Saying “Not All Men” Makes You One Of Them

By Hailey Jang

*CW: first paragraph includes mentions of a gun, mentions of sexual assault and rape throughout.

Let’s play a game.

In this game, someone hands you a gun and tells you, “This gun has 5 barrels, and only one of them is loaded. If you want to win, you have to place the gun against your head and pull the trigger.” Most, if not everyone, would refuse to play the game because even though the probability of not pulling the loaded barrel is a large 80%, there’s still the 20% risk that you end up dying.

So then it also makes sense that though women are aware not every single man will be a perpetrator of sexual harassment or assault, women still don’t want to take that risk. They instead will take all precautions, necessary and unnecessary, to avoid being the one out of five women who experience attempted or completed rape, as the Centers of Disease Control and Prevention reports.

It’s not strange or uncommon for a woman to feel unsafe when she notices a man behind her when she takes walks; it’s not strange for her to avoid the woods on a walk even in the sweltering summer; it’s not strange for her to pretend to be calling someone on her phone when she’s walking alone or in an Uber or taxi. These, among others, are just some of the actions women have to take to make ourselves feel a little more safe and secure.

When incidents of rape and/or death come out on the news or when women argue that they live their lives always in fear of men, there are waves of men who argue back “not all men.” However, this does nothing to address the actual problem. Instead, the men who post #NotAllMen on social media or show support for the idea take the attention away from the real problem and shift the focus of the narrative to themselves.

Why is it that they feel like everything has to. be about them when it’s not? If a man isn’t “bad,” then he shouldn’t feel personally attacked when he hears that a woman is scared that she might be sexually assaulted by a man. The real problem men should be addressing, instead of trying to take the assumed blame off their shoulders, is that we live in a patriarchal society that turns the focus onto men while placing the blame and burden on women to take actions to protect themselves.

An additional problem is that our society allows sexual assault to continue with few perpetrators being properly punished. If you say “not all men,” you are one of them because you are ignoring the real problem and being a part of the society that allows the problem to live on. Just as a victim can resent a bystander for not helping him or her when being bullied, women can resent the men who. neither listen to their worries nor acknowledge the problem, let alone do anything to stop it

Below are informational and action links to prevent sexual assault; remember, it is your actions and attitude toward women that really prevents sexual assault and helps women.

https://www.rainn.org/articles/steps-you-can-take-prevent-sexual-assault

https://www.rainn.org/about-national-sexual-assault-telephone-hotline

https://www.nytimes.com/2014/02/09/education/edlife/stepping-up-to-stop-sexual-assault.html