„I would never do such things.“
When Gisele Pelicot was firstly coming up in the news, a friend of mine told me, rather than reading about all these details coming up about her husband raping her, having multiple men rape her, drugging her, he chose to ignore the countless videos, articles and news about the case. „I already knew by the headlines, this wasn’t something I wanted to see.“
I’ve been thinking a lot lately about social numbness, from overstimulation by social media. We’ve adapted to reading about hundreds of people being killed, women put into blenders by their husbands or burned to death all while having our first coffee of the day.
This collective overstimulation and with it the subsequent deafness towards humans killing each other over what is marketed as political views, but rather seems to be a front for greed and power is nothing new - still equally frustrating.
I remember my mother in tears reading about social injustices. For me seeing thousands of people left to homelessness without access to medical care just adds to my numbness. I feel emotionally detached from the world around me. As if the sheer amount of sorrows in a way make them unexperienceable. Maybe we’ve blasted our brains with news about horrifying crimes against humanity, mixed with tutorials, get ready with mes and ootds. Comedy and what seems to be culture mixed with graphic images and storylines mushed up together on our phones. And all this while we go about our day, with economies changing drastically, middle wage classes being obliterated and income and housing disproportionately declining and rising.
Our own problems seem un-complainable when being blasted with the global pain and grief of millions of people. Split into to spheres: Drastic and big outside problems and not so drastic inside problems. Between the two is a mental gap, while we cannot seem to change anything about global problems, we also seem to not be listened to when we voice our inside problems.
At first I wanted to call them „personal problems“ because that’s what they seem to be marketed as. If you cannot afford rent - work harder. If you’ve been „victim“ of sexual harassment - you should’ve said „no“, or worn something different.
Somehow we see our inside problems as individual ones. As if the root to the occurring injustice is simply our own malfunction.
To get back to the topic of male guilt, and yes I am branching out but I think the connectivity between these incidents and patterns need to be put into context as well:
With the collective sharing of women experiencing sexual harassment, sexism and also assault by men, we seem to have grown a collective consciousness targeted towards what firstly seemed to be split into inside and outside problems. Afghan women not being able to speak freely, seemed to be separate from police officer Wayne Couzens raping and killing Sarah Everard in England. Women in the US being deprived of their bodily autonomy under a partriarchal and right wing ruled government seemed to be not connected to me not being taken seriously when talking about my sexual and mental abuse.
But especially with this topic, we can relatively clearly see that inside creates outside problems, and outside forms inside problems.
While I personally cannot seem to grasp the inclinations behind dehumanising women as a whole, as if we where a different species, I can certainly see its advantages on a governmental level trying to hold on to patriarchal society. Women doing unpaid labour, such as care work, cleaning, household chores and organising social activities around the family or household all while spreading their legs to have a man, maybe you maybe not, unwind after a „rough day at the office“ in a clean bed with dinner on the table is an ideal situation for economies driven by hustle culture and meritocracy. A well fed man, sexually content and driven, works better and harder than one who’s not.
One who doesn’t have these „benefits“ might search for sexual satisfaction in other ways. Maybe in display of power, maybe in playing with the assistants hair, looking at her legs, her back arching as she’s trying to reach a mug in the dishwasher at work. Maybe in talking about all the women he could have with his colleagues. Maybe in them fantasising about the assistant over a beer together, pushing each other to sexual satisfaction by outlining fantasies that can be reproduced in solitude.
All this works, as long as women play by the rules. And with us sharing our personal experiences (inside problems), having the same experiences throughout cities, states, countries and continents - we started to create this global consciousness around the fact, that there seems to be a growing hatred towards women in general, but maybe more importantly women speaking out and empowering themselves. We are collectively grieving social injustices like what is happening in Afghanistan, Iran, China and so on. We are talking about it and most importantly we are reassuring each other that it is in fact something to be outraged about what is happening to us all over the world.
Where we might have been isolated in earlier years. Being gaslit into thinking its just us as an individual who experienced something like harassment or assault, separated from „political“ happenings such as the abolishment of Roe v. Wade. That we are one of the few and either unlucky or responsible for what happened to us. We are now seeing the bigger sphere dangling above it all. Our Inside Problems are the result and also the reason for our Outside problems.
But with this collective awakening, this shift of responsibility and root of cause we’ve also grown a collective frustration towards the people being responsible, who have up until then lived comfortably, with us blaming ourselves. Men.
While women in the last 70 Years have evolved into Premier Ministers leading their countries through pandemics by example (Newzealand with Jacinda Ardern), revolutionising work culture and investing into Health and Education (Finland under Sanna Marin 2019), having outstanding statistics as surgeons concerning their death rate and complications, forming deep friendships, sharing emotional intelligence and social awareness - men have stood by and watched as they have experienced something that could be called equality - but might be seen as loss of power and privilege.
As well as socially (inside), there has been an increasing awareness for responsibility when it comes to sexual and social equality. With movements like #metoo women have been voicing their mistreatment and disrespect brought towards them by men and are now even actively distancing themselves with the 4B movement, created in south korea, now adapted worldwide. Shortly explained 4B stands for abolishing patriarchal norms even going as far as refusing romantic, emotional and sexual relations with men, since these seem to come with undetected labour as well.
Reporting about sexual abuse and femicides has also shifted. The expression „femicide“ is exemplary in itself. To put words and also into laws the brutal and primitive manner of killing women shifts the attention to the systemic problem underlining it. Victim blaming has been named as well as a method of shifting responsibility. We are no longer reporting about these incidents as accidents, simple misdemeanours or killings. We are actively naming the problem and naming the perpetrators.
In our clubbing scenes we have awareness teams, we started calling out male misbehaviour, socially (still lacking governmental support) punishing men for their lack of respect and acknowledgement of women as equals.
So in this shift of attention, this shift of blame we have a group in our society suddenly being put on the dock: men. With us women distancing ourselves emotionally and mentally while blaming men for their crimes seemingly as a collective we’ve heard one sentence repeatedly getting thrown at us.
„Not all men“
While putting it plainly, maybe even primitively: Blaming all men for the crimes of some seems exaggerated and unfair - yes. But what are we actually blaming them for?
Of course I am not going to blame the president of my university, who repeatedly seems to miss the point when hiring either male or female (no other genders have been hired to my knowledge) and boasting about every women he hires, for Dominique Pelicots mass-rape he put on his wife.
We are not blaming you for the crimes. If there’s blame put towards the „average man“ it’s the blame of passivity and silence. The blame of not speaking with and for women when your voice is the one that’s listened to. For not correcting your male friends, for not supporting your female friends. Silence is in fact complicity. And if you are frustrated about being blamed for something you might have not directly participated in - why haven’t you at least acknowledged that it happened?
„I already know by the headlines, this wasn’t something I wanted to see.“
If you’re uncomfortable, maybe there’s a good reason for it. Looking away, putting it to the side and making it smaller than it is makes you one of the men we are talking about.
This is not collective brainrot we might experience when being blasted with videos about crimes in general. This is not „just“ the Outside Problem you can lethargically swipe away. This is about your mother, sister, your friend, your partner. Even having to point out women directly in your family to get a knick of empathy proves the point of male snugness.
It is not every man. But it’s men as a collective. It also could be any men, so in an act of safety and security yes: it is possibly all men. Any man on a woman’s way home after work at night could be one of the men, any male friend of hers could be one of the men - for me one of them was that man. In the end - it is always a man.
I started this text with the hope of understanding the male frustration and yes while I can understand the overwhelming amount of social and global repercussions at first, what I cannot seem to understand is the detrimental positioning of men still comfortably participating in this systemic problem, leaning back and not learning and growing with their peers while at the same time crying wolf.
„Not All Men“ is inferentially a lazy excuse to justify personal detachment while refusing to at least acknowledge the pain and stress women are being put under daily. It is the epitome of the problem itself.