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Bingo. As the guy who gets these stories when the women around him need someone to talk to, I can promise you men, you know a woman who's dealt with this. I can also promise you that you know some men who've dealt with this. Again, they're just aren't telling YOU. https://twitter.com/Hellchick/status/1276182088450838528
I'm not kidding. I've been the guy who gets the phone call at 2am when a woman they know has had a night terror reliving their abuse and needs someone to talk to to get back to sleep. I've been the "I'm going on a date, if you don't hear from me by this point call..." guy. /2
I've been the "can you walk with me" guy when someone wants an added layer of safety. And I've been the "pretend we dated so these creeps will leave me alone guy." Most of the friends I've had in my life are women. Ya'll don't even know what you don't see. 3/3
You know what, we're gonna add an adendum to this becaus I've been trying to figure out a way to talk about this for a minute. I don't tell these stories to act like some blameless paragon. I never abused anyone but that doesn't mean I didn't have to unlearn some awful shit /4
There's an instance of a mysoginistic insult in my past that deeply hurt someone and to this day, even though I've attempted to apologize they don't want to hear it. And I don't blame them. It still haunts me and even I don't know what the fuck was wrong with me on that one. /5
There was a period when, getting the wrong lesson from the movie Hitch I got a little too curious about mentalists and pick up artists and got dangerously close to the dark side in a way that terrifies me even almost a decade later. I was absorbing some DANGEROUS ideas. /6
Thankfully a pretty powerful dragging on an old message board yanked me back to reality and made me realize where the fuck the road I was going down was going. But it shouldn't have taken all of that to get to that point. I don't know the name of the woman who dragged me /7
but she probably saved me from turning into a truly awful human. That's part of why I'm so loud about this stuff. I grew up in a house full of women and womanist/feminist thought even if it wasn't formally called that. I was pro-choice at 13 when smarter people than me were /8
still coming around. BUT it doesn't mean you don't pick up toxic behaviors when the entire society you're in is feeding them to you. It's easy to slip and if you don't catch yourself at the little slips you end up flying down the whole damn mountain ass over tea kettle. /9
So I say this in an attempt at accountability. It's possible to turn away from these bad shit and become someone women around you can trust. But it requires doing internal and external work to dismantle patriarchal ideas. And LOTS of it. 10/10
