I read an excellent piece by Qasim Rashid this morning. I drafted a long post about it on Mastodon, then decided it might make more sense to expand on it here.
Read through the essay so you have context: Women Are Not Safe Around Men
So, I grew up thinking I was a woman. Until I was 28 (last year). As soon as I started learning the statistics about gender-based violence against women as a teenager, I became very afraid of men. I had zero male friends for many years, and even now I only have like...two. (Whom I only met from them dating and then marrying existing friends.) That fear, among other things, massively delayed my recognition that, whether I liked it or not, I was a man too. So I sat around miserable thinking I had to be a woman the rest of my life, and I said I was a lesbian, but I wasn't, I just feared being a woman with a man, or even interacting with men as a woman, because I wasn't a woman.
The culture of misogyny and denial is pervasive among everyone. There's a tendency among women to think that GBV is something that happens to other women, women who make poor choices and go into dangerous situations alone or without a plan. Which, as Rashid's piece makes clear, couldn't be further from the truth. Then when or if it does happen to you (a woman), you blame yourself for not protecting yourself, for not planning for this, for not knowing that you couldn't trust him. And that only adds to the trauma.
As an aside, I know there are lots of people who don't really fall easily into the two categories of "man" and "woman". Sex is a bimodal distribution, and gender identity can be complicated. I have a binary sort of mindset because of who I am. I never want to do makeup, wear dresses, do my nails, or grow my hair long ever again. It makes me feel awful. There are some people who like aspects of masculinity and femininity, and I respect that and I want to be inclusive, but the reality is that in most of the world, you will be slotted into one of those two categories by most people you meet, and treated accordingly. So I'm going to focus on the broad strokes of "men" and "women".
When I started getting scared as a teenager, I would say stuff about it to my mother. To my knowledge, she has never been a victim of violence by a man, and she is one of the rare women who typically felt flattered instead of threatened by catcalls when she was younger. So she would tell me men weren't that bad, and most men weren't going to hurt me, and I just needed to be "smart", and she was worried about me being so scared. But here's the thing: she has four sisters. All four of them have been victims of abusive men. You can see where I'm going with this. The cultural blind spots are serious.
I think the solutions Rashid proposes in his piece are really great. Structural solutions are always going to be the most effective for structural problems. But what can we do on our own, right now?
I would say it's important for men to have conversations with other men to educate them on this topic. Maybe you can gradually break down their assumptions about what's okay to do and what's okay to discuss. Maybe you can explain that the thing they're laughing about would be really terrifying, actually, to a woman, and maybe he should put himself in her shoes for half a second. Maybe you can make it clear that anyone who wants to be friends with you needs to be respectful of women whether or not there's one in the room at the time. Maybe you can say, "man...no," when someone is "just playing around," and make him uncomfortable for saying something like that.
It's going to depend on your relationship to the other guy(s) in the room, and the situation, and maybe it won't work every time, and maybe people will brush you off, and maybe sometimes you won't quite be able to speak up and you'll accidentally let it pass or laugh it off. It happens. I once let a hairdresser talk to me for like twenty minutes about how he "supports gay people" but "parents trying to change their children's gender" was "just not okay". Presumably he was eating up transphobic disinformation on Facebook, or something. I think as far as I got was "well, I have my own opinions, but I'd rather not talk about this." So....yeah, it happens. But not getting it right every time is no reason not to try again.
It sounds small, but I think working on changing the minds of people around us can have a ripple effect. Plus, we all want to be around nicer people overall, right?