Mad About Men

I’m mad about men. I love men! I am grateful for the relationships I’ve shared with men, from partners to friends to family to in-laws who have a heart of gold and whose actions and words show it - men who make me laugh, help me feel protected, support me, listen, care, challenge me, men who are a majesty to behold: masters of their craft, hilarious, kind, helpful, gentlemen who offer a hand without ever being asked, men who make manhood look honorable, men who go the distance in their relationships. I am so grateful for these men, for the examples they uphold. They make me a better person and they shine light into my life.

It’s not these men I’m mad about. It’s men who make sport of disrespecting women that are the topic of today’s tirade. You may have enjoyed the brutal jokes during the recent Roast of Tom Brady. Gisele Bündchen and Tom’s children were fair game, haha, but the first and only Robert Kraft joke prompted Tom to get out of his seat and tell Jeff Ross not to “say that shit again.” Robert Kraft, as you may know, is the billionaire Patriots owner who got off scott free after paying for sexual favors at a massage parlor, while the woman he paid and the parlor owner were arrested and charged with a range of criminal acts. As May Jeong of Vanity Fair summarizes, “Under Florida law, it would appear, happy endings are the exclusive property of men.”

Excusing the disrespect of women is nothing new. We all grew up immersed in this behavior so we’re desensitized to it, to some degree. This desensitization is why half of Americans claim to believe a particular man is innocent despite 28 women saying he sexually assaulted them, including 3 claims of rape. The words of 28 women are not as strong as the words of 1 man - can you imagine? When pressed on why these Americans don’t believe the women, you might hear, “Why didn’t these women come forward sooner?” revealing a reluctance to understand the complexities of trauma, shame, power dynamics, and the scarlet letter women must bear when going head to head with a wealthy man regarding a sexual encounter. Half of Americans deride 28 women’s claims despite the long list of sexist comments and predatory behavior this man has admitted to for decades on video interviews and audio tapes, behavior he claims to get away with because he's a star, haha.?

To allay any confusion about why women may not speak up when sexually assaulted by a much more powerful man: one reason is because they don’t want to complicate their lives, especially when these men have the support of ruthless lawyers like Roy Cohn or Michael Cohen who have no problem raining legal hell on a woman for speaking out of turn, or threatening a woman’s family if she doesn’t keep quiet.

Another reason is that, historically, women have not been taken seriously by the police, judges, and politicians overseeing their claims. You recall the way police responded to Nicole Brown Simpson when she called them regarding OJ’s abuse two years prior to him murdering her? I’ve previously shared the story of when I was sexually assaulted while out for a run at 9 PM on Brooklyn’s Bushwick Avenue. When the two male officers arrived to take my report (three hours after I reported the incident!), I pointed out the street cameras that may have captured the attack, and one of the police officers yelled at me that he knew how to do his job and I didn’t need to tell him. At this point it was midnight so I asked the two men for a ride home, two miles away, it would have taken them 5 minutes. They said no and made me walk home alone in the dark after being assaulted. I filed a complaint against the officers and never heard back from the department about the complaint or the sexual assault despite multiple follow ups.?

Another illustrative incident worth recalling is the 1990s case of an 18 year old Italian woman raped by her 45 year old driving instructor.? He was eventually found guilty of rape but only after the court first tried to convict him of indecent exposure. While in prison, the rapist filed an appeal claiming the woman was wearing tight jeans and, because tight jeans cannot be removed without the help of the woman wearing them, and certainly not if a woman is violently fighting her perpetrator, clearly the act was consensual. The court ruled in his favor, arguing "it is a fact of common experience that it is nearly impossible to slip off tight jeans even partly without the active collaboration of the person who is wearing them" and the rape conviction was overturned. Simonetta Sotjiu, one of only 10 female judges serving in the supreme court that had 410 male judges at the time, said of the ruling, ''The law is solidly in the hands of men and many of them think in a way that is completely detached from reality.''

It took 10 YEARS for the Italian supreme court to overturn the ruling that set the rapist free. That was in 2008. 2008! Less than 20 years ago! If you are a woman, of course you know that this type of disrespect for the bodies, brains and autonomy of women is still very much alive.

Consider this anecdote from Dr Naomi Wolf 's 1998 book, “Promiscuities: The Secret Struggle for Womanhood,” about a high school senior whose sweet and respectful boyfriend, Martin, went to college and joined a fraternity:?

For reasons that only a gentle and slightly self-conscious boy in a new place can fully understand, [Martin] joined a fraternity, where I had to visit him. There, walking up the deep streets to the old wooden mansion, I would see, perhaps more clearly and strongly than ever before, what the world thought sex was and what it thought women were. As I made my way up Fraternity Row, groups of young men stood on balconies with placards marked “1” to “10”, grading each woman as she passed. I hated that they did that, hated looking to see what number they held up for me, and hated caring.?

That world was so much dirtier, in how it saw women and their desire, than the safe place Martin and I had created. The discovery was a shock to me.?

Some fraternities had a designated urinal above which the guys were supposed to put individual pub*c hairs of girls they had seduced. There were no women's rooms, so a strange little row of unidentifiable, carefully lined up hairs was arrayed within the eyesight of the carefully dressed sorority women who applied their makeup at the bathroom mirrors during parties. “What was that?” someone would ask with a grimace, and the frat boys would answer evasively and smirk. Part of the fun was making fools of the puzzled women who walked out of there. Martin's own house, though not considered particularly outrageous, had such a collection. The guys in Martin's fraternity were rumored to peer into a “brother's” room as he made a conquest.?

Martin did not become a “regular guy” in this way. His loyalty remained with me. But as time went on, he grew sadder and sadder, surrounded by male joviality, but never fully part of it. We could both feel that some of the guys were ready to ostracize him for his qualms. His friendship with me, which had been free and simple, had a price now that we were turning into men and women. Though he never said so, he must have felt resentful. Knowing it was irrational, sometimes I felt guilty.?

One night a young woman from one of the sororities came to a keg party, during the initiation of a pledge class, and got drunk. She passed out on the couch in the downstairs common room of the fine, shabby old Arts and Crafts house. I heard that someone had lifted her by the arms, and someone else by the legs, and they had taken her into a room.

By morning, all the guys in the house knew that a number of the guys had “felt her up”? molested her? The details were imprecise. Martin remembers that ‘People were drunk and rowdy and assaulted a woman. It wasn't date rape; she was not on a date. They jumped on her, groped her, dry-humped her. Somewhere between six and twelve guys were part of the scene - two involved directly.’ When the woman came to, she fled. The joke, as I recall (and my memory of this episode fades in and out of focus), was that she had escaped so fast that her shoes remained. Someone had put her red high heeled pumps on the wood mantle of the fireplace, next to the collection of beer cans from around the world, like a trophy.?

The guys and I were friends. Over breakfast, they did not hide the story from me or from the other girlfriends who had stayed the night. I remember all the guys having their morning coffee were laughing about the episode, which was hinted at but not fully described, and glancing now and again at the girlfriends while watching their reactions. We were, it was understood, nice girls because we were in relationships; we would understand that what had happened to her had nothing to do with us.?

I sat quietly throughout that breakfast. Later I heard about another girlfriend's act of dissension. I remember her as a quiet, small girl, not presumed by any of us to have a lot of personal power. But she eventually went over to the mantle and, without saying a word, took the shoes, walked across the street to the sorority house, and in full view of the brothers, lined them up carefully and sat down beside them. I wish I could write that I had done something remotely like that. I would like to imagine that both Martin and I walked out, but my eyes widened and I said nothing. I knew the words I was applying to the actions of these laughing, confident young men, friends of mine, in my head, words such as “sexual assault” would have no social meaning if I spoke them. Only the wildest eyed of “lesbos”, in their terms, would in 1979, have called it a sexual assault. I stayed inside. So did Martin. We finished our expertly cooked breakfast.

Later, Martin told me how appalled he had been by what his brothers had shown themselves to be. We circled and circled around what we could have done differently, I said, probably rationalizing my cowardice, that I hadn't wanted him to bear the brunt of my making a scene. He wondered, perhaps rationalizing, too, if maybe it was better for him to be a quiet example to the contrary from within, his kind face was twisted with the effort of explaining something to me that went against his own sense of decency, and my own cowardice made me ashamed of myself. I remember the mood of that conversation clearly. We were in his room with the shutters closed, feeling as if we were in enemy territory and holding on to each other. Our shared equivocations and our capitulations to a gender script that we both hated were, for the moment, drawing us together, but I could sense how they might also, in the long term, start pushing us apart.?

For I understood that he was being expected to choose, just as I had been expected to choose. He faced a great risk in following his own good heart and good sense -- a risk that is too often downplayed. He was not sure he would be considered a man if he did not choose the other men, and that fear was realistic. There was so much at stake -- his current life, really. The way those boys punished dissenters -- I had seen this -- was with a paranoia-inducing social withdrawal that culminated in the subtle, perpetual taunt of thirty men's collective homophobia.

I had been worried I would no longer be considered a real woman if I spoke out, either, that I would no longer be invited to the parties. But the world had changed enough so that there would be other places I could go if the frat boys rejected me. But for Martin, the situation was serious. Throughout high school, Martin, this close observer of invertebrates, a Dungeons and Dragons enthusiast, had been a self described “nerd.” This designation had given him freedom, in a way: nerd guys in Martin's teenage circle had shared value systems vastly different from those that made the frat boys “men.” But now, because Martin had been “accepted” by real men, his eccentric and charming and truly egalitarian real self was at risk. Martin was being silently, powerfully pressured to abandon his outsider status with all the freedom and integrity that went with it.?

The girl with the high heeled shoes, we heard, underwent a psychological crisis and dropped out. He and I stayed together until I went away to college a year later. But I had lost something with him. My english textbook that year and a discussion about contemporary poetry had explained that the word ecstasy had derived from the greek ecstasis: standing outside oneself in a type of trance. Not too long after our relationship first began, I had felt that way about Martin. But at that frat house, I could never lose myself that way again. There was no longer any room for Martin to be simply my lover and friend. No matter how intimate we were, I could never again feel that we were entirely alone. We had entered this alien space of the real world, where men and women were wary of each other.?

I recently had dinner with a friend who shared the story of a sexual assault she experienced in her early 20s that led to a pregnancy that changed the course of her life. I wondered aloud how so many people could side with 1 man over 28 women, and her explanation was clear and simple: because so many men sexually assault, abuse, or disrespect women in one way or another, they let it slide when they see others do it. Rich, poor, smart, dumb - men of all stripes and colors disrespect women as a normal course of action.

It takes strength of character to go against the currents of disrespect towards women that often present in the form of subtle peer pressure. I’m reminded of an experience I had when I was 12. While gossiping with a group of girlfriends about a classmate, I noticed my friend, Joyce, was silent. We asked for comment and her response was bold and pure: “She’s my friend and I’m not going to talk badly about her.” I was stunned. At the age of 12 my friend already had the courage to stick to her values despite peer pressure. What a badass she was and is (I’m lucky to call her my friend still today). I had not yet seen this level of independent thinking among my peers.?

On many occasions from childhood to the present day, my opinion of others has been influenced by those around me. In high school I recall classmates who were lovely and sweet and warm and funny, being labeled a “sl*t” after which their societal standing took a nosedive. Even though I never knew the truth of the matter, I absorbed the label as truth or at the very least, as a stain on my perception of these young women, and still today - nearly thirty years after high school - I detect within myself remnants of that same negative perception I absorbed.

Thinking about this human inclination to adopt the attitudes and actions of others, particularly during one’s most formative years, helps me understand why disrespecting girls and women is so commonplace in societies around the world. By the time we reach adulthood, we hear and see countless micro and macro aggressions that form our subconscious and conscious beliefs about a woman's place in society. It’s why Andrew Huberman allegedly lied to various women so he could have his cake and eat it too. It’s why people still support Woody Allen who obviously sexually assaulted one daughter and then married his other daughter. It’s why two men were appointed to the United States Supreme Court despite credible claims of sexual misconduct by credible, accomplished women. It’s why men who have never raised a pro-life objection to the death penalty, the killings going on overseas, or United States gun laws, have a lot to say about being anti-abortion. Could it be that “punching down” to control the actions of women is much easier than trying to control the (mostly) men who decide gun laws, the death penalty, or who lives and dies in foreign wars??

I understand: the Roast of Tom Brady was a no-holds-barred diss-fest where everyone, not only women, was woefully disrespected. It was meant to make us laugh in shock, and a lot of what was said was brutal and hilarious, most especially Nikki Glaser’s set - damn she's good. But widespread disrespect for women is no laughing matter. It’s up to each of us to have the guts to detect and interrupt it - the way Tom Brady shut down disrespect towards Robert Kraft, the way Joyce stood her ground about a friend - in order to change the undercurrent of cues that intimate what women are worth. So that the truths we hold to be self-evident are that men and women are equal and should be treated and respected as such.

Thank you May Jeong for the Vanity Fair article and Dr Naomi Wolf for the book.