Yes, "YesAllMen"

Through the digital web that is the Internet I can already hear some of you reacting against the title of this blog. "Certainly," I can hear you say, "you don't literally mean all men! After all, you're a man yourself!" And that's true, I am a man; I have a penis and everything, was even born with the thing, making me cisgender (not that whether or not one is born with, or even has a penis has anything to do with whether or not someone is a man; someone is a man if they say they're a man; same goes for someone being a woman). So yes, I'm a cisgender man and I'm writing a blog with a strong feminist positioning titled "#YesAllMen" and yes, I mean it, ALL MEN.


So let's clarify this right away. The phrase #YesAllMen is an intentional reversal of the idiotic hashtag #NotAllMen. #NotAllMen emerged as a response from “meninists” (a term I hesitate to even give the dignity of using for fear of pretending like such an identification is at all legitimate) to the very real concerns of women about rape culture. The hashtag was meant to express that not all men are potential rapists, not all men hate women, etc. (Spoiler alert: the men using the hashtag are all misogynists, as are, by definition, all of the “men’s rights activists” from which this nonsense spawns). And you’re right, not all men have committed acts of violence, and some men are decent allies. And I still say #YesAllMen. The reasons for this are multiple, but the most serious is that it’s not all about you, Mr. Nice Guy. #YesAllMen because women living in this culture need to assume that any man who they don’t know, and too many who they do (most sexual assaults are committed by people known to thesurvivor/victim), are potential assailants.  So women have to live their lives with a the knowledge that any man could be a potential assaulter.  And as long as that is true, as long as patriarchy, misogyny, and rape culture persist, then #YesAllMen.

Perhaps an example will help.  A girlfriend of mine was saying to me recently that she was telling two of her male friends (yes, assholes, feminists do have male friends) that she thinks she knows about how she would react to being raped if that ever happened to her.  As she said this, she saw a moment of shocked comprehension on the men’s faces.  It dawned on them that we live in a world in which not only does rape happen to women frequently, but that it is such a constant threat that even those who have not been attacked have to think about this, have to consider what they would do, how they would react to it, etc.  This is just one part of rape culture, but the very existence of rape culture means that #YesAllMen is a necessary response and that #NotAllMen is a useless way of turning the conversation back to men and delegitimizing the experiences and feelings of women, who remain a subjugated community of people.  (Side note for a future post: men all too often turn the conversation back to themselves and make everything about themselves, which is what the #NotAllMen hashtag ultimately does.)

Another example: when I was living in the Mid-West I attended a rally and meeting in support of Native Women’s rights as a part of the struggle surrounding "Red River Women."  At the meeting, the usual statistic thatNative Women are one of the groups most likely to be the victims of violencewas repeated.  However, a story was also told in which a young girl, talking to her mother about that reality, told an activist, “When this happens to me, we’re not going to do anything about it.”  Really focus on both sides of that sentence: “When this happens to me, we’re not going to do anything about it.”  Not “If” this happens, but “When.”  It is seen as an inevitability in this girl’s life, and she and her mother have decided that nothing will be done at that time, because it’s so common and there is so rarely justice that doing anything feels useless (there are a lot of reasons for this that I won't be getting into here, but one contemporary component is the oil boom in Western North Dakota that brings transient men from around the country to Reservations for work, and who are commonly able to commit crimes, including rape and murder, and leave almost immediately without accountability).

To respond to such a reality with #NotAllMen is beyond fucking offensive, but it’s not surprising.  As I’ll be discussing in another post, masculinity is fragile, it is built on very little and is easily threatened.  Thus, when masculinity is threatened, men feel the need to buttress and reaffirm their superior status.  This is what #NotAllMen really does, it reaffirms patriarchy while attacking women’s experiences; it works to delegitimize a woman's need to protect herself in a world that commits regular acts of violence against them or threatens to do so.

If you met that little girl, waiting for when she’ll be raped, would you say, “Yes, little girl, but take heed, because not all men are like that.”  No, and fuck you if you would.  Defending your own pathetic gender superiority in response to someone else’s suffering is beyond cruel, and it simply turns the conversation back to you rather than engaging with someone else.

So, #YesAllMen.