What planet do you even live on? Have you even read the newspaper lately? SMH... You have conveniently forgotten what overwhelmingly happens to women who report rape, violence, or harassment. They mostly get slut-shamed, blamed, demoted, frozen out of career tracks, and made to wish that they'd never spoken up. When #MeToo broke, it didn't magically change the world for us all to learn just how bad things really are. No, instead it spawned the manosphere and growing movement of men yelling, "Stop lying and making men look bad, bitch!"
Half of all murdered women are killed by their current or former male domestic partners. We've known that for 35 years or more, but it doesn't ever change. 85% of American women started getting sexually harassed in public before the age of 17 - when they were still children. For a lot of them, this began at age 10 or 11 - same as it was 40 years ago when I was that age. It doesn't ever change and it's never going to change unless men like you get off their complacent asses and stop tolerating and turning a blind eye to that shit. These aren’t “women’s problems” that have nothing to do with you, because you don’t do this stuff. They are “men’s problems” caused by a culture of masculinity that not only allows for a lot of it, but encourages it in some cases.
“[Ours] is a culture in which sexualized violence, sexual violence, and violence-by-sex are so common that they should be considered normal. Not normal in the sense of healthy or preferred, but an expression of the sexual norms of the culture, not violations of those norms. Rape is illegal, but the sexual ethic that underlies rape is woven into the fabric of the culture.” — Robert Jensen
A doctor at a hospital affiliated with Columbia University sexual abused patients for over 20 years and his superiors knew about it. They had heard the complaints, but they swept it under the rug. After he was finally arrested for licking the vulva of one of his patients, they let him go right back to work. The charges were dismissed on a plea deal because Columbia wouldn't cooperate with the investigation. It took a couple more years for him finally to be brought down. In the meantime over 250 women were assaulted.
Bad apples spoil the entire barrel, so don’t even start in on that.
It's completely delusional for you to say that women simply have to speak up and society will work to fix things. No, they won't - and there will be a lot of pushback and vilification of anyone who dares to speak up as well. Rape culture hasn’t changed, pervassive harassment hasn’t changed and neither has telling women to “get back in your lane.” 70% of woman journalists have experienced harassment, death threats, rape threats, and other completely inappropriate responses to them just doing their job - not necessarily even reporting on crimes like these. Just trying to be an authoritative woman in the public eye is enough to spark misogyny. Don't you think they've mentioned once or twice that they don't like that and want it to stop? Grow up. How exactly is someone supposed to take "personal responsibility for their safety" under those circumstances?
You are continuing to abdicate responsibility for helping to co-create the culture right now as we speak. Of course, you can't do it alone by yourself, but if you and even 30% of other men all started challenging that shit instead of sitting quietly and turning a blind eye, it would absolutely transform our society. Please talk to your daughters about just how out of touch your beliefs are with their actual experiences. I'm sure it will open your eyes.
I don't have any more time for this, but I urge you to wake up to reality - not just for your daughter's sake, but for everyone in our society. The same dynamics that drive violence against women, drive violence against men as well.
We try to show them that violence by men against one another—from simple assaults to gay bashing—is linked to the same structures and beliefs about gender and power that produce so much of men’s violence against women.
Katz, Jackson. The Macho Paradox (p. 7). Sourcebooks. Kindle Edition.
