YOU CAN'T LEAD AN ARMY WITH SOMEONE STANDING RIGHT NEXT TO YOU

I recently had a really amazing man come into my life. He’s the type of man you dream about as a little girl, but then you spend your life interacting with men and every man you meet just further confirms that men like him don’t actually exist. He’s super compassionate and spends all his time saving animals and traveling with the humane society to other countries to do volunteer work. He’s a really good person.

In the midst of all this another man came back into my life; my brother. He’s the quintessential patriarchal male. He’s self-absorbed, disrespectful, and abusive towards me. It wasn’t always this way with him, when we were little he was my best friend and my hero. And than as we got older and sometime after my parents divorce he started to become a lot like my dad. He went from being the one person who protected me from my dad, to being another one who was abusing me. I still remember when I was 13 and I was sitting in my room playing on my computer. He walked into my room uninvited and just started yelling at me. The next thing I know he spit on my face. My mom was sitting next to me, and I think she was too shell-shocked to say anything. It’s by far one of the most degrading things that has ever happened to me, and I’ve had a lot of degrading things happen to me at the hands of men. This was just one of many incidents of him verbally attacking me and inflicting degrading behavior upon me. My brother decided to come home for a visit and enact his passive-aggressive abusive behavior again, and he wonders why I don’t like him. And no he has never apologized for the way he treated me and continues to treat me, I think he thinks it’s acceptable.

In the crossroads of all of this, I found myself wondering how I could be in a relationship. I’m not gonna lie, there has been way too much damage done to me on a soul level by men to ever have a happy, healthy, normal relationship with a man, even if he is remarkable. I think all of this brought it to the surface, and it's made me really question what I should do about dating. Or if I should just continue to be single (probably by choice forever!) like I have been.

As a man you are either in the group of men who spend their time trying to make the world a better place for us and having a positive impact on everyone (this is probably about 1-3 percent of the entire male population) or you are either in the group of men who abuse us, or you are in the other group of men who have just stood by and allowed all of these horrible things to happen to us. If you are in that last group it becomes irrelevant if you actually agree with the abusive men or not, because by being passive you have allowed them to speak on your behalf and to represent you, and through that you have silently agreed with them and enabled their behavior.

Even if you are in that small group of men who appreciate women, the way that the rest of your gender treats us does directly affect the way I interact with and the way I see you, because you are a man. To think otherwise is just naïve, ignorant, and insanely delusional. The majority of women have a history of abuse (and pretty bad abuse) at the hands of men, and all it could take is you making a comment or raising your voice in the wrong way to bring up a lot of fear. There is also the issue of a lot of women having histories of sexual abuse, and it doesn’t take much for that to be triggered. All it takes is for her to be touched in a certain way or for you to move in a certain way to trigger a lot of really horrific terrifying flashbacks. Then there is the everyday aspect of being a woman, and of course after a long day of being sexually harassed and paid less, I’m gonna come home and be irritable and take it out on you. Then I’ll be angry at you, because it’s like why are you not defending me? Why are you not out there changing things for me? Why is everything so easy for you? Because its not fair! This is why men should always be nice to every woman they meet, because pretty much every woman has gone through hell, and there is a lot of fear there towards men and a lot of pain there because of men. In some cases so much fear that some women can’t even be alone or really interact with men at all, or do just prefer to have their own lives free from them. Contrary to what you guys want to believe, no woman on this planet enjoys being treated like shit.

This makes me all really angry, because it’s not fair that I shouldn't be able to have a happy, healthy relationship. But I also don’t really think there is anything any man could do to change it. Even if he is super amazing, it’s kind of just too little too late, at least it is for me. I definitely don’t need to be “saved”, I’ve done a pretty good job of supporting myself my whole life with little to no help from the male population. I don’t need to be “fixed”, because I’m not broken. Men sure as fuck need to be fixed, and these systems they created just need to be destroyed, but there isn’t anything wrong with me. It’s not my fault if my soul has been damaged from being abused, I wish it wasn’t like this. As does every other woman on this planet.

What I do need is to be respected, celebrated, and valued. I would’ve much rather grown up in a world in which every man was compassionate. And I can’t help but wonder if maybe all of this is to make my mission in life that much easier. My mission in life is to help empower women and girls, and to apparently spend all my time and energy cleaning up this giant fucking mess that the male population has created. I don’t see how I could devote myself to that work if I had a boyfriend, (and as a little Catholic girl growing up I used to dream about becoming a nun someday, and maybe there is more to that than I originally thought) and maybe then it’s actually a good thing that I can’t have a normal relationship with a man. It could very well be the universes way of ensuring that I don’t get too sidetracked while I'm down here.

I guess even putting that aside there will always be a part of me though that would be mad at him as well, because I’ll always look at him and wonder why he let all this horrible stuff happen to me. And part of me will always be resentful and maybe even jealous because his life has been so much easier, and he’s been given so much all at the expense of me, and it’s not fair. I can’t even imagine how nice it would be to simply not have to spend my time worrying about the fact that I have no legal rights to my own body, and not having to worry about being gang-raped for walking down the street. I guess the fact that so few men even seem to care, or notice kind of says everything about how they actually feel. I also feel like I can't say all of this stuff to men, because then they either just dismiss my feelings, or act like it's not that bad. Which then it turn says to me that I need to just be okay with how everything is and with being treated horribly, which then means I have to be completely inauthentic to myself and how I actually feel. Instead of them just understanding what it must be like for me, coming from a place of compassion, and taking responsibility for their obligation as a man to help end it. For now, I’m gonna take things slowly and see, but ultimately at the end of the day all I really want is to be completely free and independent of men. That’s really all I’ve wanted my entire life.