Rise Up

Dear Men,

Here’s what needs to happen:

We need a massive fucking male uprising. We need to take to the streets and demand an end to the sexist oppression of women. We need to stop our work and commence studies of the pay distributions in our organizations, and we need the gaps to be closed. We need to stop dominating the women around us, physically and psychologically. We need to tear the ads of objectified women off the wall, throw the magazines in the trash, turn off the TV.

We need to tell the woman around us how brilliant they are, how good they are, how fun they are, how great they look. We need to actively dispel the myth that we want them to starve themselves for us, or squeeze into shoes that maim them and clothes that make them feel powerless. We need to realize that they are as capable as we are and that they know we know it.

We need to learn to see the world as women do, to see the threats they see that are invisible to us. And we need to understand the threat they see in all of us. We need to change our behavior in ways that allow them to worry less about being assaulted, and worry less about being discriminated against.

We need to treat the women around us as equals, so our sons will treat our daughters as equals. We need to encourage our boys and girls to be active but not violent. Energetic, playful, and assertive but aware of their power to be destructive, and strong enough to prevent it. Boys need to see their dads check their own power. We need to do things traditionally reserved for women so our children know they can do whatever they want to, whatever their gender. We need to restructure their education so the girls are excited about engineering and the boys are excited about crafts.

We need to have healthy sex lives, based on our mutual horniness, not male domination, and we need to talk about them. We need to let our kids know that they’re OK whether or not they have sex, no matter who they want to have sex with, and that they were born complete people and they don’t need to be anything in particular to be OK. We need them to know that if they want to be sexually active, their opportunities will come and that patience is sexier than desparation and far sexier than losing your self respect.

We need to learn to recognize the undercurrent of domination and submission in our sexualities and to reprogram ourselves without it. We need to learn to see the desire to “own” women in ourselves and the men around us. We need to see those desires as the seeds of sexual assault and stop them before they mature. We need to recognize in ourslves the language and “guy talk” that portrays women as things to be dominated and stop them before they come out of our mouths. And we need to stop such language in the men around us, without turning them off with our own aggression.

We need to stop assaulting women, physically and emotionally. We need to stop pressuring them to do things we know they don’t want to do. We need to take the first hint of a no as a no. Women have a right to be treated this way, but it honestly benefits men too. If the women in our lives trust us more, they’ll want more sex not less.

We need to teach our boys that if they treat women like human beings, if they cultivate honesty and understanding and patience and passion, that women will like them and they won’t die alone and a virgin.

We need to reach out in particular to our boys and girls who have been abused or neglected. We need to show them how valuable they are before they slip irreversably into a life of violence, domination, and lust for power.

We need to treat womens’ bodies as their possessions, not ours. We need to learn to see environments that are more hostile to women than men and offset that imbalance by being extra careful to make sure that women feel safe and welcome, particularly in the workplace.

Most of all, we need to get mad, and we need to get serious, and we need to work our asses off tearing down and rebuilding male culture until women’s rights are a central priority of every man and feminism is built in to the definition of what it means to be a man.

Love,

Erik