(some snips)
Throughout my life, I have felt so attuned to men’s feelings that sometimes I prioritized them over my own (all the sex I didn’t want but had anyway) — either to make those men feel better or to protect myself from their wrath; sometimes both. How to soothe them without making them feel emasculated is a balance I never quite nailed. Girls are the ones who are supposed to care about boys’ feelings, boys’ opportunities, boys’ lives. But are boys taught, in return, to care about ours?
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Perhaps some #MeToo’d men and their defenders also believe that their alleged crimes were minor too, if they were crimes at all. At least, they were too minor to warrant anything so severe as an admission of guilt, or an apology, or a proposed commitment to self-betterment — let alone professional or criminal consequences. They’ve pitted their pain from being accused directly against the pain of the women accusing them, and it’s clear whose pain we’re expected to care about more. “I feel sorry for a lot of these men,” wrote Michelle Goldberg in the New York Times, “but I don’t think they feel sorry for women, or think about women’s experience much at all.” Put another way, by writer Heather Havrilesky: “[C]ruel men believe they deserve redemption and eventual exaltation simply because they've suffered. Imagine if women believed that. Imagine if a woman's suffering were even a passing concern.”
“If somebody can be brought down by accusations like this, then you, me, every man certainly should be worried,” a lawyer for the White House recently told Politico, in response to the Kavanaugh allegations. Perhaps he’s right. Every man should at least be actively sifting through their past experiences to figure out if there’s anything they should be worried about, anything for which they might seek redemption. I have a feeling that some of my strongest memories of discomfort and pain at the hands of boys and men are memories of mine, and mine alone. I still remember that crawl space near my best friend’s bedroom, and what happened there. Does the boy who pinned me down remember it, or has that morning blended into the fog of his every other sunny teenage summer?
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But those girls — kids at the time too — they all grow up. We grow up. And we remember.
https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/shannonkeating/brett-kavanaugh-me-too-brock-turner-sexual-assault
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