Gentlemen: Please Join Us Beyond International Women's Day
Please read these three books and one Substack
“When I read the emails I receive from white men threatening suicide, I read them as someone who knows what the despair of suicidal thoughts looks like,” Ijeoma Oluo wrote in Mediocre: The Dangerous Legacy of White Male America. “And when I look at the threats and harassment that I and so many women and people of color have received from angry white men, I know what that despair looks like when it’s mixed with the entitlement and bitter disappointment of white male mediocrity.”
Angry men have threatened Oluo with rape and death ever since she started writing about racism in America. They have threatened her children. They discovered her address, made a false report of shots fired at her home pretending to be her son and claiming he had killed two people. They were trying to instigate an armed response to her home where her children slept.
When she started writing about misogyny too, they started threatening themselves.
They blamed her for their own misery, with no shortage of racist and sexist slurs, thereby proving her overarching point: the patriarchy harms everyone.
“These men were trying to terrorize me with what they saw as the only logical conclusion to my anti-racist, feminist work: the mass suicide of white men. They wanted me to know that they saw my work to end violent misogyny and white supremacy, and they saw that it was a threat, not only to their norms and their status but to their very lives,” Oluo explained their false dichotomy. “They wanted me to know that the only option available to address white male patriarchy was either to maintain the status quo that was making us all miserable, or death. They wanted me to know that they were not capable of growth or change and that any attempts to bring about that growth or change would end them.”
Good Guys. I know you’re out there. And I know you’re busy. But I also know that you’re enormously capable of growth and change. As we conclude International Women’s Day, my fervent hope is that we keep fighting for equality instead of “celebrating” this day, together, as though we’ve already crossed the finish line.
Please don’t just private message flowery memes to the women in your life on International Women’s Day. Please keep learning and publicly advocating for social and structural change throughout the rest of the year.
Please share our wildly under-reported accomplishments on your social media like emma hughes🪽 does in badass women in history. Please amplify our deliberately minimized voices when we report discrimination, injustice and violence.
It’s rough out here, gentlemen. But very talented writers have crafted brilliantly readable breakdowns of the nuanced, insidious, and overt ways that sexism and misogyny still thrive in every system.
Reading three books will take more than a day, and you’re navigating outrage fatigue too, but please consider just these few books for now. And please feel free to recommend your favorites too.
Oluo’s “Mediocre” exposes the deadly extremes of male anger and its absurd hypocrisy. Yet it is women’s anger that gets socially stigmatized, belittled, and ridiculed.
Please understand how just absolutely sick and fucking tired we are of being underestimated, overlooked, mocked, objectified, stalked, harassed, assaulted, and raped while an adjudicated rapist is our president and half our government is protecting the powerful men in the Epstein files. But as devastating as it is to be a woman in danger, too many men seem sick and fucking tired of just hearing us reference danger, let alone directly imploring, please stop raping us, please stop killing us.
For men who don’t want to believe the devastating statistics, it’s easier to believe women are exaggerating or even maliciously fabricating false accusations.
Rebecca Traister proves that women’s anger isn’t just rational and justified. It’s not irrational hysteria; it’s the historical spark igniting major political movements from suffrage to #MeToo.
In “Good and Mad: The Revolutionary Power of Women’s Anger” Traister catalogues how angry women have been dismissed, undermined, punished, raped, and even killed for their anger in every single culture during every period of history.
But humanity can’t help but fight for itself.
Traister also addresses the ways white feminists have co-opted the fight for equality and made progress for themselves at the expense of Women of Color.
“The election of Donald Trump over Hillary Clinton for the presidency of the United States in 2016 may have felt like a stinging, agonizing shock to many of us who lived through it. But in the context of American history, it should have been wholly unsurprising. In the wake of a challenge to white supremacy, in the form of two Obama administrations, racism won. Over the threat of a potential female leader, brutal masculinity won,” Traister wrote.
“White women, who — as wives, daughters, mothers, sisters, neighbors, employees, colleagues, and friends of white men — have been offered a proximal power: greater access, via their relation to powerful white men, to wealth, jobs, educational opportunities, housing, and health-care options…” Traister calls out the white women who perpetuate the oppression of People of Color in order to eek out what advantage for themselves that they can.
White women, we need to do so much better.
Lindy West is just as incisive as Oluo and Traister. But she adds unexpected humor to deeply difficult topics.
West rose to fame when her 2012 essay “How to Make a Rape Joke” went viral after a has-been comedian told an audience member it would be hilarious if she got gang-raped right there during his show. That audience member had called out that rape jokes are never funny.
“The best comics use their art to call bullshit on those terrible parts of life and make them better, not worse,” West shrewdly differentiated. “The key — unless you want to be called a garbage-flavored dick on the internet by me and other humans with souls and brains — is to be a responsible person when you construct your jokes.”
When asked why she named her memoir-turned-Hulu show “Shrill”, she explained: “It’s a pejorative that is assigned only to women … it’s not a word that we apply to men; it’s a way to devalue what a woman is saying with absolutely no substantive critique. It’s also a word that’s applied to women who are funny and loud, and who are not meek and quiet and small. So it’s something that I feel is applied to me in a way that’s intended to diminish me. I wanted to reclaim that.”
In addition to the sexism she navigates as a smart, acerbic, talented woman, West is constantly subjected to fatphobia.
“I do not have to feel that my body is inherently shameful or bad or something that I have to apologize for. I think that there’s this notion that it’s OK for fat people to not hate themselves, but they still need to be doing this penance to try to conform to the way society thinks their bodies should look,” West told Seattle Mag.
Body image is not the sole focus of this smart and funny book. But it is another exhausting layer of sexism.
If you don’t have the time or bandwidth to read entire books, please consider following one of the smartest, coolest women online. Liz Plank self-identifies as “a feminist who loves men.” Her 2019 book is actually called “For the Love of Men.”
A flyby over Liz Plank’s headlines alone showcases her range as a modern sociopolitical oracle.
Sometimes glib is the best way to expose bullshit.
“Draft the Podcast Bros: They helped start this war. They can fight it.”
And in Plank’s essay titled “Stop Calling It Sexism. It’s Cowardice” this line summarizes the recent failure of the U.S. Men’s hockey team to stand shoulder-to-shoulder with their fellow gold medalists: “They put their entire dignity and reputation on the line and publicly mocked women that they seem to actually respect, to get the approval of a 79-year-old man in diapers.”
Follow her Substack or join almost a million folks and follow her on Instagram.
None of these books are weighty tomes, nor are Liz Plank’s essays. But nor are they light reads. They should make you mad too. Frankly, the unfairness, injustice, violence, and cruelty should actually infuriate you. And we welcome your rage. When it’s directed at the perpetrators, not us, the targets.
Sexism isn’t a niche women’s issue. These are books all men can explore about misogyny and patriarchy, even if you’re sick of those terms. Especially if you’re sick of those terms.
I know how sick people are of the term “patriarchy”, but it is still a cancer. And women damn sure didn’t cause it. But we can’t cure it without you, dear gentlemen. And if we’re being perfectly honest here, we’re exhausted. We’re suffering from the patriarchy and fighting it at the same time. Sometimes it feels like being the patient and simultaneously trying to be the doctor.
Will you help us find the cure for this disease?
Let’s keep learning together. Not just on International Women’s Day, but all year long.
And it is, of course, trite and internet-obligatory, but feel free to leave your top reads and follow recommends in the comments below. Who am I missing?
love this!!! thank you!!!!!!!!! 💗💗💗💗
Subscribed. Thank you.