I would like to think that I am pretty in tune with the inner workings of the male brain. I grew up with three brothers, I am close with my dad and I have no shortage of friends who are men. As close as I think I come to understanding men and the way their minds function, there are certain moments that remind me that, at their core, they are still men.
Now, I do not mean to say that being a man is some horrible sin. Rather, there are moments when I am around the men in my life that remind me that men and women truly have some deep disconnect. It is this deep disconnect that causes harm to the members of our society. This partition is something I feel to be a reason why nearly every woman has a painful firsthand account of violence. The seed of this divide can be traced back to the language we use and hear every day.
The other night, at a college birthday party, a group of friends and I talked idly about our days. As we talked about the daily stresses of being full-time students — the classes that are troubling us and the tests we are prematurely stressing over — the conversation moved towards a class many of us share. As we talked about this class, mainly how we find the class to be a waste of time, one of the men in the group began expressing his extreme hatred for the class. He deflected his dislike for the class onto a personal grudge against the instructor, who is a woman.
Rather than reflecting internally on why he would think this instructor may have it out for him, he began to passionately express his deep hatred for this instructor. As he went on his hatred started to feel like a more cruel attack against her. It felt as though the conversation was animalistic as the man verbally tore her apart. As if this poor teacher deserved some divine punishment for wronging them, the man began to imagine and verbalize violent acts he would do to her as a form of justice.
As I sat there beside him, I was overcome with a suffocating sense of discomfort and nausea. I know these comments were made in jest, and I can assume and hope that he will not do what he spoke of, but the feeling of unease still lingered within me throughout the evening.
Later that night, before I let myself drift into sleep, I reflected on why these comments made me so uncomfortable. I was not the one being threatened. It was not someone I cared deeply about being threatened. What I later concluded to be the source of my nausea was the fact that this man had every capability to follow through with these violent acts. Not only did I fear my own fragility but how openly this man threatened violence. If this man, my friend, whom I deemed to be a good person, could so easily talk about women in such a violent manner, I felt utterly mortal and defenseless.
Not only did I feel small, but I began to view him and the other men around me through a new lens of fear. My image of him had changed; he was no longer the docile friend I once knew him as, but instead a possible threat to my safety. I know it is not all men that are dangerous, but it is an incredibly eye-opening realization knowing that even the men closest to me can pose a real threat to my well-being and can openly talk about their violent tendencies.
Beyond just hearing my male friends talk about women in a destructive way, there have been many times I have witnessed even my brothers objectify women. During my family vacations, it is tradition for my brothers to get excessively drunk and have deep late night talks. While I remain the only sober one during these conversations, I enjoy hearing the secrets that slip out along with their sobriety. Usually, these talks eventually land on the topic of girls and their experiences with them.
In their drunk and slurred speeches, my brothers describe their current situationships, always by their appearances and never by their personalities. They describe these girls in such detail and in such an objectifying way that I often feel compelled to step away. Again, listening to these men, men that I love and I find to be good people, talk in such a vile way about women, I get filled with a sense of discomfort. If these men feel so comfortable talking about women in this sort of crude way in front of other women, you cannot help but wonder what they say in their conversations amongst themselves.
Another question that arises whenever I hear men talk about women in front of me is how they view me in comparison to other women. Do they view me as a “bro”? Do they view me as docile or too timid to speak out about their disgusting words? Am I viewed as an entity devoid of gender? These questions only push me further away from feeling as though I understand the functioning of the male brain.
After doing a deep internal dive on the root of the unease I feel while listening to the horrible ways men are able to talk about women, I reflected on what I could do to ease this nausea. I began asking myself, ‘How can I not be a bystander when the bullies are the people I am closest to?’ I have found, through much practice, that the key to eliminating this kind of talk is rejecting it from the source. I have challenged myself, and I challenge all those reading, to speak out against these harmful conversations right when you witness them.
This harmful language from men is universal. The acceptance of this talk is what normalizes things like violence and sexual assault throughout the world. As we hear these violent words, we become acclimated to violence. By staying silent when men talk in this manner, you are implicitly becoming more accepting to violence and sexual violence in your everyday life. Idly listening to men talk about violence shows that you are complacent with violence; it is this acceptance that pirates the seriousness of the matter.
Staying silent will not keep you safe, opposing will. Speaking out against words of violence forces you and those who speak of violence to confront the topic, and thus sit with the discomfort it evokes. I urge you to listen to your discomfort and speak out. You must not accept the prose of violent objectification that men speak in.