people.

On Bluesky.social, a social media platform that’s still in beta and has only two million users worldwide, a user posted:

“Interested in your thoughts on this… Every 18-30-year-old woman should be required to have testosterone applied for one week to understand what it’s like to have a dude’s sex drive. I expect they have absolutely no idea the level of self-control most men actually have.”

Thanks to all the men who didn’t sexually assault or rape anyone today. Good work. Never mind your buddy who’s rating teen girls’ bodies or being gross online, the coworker who harasses your colleagues, or your boss who promotes everyone but the woman off his team because he “likes to see her in the office.”

Sure, not all men…

But damn near all women, and that should count for something.

Liz.