I'm sorry, but that is a complete crock of shit that simply enables you and other men like you to evade responsibility for creating a better culture - and that is not a center ground position. When exactly is the "time going to be right"? Because the moment that the we just start calmly and quietly accepting our fate as marginalized people whose rights, personhood, and very lives are under siege is the moment that complete and utter complacency takes over. Nobody is complaining, so there must not be any problems.... It's completely and utterly unrealistic and it does what MLK would characterize as "a bid for 'tranquility and the status quo' at the expense of justice and humanity." He skewered the segments of white society that wished for this rather than taking on the important work of creating a more just society.
To paraphrase Dr. King once more, “Why is equality so assiduously avoided? Why does male America delude itself, and how does it rationalize the evil it retains?
I think that the stats in the UK are pretty horrendous as well, but I'm less familiar with them. In the US, an American is sexually assaulted every 68 seconds - most of them women. Around the world, nearly every girl is harassed on the streets before the age of 17 - many of them at the age of 9 or 10. This takes place in the US as well, so it's not just India or Argentina.
In some industries, 80% of women experience sexual harassment at work, and across the board, the numbers are somewhere between 50-70% depending on how the information was obtained. Half of sexually harassed women say it hurt their careers.
When journalist Mary Ann Sieghart set out to document the ways that women are held back by a cultural presumption of their inferiority, she found reams of data to support her case — and heard stories of how it affects even the most successful women in the world. The authority gap: why women still aren’t taken seriously.
Half of all women in the US who are murdered are killed by current or former intimate partners. By contrast, the numbers for men are about 4.9% and at least some of that takes place in self defense. From 1994 to 2010, approximately 4 in 5 victims of intimate partner violence were female.
I could go on and on, and on - but you're either going to continue to talk about hyperbole or you're going to stop this deflective level of denial and actually become a part of the solution. If you don't, then you are a part of the problem.
As a man, once you are aware of the degree to which women suffer from gender violence and all forms of sexism, you can’t simply go about your business and pretend everything is fine. You have to do something about it or else risk losing your self-respect. This is where denial comes in. Denial is a tried-and-true method of coping with disruptive, traumatic, or discomforting information; it is much less painful than facing the truth.
Katz, Jackson. The Macho Paradox (p. 41). Sourcebooks. Kindle Edition.
