A Simple Question for My Fellow Males

A Simple Question for My Fellow Males
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To my fellow males across the globe: Put down the beer, the remote, the phone, and the cigar for a second. I have a quick question.

What the hell is the matter with you?

Here is the current list of things you are charged with:

· Manspreading on buses, trains, couches, benches, and wherever else you exist.

· Touching women you know, and those you don’t, especially when they don’t want you to.

· Harassing women.

· Assaulting women.

· Insulting women.

· Ignoring women.

· Oppressing women (See: religion; clothing; the workplace; politics; Earth).

Dudes, I’m far from perfect. I can be clueless and clumsy. But I don’t do the stuff on the list above. I am:

· A father of a terrific daughter.

· A husband of a terrific wife.

· A professor at a university with a majority of female students.

I mention the last one in order to relate a story. A dozen years ago, I was on a tram in France with a colleague and 31 students. I was standing, and one of my female students was seated just to my left. A young man standing next to me reached over and began caressing the chin and cheek of the student. She kept brushing him off, but he kept smiling and touching her face.

I was so surprised by the brazenness of this act that it took me a second to realize what was happening. I grabbed the man’s arm and said, “Stop that.” He looked at me and replied, “What a drag.” He turned and looked out the window of the tram, presumably on the prowl for his next victim.

Was he a rapist, a predator, a serial killer? Unlikely. He was just a guy, doing whatever he wanted to do with a woman, without her permission. There you have Harvey Weinstein, Roman Polanski, Woody Allen, Bill Cosby, and a host of not-film men like them around the world in a nutshell. Men who think they can dominate and control women. Men who think women exist for their pleasure/use/abuse.

Both my daughter, an accomplished attorney, and my wife, an accomplished administrator, have suffered sexist indignities on the job. Female colleagues I have known in workplaces all my working life have related incidents large and small concerning men and unwelcome advances, discrimination, verbal slights, condescension, taking credit for their ideas, or overlooking them altogether.

I close with the question I opened with: What the hell is the matter with you? If you oppress, slight, or harm women, especially if you feel justified doing it, Bruh, there is something wrong with you.

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