"Fucking Bitch"

I feel like I have lived in a state of fear my entire life, even as a privileged white male. Fear for myself. Fear for my career. Fear of the future. Fear for my friends and colleagues--definitely fear for my friends and colleagues of color. And then you get married. New fears arise. Your wife. Your kids--definitely my daughter. Their present. Their future. I'm tired of living in fear. I'm tired of the world oppressing voices and people and genders and colors. I'm tired of hiding the things that need to be said from public view. I posted the below last night on my Facebook page. A handful of people can see it. Now more can here because I'm no longer fearful.

Just as much as I wish 'MeToo' was something more than just a sidebar conversation, I wish all women had the opportunity to be heard like in this video. To be able to call out those who hold them back. Who beat them down. Who tear them apart. Though, at the same time, they should't have to be heard. We should be better than this as a nation, as a world. We aren't.

I gander to say no parent sets out to raise their daughter to accept abuse from men, perhaps some do, but in either case they are forced to when they grow up anyway. The system is designed that way. Just as much as there is systemic racism, there is systemic gender bias, inequity, inequality. By and large, women can't speak up. They have to accept the abuse, the lower pay, the ridicule. Because if they do, they're just 'fucking bitches.'

A man, a wife, one daughter. Another man, a wife, one daughter. Another man, a wife, a daughter-in-law, a granddaughter.

I have a wife too. You've held her back. You've shackled and silenced her. You've demoted her. You've constructively fired her. Locked her out of her office. Demeaned her. Demoralized her. Defaced her. Defeated her. You've sat her down in a chair and scolded her like a child. For what? To cover up your inaction and what she can do better than you? All because she is a woman. All because she's a 'fucking bitch'.

There are no descriptors to explain the hell my wife has been through the last 18-months and the PTSD she has and will have because of it.

I also have a daughter. What you do today... what you do to her mom and what you do to countless other women. That will hold my 6yo back tomorrow. It will shackle and silence her. No matter how I and her mother raise her. No matter the example that I set for her that is the opposite of what you and countless other men do in the workplace and in life... she will still be held back. She will still be silenced. Because there aren't enough of me to stop you. There aren't enough of me to make you stop. There aren't enough of me to hold you accountable. There aren't enough of me to tear down the system and build it back brick-by-brick, hand-in-hand with my counterparts of the opposite sex.

I can't even protect my wife despite my best efforts. How the hell am I supposed to protect my daughter? And how the hell do you live with yourselves as a father, or a grandfather, or a husband, a father-in-law?

Fucking bitch. Ain't that the truth.