Men Face a "Moment of Reckoning"

As the national media shifts attention from abuse victims to the due process rights of millionaire predators, allow me to press the “pause” button.

I have tremendous admiration for the survivors of sexual harassment and assault who have publicly named their tormenters. While liberating themselves, they have given strength to other survivors and generated important discussion about the dynamics of abuse.

I don’t know any woman who doesn’t have her own story about sexual harassment. My own experience as a teen aged girl was not nearly as traumatic as the accounts making headlines. Looking back now, however, I think it stoked an indignation about male mistreatment of women that grew over the decades.

I worked as a cashier in a PDQ store back in the 1970s. Male customers harassed me and tried to pick me up pretty regularly. I was underage and these men knew better. As girls and women must, I developed defense mechanisms to repel unwanted, sometimes crude proposals. If someone was persistent, I called my male supervisor, whose arrival caused the mashers to retreat.

I don’t remember being intimidated as much as I was disgusted by their brazenness and presumption. I was what lesbians call a “baby butch” in those days so I certainly was not putting out any welcoming vibes. It’s kind of funny how stupid the men were. But their casual assumption about my availability and their predatory motives were no laughing matter.

The picture isn’t complete without noting that we sold vast quantities of pornographic magazines from under the counter. Hustler. Penthouse. Oui. Gallery. Playboy. Bundles were rolled in on dollies every week. The store made big money from porn. The male employees consumed it during break times. I didn’t complain. I thought they were morons. Such was my girlhood in respectable suburban Wauwatosa.

I moved on to college in the late 1970s and volunteered briefly for the Women’s Crisis Line, where I heard harrowing stories from women terrorized by boyfriends and husbands. It was so disturbing to me I could not be an effective counselor. I decided from then on to express my feminism through journalism.

That 1970s generation of feminists reformed laws related to credit, divorce, marital property, sexual assault and domestic violence. They worked selflessly to establish shelters and victim services. But when writers like Andrea Dworkin, Susan Brownmiller, and Kathleen Barry dared to suggest that toxic masculinity was at the root of the pervasive violence against women, they were dismissed as “man haters.”

Given the sexual harassment scandal; honor killings; the mass rapes of Rohingya and Congolese women; the murder of female journalists and trans people; the elevation of sex trafficking to an international law enforcement priority; and mass shootings by weapon-crazed American men: it’s time to re-open that discussion.

Stephen Marche took a big step when he wrote in The New York Times that men face a “moment of reckoning.” While men are “shocked by the reality of women’s lived experience,” most are “unwilling to grapple with … the often ugly and dangerous nature of the male libido.”

“How can healthy sexuality ever occur in conditions in which men and women are not equal?” Marche asked. “How are we supposed to create an equal world when male mechanisms of desire are inherently brutal?”

This is where the discussion needs to go, and men are an essential part of it.

Jamakaya is an award-winning writer and historian based in Milwaukee, WI.