The reason it is “yes all men” to me is that the numbers I’ve personally experienced don’t match with any other claim. I don’t know a single woman who hasn’t been sexually harassed (unwanted touching and above), raped or suffered partner abuse, were abused as children, and some or all of the above. Now, I have been raped 5 times. I have been in 1 extremely abusive relationship that broke my entire self for 6 years after, and another that got me addicted to cocaine. I have been inappropriately touched by literally countless men in bars and nightclubs (even though I expect it in that scenario, should I think its normal and ok?). I used to write down the “compliments” men would shout out their car or van windows to me as I walked to university and wear them with pride, I tried to take ownership of the constant onslaught of unwanted sexual attention.
At a absolute minimum, I have had 20 men lay hands on my body and alter my brain, without my consent. Of these 20 men, only one would think of himself as someone who has harmed a woman. The first rapist was arrested for statutory rape. The 4 other men who used my body when I was passed out, thought they were just fucking a easy chick they got lucky with. The man who destroyed my sense of self and ability to function, didn’t think there was anything wrong with him. The boy who got me addicted to coke so I would buy it for him while I paid him to work for me and live with me, all while his other woman was in another city, was “just having a good time”. And the faceless hands in the nightclubs were attached to men too drunk to notice or care, following the narrative of how to behave in these spaces. 19 out of 20 of my abusers would not ever think they could be “all men”, they are just regular guys.
This isn’t taking into consideration the plenty of other abuses of power, position and age that have been used to manipulate me into sex, whether its the 40 year old club bouncer who challenged me to give him a handjob when I was 15, or the other one who let me suck his dick when I was 17, or the bosses/collogues who took advantage of my weak boundaries, the man who flashed me on the school driveway when I was 13, or the bullying I received everyday from the boy who would touch me and kiss me when no one else was around when I was 10.
I am one woman, and I cant even count on my fingers and toes how many man have abused me in one way or another, not just verbally, but all of them physically encroaching on my body. If I include all the men who verbally assaulted me, then we would be in the hundreds, maybe even thousands. And now we have social media to add to the pervasive abuse.
Now if every other woman I know has had at least one, and some up to as many as me maybe, how can it NOT be all men? Are there enough women out there with 0 physical assaults to balance out women like me who have tens to hundreds, depending on the definition. Even if its just the rapes, I have had FIVE.
The math’s don’t add up. It logically HAS to be ALL men.
Only one man in my story thinks he has ever harmed a woman.
All the others think they are ok.
Now obviously I know more men than just ones who have assaulted me, so how can I say its all men? What about my Dad, step bro, uncle, et etc etc?!
Well if MOST of the men who have assaulted me don’t know they have ever done anything wrong, than how do I know that any of the men I know/knew that didn’t harm me, haven’t in fact harmed another woman and don’t even know it or wont acknowledge it/admit it to themselves.
I have no fear over admitting men close to me have this blindness to their impacts on women and their place in the statement “all men”, I see them there too and it backs up my understanding of the numbers.
I don’t blame men though. Nowhere in the statement “all men ” is there any judgement or value placed on men, it is not placing blame, its stating a statistical probability. If the woman is saying “all men” cause she has experienced multiple incidences of sexual assault and all her friends and family have also, then it seems like a lot more men are assaulting than there are women. Do we share abusers? Its not just all men, its some men, many many times as well.
I don’t hate men, I love them. They are vital to my existence. They are my juice. But I do not like the way they are socialized, trained, domesticated and how woman has been shaped around that. Its forcing men into the shape society has made for them that they do not fit into that causes their worst sides to spill out in reaction to be suppressed.
“All men” were raised by women. So there is no way in hell I am blaming men for the fact that they all abuse women. I don’t need to deconstruct the past, and stay angry at men for a reality they didn’t create. I want to move forward to find a reality that is comfortable for all people.
For me, the solution is to go back to the first principles, what are the fundamental truths and realities of being male and female. From there we see what works, and keep trying different ways without getting stuck on the wrong path for too long. Thought experiments down the path from the first principles until you hit a dead end, then you come back, with all the knowledge and ideas gained from that first path, to start again from first principles in another direction, maybe guided by what you previously learnt, over and over, till the thought experiment cant be broken apart by challenges from as many angles as possible, and it can move from theory to reality.
I have been doing this with sex, the body, the human, the male, the female, the world, society, culture, politics, psychology and sociology for my whole life. And I have some pretty well tested ideas, and have come to some good conclusions to thought experiments which often prove out to be right in the real world. I am a predictor of change. And I sense now is the time, I’ve caught a whiff of something, and I like the direction its going in. If people are starting to apply first principle thinking to social issues and in business’, then its time to share my first principle thinking on sex and the body and what I know.
It took me 21 years and 1000 sexual partners to get to the point where I gave up on men in this reality. I am not a man hating feminazi. I fucking love men, I tried and tried and tried again until I had nothing left of myself. I tried to be the change myself, tried to live what I believed it could be for women. But over and over it was taken advantage of and my sex used against me. It took till 36 to realize I cant keep trying the same thing over and over expecting a different result. So here I am, 2 years celibate, looking to help change the understanding of men and women and the intimate and sexual nature of the human animal, so I can help us all become domesticated in a way that is beneficial to the physical reality of the experiences of both sexes., so I can risk going out in the world again, to eventually find the wild humanimale that will honor me, my body and my reality, without fear of further abuse by what is now “all men”. I want the new man. An embodied, confident, open, soft, strong, fit, fun, intimate, sensual, passionate, well rounded, self aware play pal for women. Cause that is a happy man, and happy men, comfortable with their place, equal to, yet different from women, able to see the value of the reality of women, wouldn’t be able to abuse us.
