What to do for women

It was very confusing, coming of age in the late 1960s and early ‘70s. There were many women who hadn’t figured out yet that they would prefer to be left alone, and men — even white men — could have the mistaken impression that their kind had actually achieved something of value over the centuries, and that someone could actually like them. Sure, we needed to be less pushy and more open minded. The true depths of male — particularly white male — depravity were concealed behind the facade built brick by brick by the patriarchy to secure dominance in perpetuity. It is hard to come to terms with the harsh truth that one’s entire world view was built on lies, but there it is.

As an average heteronormative schmuck, I found women desirable and acted like various kinds of idiot to try to get to spend some time with them. I am limited by my own lack of social skills in this, but you can find all kinds of support for the idea that you may be socially awkward, but deep down you're actually really cool and people will want to be with you.

That's a comforting lie. The key to its survival is that it is comforting. It seems empowering and encouraging of diversity. But hooking up is a competitive activity. There's a lot of weeding. If your motivation includes what we call the pleasures of the flesh, you need to qualify. Hell, if all you want is conversation and a break from the endless loneliness of shy dorks, and you happen to like the company and insights of women, you still need to avoid wearing out your welcome.

Obviously, based on the avalanche of stories of women who have been attacked and forced into sexual contact, a lot of men don't worry about qualifying. They just grab. In so doing, they give all of male horniness a bad name.

Maybe male horniness is only worthy of a bad name. It's as common as dirt, and less healthy to get on you. Actual dirt contains beneficial microbes.

I was once young enough that a woman might give me a second glance, and even an audition. I was no prize, but I was deceptively attractively packaged. It fooled both them and me. I apologize retroactively for believing my own shit. We were all being raised to believe that we had promising futures, and that life was to be enjoyed. My blunders haunt me to this day.

What I finally realized was that the best thing men can do for women is purposely, consciously, and in large numbers, get out of their way. 

What have you read on social media since Thursday? Women saying that they wished they could walk around without constant fear of some aggressive creep assaulting them with anything from words and gestures to actual physical force. Women in vast numbers calling for an end to paternalistic, misogynistic oppression. Women drawing comics about how great the world would be if all men vanished.

Paternalistic misogynists will continue to make what they consider to be their case. They can cite a lot of history, and call upon female allies who have, for generations, worked within that system in their own ways, and present it as the norm. Women are not unanimous in their support of Brett Kavanaugh's accusers. They're not uniformly supportive of survivors of sexual assault. This is jarring and incomprehensible, but it's part of the bewildering variety of human experience."Good girls" won't have any problems. Feisty ones will suggest that a woman simply needs to be armed and ready to fight off any male who tries to go too far. It's a pretty sad view of human nature, that the best we can ever do is learn all the ways in which to defeat the inevitable attack.

A woman named Nancy Theeman wrote that she taught at Holton Arms when Christine Blasey Ford was a student. One thing she mentioned was the value of single sex education to create empowered women. Because the students were all women, they held all leadership positions by default. They competed among themselves on their own merits to achieve these positions, unfiltered by any judgment stemming from mere anatomy. But at the same time, at an all boys' school, young men are in an undiluted environment of male assumptions. And the empowered women coming out of the all-female incubator emerge into a world that is not ordered that way at all. If no one is teaching all the men how to be anything but entitled chauvinists, the system never changes.

Men need to listen. Don't jump in the minute you think you get it. Shut up and listen. Then shut up and listen some more. We have centuries of shutting up and listening to catch up on. Don't expect to knock it out in a couple of days. You can't pull an all-nighter for this. And if all goes well, the world that you knew will never exist again.

A lot of men simply aren't going to listen. It's easy for me to say shut up and listen, because I was not indoctrinated in the notion that it was my right and duty to lead the world. And by observing my father's frustrations as a skilled and loyal officer of a government increasingly controlled by the military-industrial complex, I was not drawn at all to the established power structure, even if that was where the money was. Like him, I believed that the ideals of our nation were sound, but that the execution of them fell far short of the promise of the words.

Naively, I believed that everyone would eventually agree. And I figured that far better minds than mine were working on it. Far better minds than mine have been working on a lot of stuff. Some of them have been working on this. A lot more of them have been exploiting the existing trends toward wealth consolidation and reinforcing existing hierarchies of race and gender.