“LOOK AT ME WHEN I’M TALKING TO YOU”
That quote up there? This photo here?
Should be on tee shirts. Hoodies. Bumper stickers. Posters, mugs — big buttons you can pin on your clothes.
At least three billboards outside and inside of every city in America including Ebbing, Missouri where the movie ones were supposed to be.
But most of all, it should be a rule, from now on, that men who truly respect and care about women should follow when dealing with women. All women.
Because in the end, that’s it. That’s the thing. That’s what we’ve been asking for since…Eve.
Listen again. Yes, I know, but listen again.
We’re not talking about “the male gaze.” Which so many of us worked so hard to receive for so long and for so many reasons we ourselves didn’t even understand. I don’t have time to go there right now.
I just remember the moment I first realized what a dangerous thing that “gaze” actually is. What it really meant.
I was in a car with our high school driving instructor who, after telling me what a beautiful young thing I was, how I could have any man I wanted — and…any thing I wanted — started asking me what I liked to “do” with my boyfriend.
When I didn’t quite know what he meant — I was remarkably naive for my age, I have to admit — he gave me a few jaw dropping examples. And later promised if I kept our little “talks” a secret, he would make sure I got my learner’s permit. No problem.
I didn’t care about that. I didn’t know what the hell was going on. I went from flattered, because I thought I should be, to shocked, because…well…just because.
I was young and I’d never heard anything like this and I didn’t believe anyone else would believe me if I told them what I’d heard. I also wondered if maybe that was just “what men did.”
And then there was that “gaze.” At first, I felt prized. I felt pretty.
Wasn’t I supposed to want that?
It would take me decades to sort out what I really wanted. That what we really want, what millions of us wanted especially this week, isn’t to be gazed upon as objects but rather to be seen as we are.
And heard. And fought beside — not “for,” but “beside.”
We needed our brothers to stand next to us as we stood up for ourselves. And to maybe kick a door open, in the nick of time — remember that Bonnie Raitt song? “Love in the Nick of Time.”
It’s a song about a reckoning. A song about growing up. Part of it goes:
Just when I thought I’d had enough
And all my tears were shed
No promise left unbroken
There were no painful words unsaid
It’s also a song about finding just what we needed right when we needed it — love, in the song.
But we were looking for a different kind of love. A more altruistic love born of actual compassion and caring — concern, too, this week. For what was happening to us. And for what was not happening for us.
And we got it. From someone who shocked the hell out of me. I’d just tweeted what a coward Jeff Flake had turned out to be. A politician from right here in Arizona where I live, who’d led me to believe he was somehow different from his colleagues, after all that brave backtalk he’d given 45 over the past few months.
Turns out he is different. Or was for one brief shining moment.
He could not, bless him, just walk away from Ana Maria Archila and Maria Gallagher, those women who cornered him in that elevator. He was like one of those people who, at the scene of some horrific traffic accident, gets a sudden burst of super human strength to lift up a whole car and free someone trapped under the wreckage.
This was more like a train wreck comin’ at us at warp speed. And along with those incredible women, he leapt in front of it. Stopped it, at least for a week.
I owe him more than an apology. We owe them all more than we’ve even begun to imagine.
Three Americans actually made America great again in a few heart stopping seconds as we all looked on…hoping against hope…
But hope arrived. In the nick of time.
Go Bonnie.
