Ron Collins
Jul 10, 2017 · 2 min read

And that’s what I’d urge all privileged white men to do. Shut up (unless you’re going to ask thoughtful questions) and listen. Give us back our voices and make us visible. Believe us. That’s the job of an advocate. Lift us up onto your broad, manly shoulders. Activate us. You won’t regret it.

I don’t know quite what being “white” has to do with any of this, but a great many men have done exactly this: shut up, make a woman visible, lift her up and activate her.

And come to regret it.

I haven’t known a lot of kept women. If making your own decisions with no one compelling you to, to accompany a man on his journey, is your being “kept”, I’d say the trouble is more with your decisions than with the man.

But I have known plenty of kept men, men who spend their entire adult lives trying to jump through one hoop after another, to “activate” (or the more accurate term being “obey”) one woman, and that woman having no more ability to keep herself from being absolutely corrupted by such absolute power than any man ever had, and he comes to regret it bitterly.

As I usually find in tales of woe by women about this alleged “patriarchy”, it is there as the meaning of life because you need it to be, and need it for cursing it’s sake to avoid taking account for your own decisions, but ultimately it turns out that you want your patriarchy ready and waiting, right where you can get it to step and fetch when ordered to by the ladies, which it generally does.

And is learning, at long last, to regret it.

Don’t want to be kept? Then carry your life on your own broad shoulders, and learn for once that we might have something better to do as men, than carrying you while you congratulate yourselves for how much you don’t need us.

    Ron Collins

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    Recognizing that women have no need of any special status granted them by men is as respectful of women’s abilities as it is protective of men’s