This essay is about misogyny, gender, privilege, and how the very aspects of manhood which we praise and uplift are the same aspects that breed entitlement in men and terrible violence towards, and fear inside, women.

After a young man killed some people in California, we searched and asked the obvious question of “why?” We know how he killed them. He used a gun. Since we as a country find it utterly impossible to change the culture and legal framework of gun fucking ownership, moving to “why” makes more sense to us, is easier, and takes less time. It turns out that the “why” is far worse than the typical, weird, crazed maniac issues. This young man was an active misogynist. He found like-minded misogynist on the internet, talked to them, discussed how he hated women because women wouldn’t love him, posted videos about it, bought some guns, got real annoyed that no woman would touch him, then murdered. Usually, we would focus our attention on the “how”, but the “why” caught the fire in out guts this time. Once we collectively learned that this guy hated women to the point of wanting to kill them and then himself, we asked a great question: Is misogyny a bad thing? It almost feels like we never asked that question before, even though we have spent tons of time with famous misogynist (Shakespeare didn’t write about women all that great, Edgar Allen Poe was weird about women, too. Lewis Carroll wanted to have sex with a little girl and let’s not start talking about Hemingway). We tend to use misogyny in our humor (How many television shows and movies make us laugh because they depict women as either stupid, sex crazed or both). We also celebrate misogyny as a cultural norm (We tell girls not to get raped and we tell boys that sometimes a girl says no but, I mean, they don’t really mean it). But, because murders were involved, and we have the most powerful and the most easy to use sharing tool in history, the mass murder in California allowed millions of women to share their experiences of being mistreated, objectified, abused and generally terrorized. Thus, #YesAllWomen.

If you’re on Twitter, you should spend some time with the hashtag. If you’re not on Twitter, get on Twitter and spend some time with the hashtag. #YesAllWomen is a collection of short pieces about how women suffer at the hands of men. There are stories of being groped, of being raped, of being yelled out by guys when they walk down the street. There are stories of being molested and being told it was their fault. There are stories of women having to fight off men at parties, women being accused of fostering rape, of “asking for it” and thousands more simple tales of women living in absolute fear. This comic by Matt Bors sums it up so beautifully that I had to share it (please don’t sue me).

The #YesAllWomen hashtag is the natural reaction to the #NotAllMen hashtag that had begun roaming the internet. Where “Not all men” is about how asshole males doing terrible things is supposed to be the exception, not the rule, “Yes All women” is about how all women deal with the culture that our society has created, often times with humiliation, often times with emotional violence, often times with physical violence and often times with death.

Yes, misogyny is the “racism” of our time. Just like how my grandparents and my parents had to deal with a level of racism that I barely see now, we have to deal with misogyny because this level of misogyny is out of control. Just like how racism is still an issue now, even after the Civil rights fight of the 60s, misogyny won’t completely go away. That doesn’t mean we can’t try.

When I say “we,” I mean all of us. Men and women. Because the root of misogyny is gender prescription and unless we deal with our underlying issues with gender, then misogyny will continue to be a powerful symptom of a much larger and more horrible disease.

Gender prescription is the idea that men have to be one way and women have to be another way, without any variance or disruptions. If you’re a man, you fucking act like a man. You fix cars. You play sports. If someone steps to you, you beat his ass. You don’t take shit from no one. You fucking win, goddamn it. You take it because the world is harsh and it hates you so take a baseball bat to it and crush it’s teeth. Go buy a gun. Go buy a hamburger. Act like a man in all that you do. Get married. Be the bread winner. Teach your son how to be a man, too. Because man man, man man man, growl man. Our basic cultural frame work is a factory for little women-haters. How can we glorify a sport like football then wonder why our sons have issues with violence? How can we send men off to war and then teach them to kill and wonder why they are fucked up when they get back? And then we say “Thank you for learning to kill and killing…I mean, thank you for your service.” We teach that violence wins, in all forms. Why are we confused when our boys are confused?

Gender prescription is also when we teach women to wear skirts and look pretty at all times and be soft and smell good and expect a man to hold the door for you and you should flirt but not too much and you should be thin because being thin is pretty but you should also have curves so not too thin. Oh, and if you’re a girl, you should not speak up too much because boys don’t like that. Don’t be aggressive. You don’t need to figure out how to change a tire because a man will do that. Wear high heels, even though they might hurt your feet and are not practical at all, wear them anyway. You are a gift! Your body is a gift so be sure to GIVE your body to the right man and enjoy what men do and don’t be afraid to tell a man to “Man up” because sometimes a man needs to act like a man and man man man, man man, growl man. Our basic cultural frame work is a factory for little women-haters and some of those women-haters are actually women. We teach our boys to be men, which by its very nature is a a violent creature. We also teach women to reinforce what men are by teaching girls not to challenge it and in some situations actually encourage “manly” aspects. All of us, men and women, are guilty.

Men becoming violent is so intertwined in our culture that our very entertainment is based on it. Every hit movie, video game, book and television show has violence as the sweet opiate. Whether it’s man on man violence in a kung fu movie or man on woman violence in a rape scene on a cable television show you pay for, nothing is interesting to us unless someone is hurt. Take that away from our extracurricular after-work programing and we would probably all cry ourselves to sleep from boredom.

If we truly want to deal with misogyny in our culture, guess what: we’ll have to change our culture. All of us. We need to say what is in our hearts to be true. What we teach boys and how we teach boys is broken. The only way to fix it is to change what we teach girls and boys. The entire system has to go. All of it.

We have to change all of it because it’s not just a man/woman binary anymore. People are gay. Remember them? And we didn’t even start talking about those that are transgender. None of the bullshit paradigms and stereotypes we depend on really work anymore. What it means to be a “man” or a “woman” is quickly changing. I am 37 years old and I have no desire to shoot a gun. I don’t play any sport. I don’t have a tool box. The list goes on and on. I’m a straight man and I don’t even fit the stupid definition of what it means to be a straight man. We, as a people, are using an outdated rulebook for a game that’s changed dramatically. The worst part is that we don’t talk about it. There’s no wonder that a poor kid can get confused, become angry, become sick and let that sickness make him mentally unstable enough to kill and then kill himself. That poor kid was confused at a world that tells you to do X, but then doesn’t explain that doing X isn’t a good thing to do. We as a people objectify women and then we wonder why a young boy gets angry when the results of objectifying women are fouled and wrong.

Talking about all this won’t bring those people back that he murdered. I wish it could. There is more to this than just misogyny. That young boy was obviously mentally ill. There are more men in the world that hate women more than that young kid did and you probably will never know it. How he got those guns so quickly and easily is another whole mess that we probably won’t do a thing about. So, no, talking about the evils of this culture or men won’t change things quickly. But I do think it will change things. I hope so. I would like to think that there is a guy out there who has read some of the #YesAllWomen stories and decided to re-think what he views as manhood. I also hope that parents think about signing up their sons for art class instead of football practice or maybe give their daughter a set of Star Wars Legos instead of a Barbie doll. I hope that those things happen and I have some faith that they might. I have to hope that. I have to have that faith.

Misogyny is a symptom of our cultural. Aspects of our culture are broken. Until we look at that, all of it, everything we think we know about gender and how it’s all twisted and wrong, until we shed a bright light on that, misogyny is going to ruin the lives of all of us, men and women, slowly and with sporadic violence.