Men. Brothers:

I absolutely, unreservedly support women in defending their sex-based rights to women-only spaces, services & opportunities for a host of reasons.

Among them:

1. If SOME males obtain the right to those things, on the basis of ‘self-identitifying’ 1/

as having a nebulous #genderidentity which functions as a magic key, then ALL males obtain the right, irrefutably. ALL men would acquire the right which we could choose to exercise or not. Like masters of everywhere & everything. No checks, no balances. Just our choices. 2/
If we are capable of empathy we will know that that’s an intolerable assault on the safety and dignity of women and girls. A sexual totalitarianism laid on top of the already deeply misogynistic cultures we have developed.

Do we have empathy enough with women to see this? 3/
2. The idea that only gentle, vulnerable, harmless males -whether they believe themselves to qualify as ‘women’ or not - would exercise that new universal right is so absurd as to not deserve consideration. History shows us why.

3. A let’s ask ourselves why some men are so 4/
Very keen to tell women to accept males in their spaces, services and opportunities. What are the motives? On the surface they are a desire for ‘kindness’, ‘acceptance’ - by women, toward men. Hmmm... So women are the nurse-class of humans, the sponges, the buffers?

Sexism 5/
Why don’t we think about how we men regulate our own spaces, rules of ‘manhood’, ‘masculinity’ & ‘maleness’? What is it that some of our brothers cannot bear to live in / as? Our suffocating expectations, demands, limitations, judgements? If someone wanted to leave your social 6/
group wouldn’t you be curious as to why? Or would you tell another social group that they should accept them ‘or else’? No reflection? No soul-searching? Just ‘good riddance’ & ‘let them in or face our wrath?’. Hmmm...

Maybe we find men performing ‘woman’ (femininity tropes) 7/
Threatening of our own sense of ‘man-ness’ - maybe it scares, confuses and disgusts us because it goes against our own socialization as males? Maybe that’s not something we want - or are able - to acknowledge? Easier to tell the women to accept them than we do that, right? 8/
That’s women’s work anyway, looking after us. Right?

4. Women need space away from the male gaze, respite from vulnerability, chance 2 relax, enjoy, organise, think, talk without us. We respect that - right? When I was younger I might have felt somehow rejected or slighted 9/
But we grow up & learn. Men who don’t accept boundaries are dangerous, regardless of whether those men are perpetrators or merely immature - cognitively & emotionally. The former enacts abuse, the latter facilitates it. The damage is the same.

There’s so much more to say... 10/

More from Society

You May Also Like

I’m torn on how to approach the idea of luck. I’m the first to admit that I am one of the luckiest people on the planet. To be born into a prosperous American family in 1960 with smart parents is to start life on third base. The odds against my very existence are astronomical.


I’ve always felt that the luckiest people I know had a talent for recognizing circumstances, not of their own making, that were conducive to a favorable outcome and their ability to quickly take advantage of them.

In other words, dumb luck was just that, it required no awareness on the person’s part, whereas “smart” luck involved awareness followed by action before the circumstances changed.

So, was I “lucky” to be born when I was—nothing I had any control over—and that I came of age just as huge databases and computers were advancing to the point where I could use those tools to write “What Works on Wall Street?” Absolutely.

Was I lucky to start my stock market investments near the peak of interest rates which allowed me to spend the majority of my adult life in a falling rate environment? Yup.