It was originally going to be titled, "#IBelieveYou, Because I was an Asshole". In the wake of the sexual harassment scandals involving Harvey Weinstein, I wanted to step up and tell women, "Yeah, I believe your #MeToo stories, because I used to be the prick that you're talking about."
How do you go about writing that you used to be a misogynistic piece of shit that sexually harassed women? Hell, with the left's desire to make anyone who has ever done it in their life persona non grata, should I even make that kind of a confession? How many friends would I lose by admitting the horrible things I've done? Would they even want to know why I did them?
Yet the story of Al Franken groping a woman over a decade ago came up, and the ability to write this all fell into place, because these sins aren't just my sins. They're the sins of every man. There is no one righteous, not even one, and there's a reason for that.
We're living in a new age of civil rights, and with that society is teaching new rules on how to treat women. We're being taught things about consent that we literally have never been taught before.
I didn't know about the concept of affirmative consent until long after I got married. And it's not a concept that has been taught well until recently, as this Cracked article can tell you. The article was written in 2015 by a guy that wasn't taught the concept of affirmative consent. He committed rape because instead of his victim saying no, the woman froze in fear. He didn't know that he committed rape until the next day.
Some reading this might want to stand up and say, "Surely you were taught -"
No, we weren't. Seriously, we weren't. We were taught that no means no, but anything less than that is consent.
And there's not going to be a guy with a sexual history of a number of partners that reads that Cracked article without feeling mortified and wondering if he might have been that guy. Every time I see that story I go through my entire history of sexual partners and wonder what if. Because while I may have never forced myself on a woman who said no, I often interpreted body language to mean yes. I'm confident that they all did want to have sex, but what if I'm wrong? I've always been a giant. I really hope I'm not wrong, because it disgusts me to think of the alternative.
That's an extreme example. Let's look at a few others.
George Takei was recently accused of groping a man back in the early 1980s. Not rape, but touching another man's genitals without his consent. You want to see what consent looked like in the 1980s?
I present, the "love scene" of Blade Runner:
Fast forward to around the 3:25 mark.
I've only seen that movie twice in my life. Once when I was thirteen, and earlier last year when I wanted to be caught up to see the sequel. When I was thirteen, I didn't think much of the scene. When I saw it in 2016, I was like, "Um...dude, that's fucking rape. What the fuck."
That was the "love scene" of the movie. That was what society taught was consent in 1982.
A year later, this catchy little tune started playing on radio stations across the country:
The Police's "Every Breath You Take". A song about a guy that's so fixated on a woman that he's literally watching her with every breath...well, it's in the title.
It wasn't until the late aughts that people on the internet began to point out that Sting's lyrics sound less like a love song and more like the rantings of a deranged stalker. I don't need to post the lyrics. We all know the lyrics (even the kids know the lyrics, thanks to Stranger Things).
One of the top love songs of the 1980s was literally a song about stalking someone. Back then, stalking wasn't even a crime. California passed the first anti-stalking law in 1990, nearly a decade after a song came out glorifying it.
Combine all that with the shitty idea that still persists in society's mind-that men ALWAYS want sex and couldn't possibly say no-and I'd be more surprised if a closeted gay celebrity in the extremely homophobic 1980s didn't grab another gay man's genitals in his apartment without affirmed consent. Ideas on consent in the 1980s were extremely fucked up.
That brings me to my own sins.
In my early 20s, I was lonely and angry at the world. I learned from my friends in the military and the internet that the secret to not being lonely anymore was to be an asshole to women. So I was. Like, all the time. A complete and total asshole.
I can share numerous horror stories about how I was a major prick to the women that shot me down. You know all those stories you read now about the women who saved their conversations on Facebook messenger about the guy that flipped out once the woman said she wasn't interested? That was me. Except it was 2003 and I was on Yahoo and AOL Instant Messenger. I sexually harassed many of the female soldiers I worked with in the military. When one female soldier reported a male soldier for sexual harassment, I joined with the male soldiers in freezing her out. She learned her lesson. Can't say the same for the guy she reported. Even when I didn't think I was being sexist, I was subconsciously being condescending as fuck to all of the women I knew. There's times that my wife will mention how I talked to her while we were dating and I wonder why she didn't just dump my ass. I was a jerk, even to her. I've smacked more than a couple of women on the ass despite barely even knowing them. And all the time I did it with the belief that women liked being treated this way.
I don't have any excuses for my actions. I was young, dumb, angry, and wrong. And I'm sorry.
And before anyone says I'm trying to make all of what we did okay, I'm not.
All of this isn't made to excuse any of the actions that we men did when we were young and stupid. What we did was wrong. The thing is that we weren't taught that any of this was wrong. We live in a new age of feminist ideas on consent and equality, and that's a good thing. We men need to change. We need to be better.
There are most definitely exceptions to what we were taught, though. Harvey Weinstein forced women by threat of ruining their careers to have sex with him. He whipped his dick out and jerked off to female reporters. Even if you could pull the "other time" defense here (you really can't), after the first lawsuit got settled he should have known then what he was doing was most definitely not okay. It was criminal, and he knew it.
Donald Trump walked in on teenagers changing during beauty pageants. He may have even raped a thirteen year old girl. Fuck that piece of shit.
Same thing with Roy Moore. That shitbag tried to have sex with teenagers. There's been so many women that have come out accusing him, and even men that have said that they knew what he was doing at the time, that I can't even link to every story. Fuck that fucking fuck child molesting piece of shit.
And just as a side note, I'm getting tired of hearing talk about, "Well, why are they coming out NOW?" Look at how they're being treated now and you have your answer. They're being treated like this NOW, when they're finally in a position to talk about this without having society completely destroy them for coming out. Imagine how fucked their lives would have been if they reported this stuff THEN, when Harrison Ford could rape Sean Penn on screen and it was considered romantic.
So yeah, there are some men that were so fucking horrible, that there isn't a defense. We know not to go messing with teenage girls. We know not to use our job to force women to have sex with us. Those guys have no excuse. Fuckem.
And yet that doesn't change the fact that there is no man without sin. No one. Not even a senator with a proven record of fighting for the rights of women like Al Franken. We men have all done bad things to women. For my female readers, this includes your husbands, your brothers, and your adult sons. It includes the men that were joining you in solidarity at the march back in January. We have all sinned, and fallen short of society's new rules and expectations.
So if every man that has ever done something inappropriate toward women (or in George Takei's case, to men) is going to become persona non grata, every man is going to get tossed into the wilderness eventually. That includes we men that have learned from our mistakes and are now trying to be good allies and create a better world. We were born in a worse age and are living in the new one, and we're hoping to leave the world better than when we joined it. I'm not saying that nothing should be done to make us pay for our actions, yet there has to be a way to make things right without completely ruining people that are now better men. If not, the only men that will come out on the other side are going to be those that were very, very good at hiding their actions, and those that want to turn us backward on the rights of women. Guys like Trump and Moore.
And to the men, we now live in this new age. We have no excuse now. We know what's right and wrong. It's up to us to tell women #IBelieveYou when they say #MeToo, because we all did something inappropriate to women at some point. We know women who tried to report sexual harassment and were punished. We now know about affirmative consent. We know now that there's going to be times when a woman will be too scared to say no, and that's why we need to be sure that they want sex just as much as we do. We know not to go grabbing on random women, and to just suck it up and try your luck with another woman if you get shot down, and to not even try when it's a woman you work with. We live in a new age with new rules, and we don't get to plead ignorance from here on out. We know we need to be better, so let's be better.
Because if you don't want to be better, you will get tossed into the wilderness. Society is moving forward whether you want it to or not. Ignorance is no longer an excuse.
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