It's time to end men.
How did it feel to read that sentence?
It was frightening to type it.
It’s scary to think it, as I thumb notes for this article into my phone on the train, standing against the wall so my screen wasn’t visible to anyone else.
Someone could be reading over my shoulder. Someone taller, richer, more connected. Someone who probably knew a QC, or at least an expensive lawyer, or had a beautiful sister or daughters, and could bury me in court. Someone who might have the impulse to follow me off the train and the 500 metres to work, so he would know where to wait for me in the dark.
A man.
There is a man inside me more often than I would ever admit. It’s a muddy voice in my head that guides me towards the bright lighting on the platform, and away from the side streets near the pub after sports games and 7pm on any given night.
This is a man that we’ve all tried to change – some of us are still in the trenches. This is a man who rapes and murders and grooms and attacks and assaults. This is a way of being men that is arrogant and cheats and stands up and ghosts and murders women who have given them an opportunity at love, connection, equality. If we’re not complicit, we’re complacent. And our complacency is killing women all over the world, today. It’s time to end men, and begin again.
I have been called a man-hating lesbian more than once in my life. Perhaps it’s true – I am a lesbian, after all. And I do hate the current method of manhood. I’ve been hurt by it. I’ve been assaulted by it, and embarrassed and catcalled and underpaid and disappointed by it. Even as I type this sentence, I have my mother’s voice in my ear.
Hate is a strong word.
And it is. And she’s right – it is indeed a question of strength. That’s why men have occupied the status and privileges they have – the fact that we’ve all agreed to believe the archaic and misplaced idea that, because men are sometimes physically larger than women, that they are somehow more capable. As if having more flesh makes you smarter. We all know that’s far from the truth. Yet, the still afford men the carving knives at Christmas tables, the largest helpings, the benefit of the doubt.
I have no doubt any longer.
This week in Australia, a man stabbed five women to death in a shopping centre. A woman was found in a burnt-out car. Investigations continue into a missing woman who went for a run, which would prove to be a fatal mistake. And it’s only Tuesday.
We’ve tried negotiating and understanding and attempting equality. Still, we are murdered and raped and the onus is still silently on us. Your HR department will say it’s unacceptable. That there are systems in place to protect us. Your local politician will tell you they have a plan. But we know. We can feel it in the air, in the space between the office and the kitchen. In the moments we pass a group of men in an alley or at a bar at a dangerous time (any time of day or night).
Like the temperature, there is an invisible ‘feels like’ barometer for danger built into many women. The truth is in our lived experience. The unsaid. They tell us it cannot be legislated if it lacks words. If there’s no-one to corroborate your statement. And so, we are each other’s witnesses.
I’ve seen the way he looks at you.
I know how hard you work and what you deserve.
I believe you without a shadow of a doubt when you say you have been stolen from, defiled, disenfranchised, undervalued, shamed and undercut.
I have seen it with my own eyes.
I will be your witness.
Since I was a small dykey kid, I wanted to be a buffer between men’s behaviour and women. I wanted to put my tiny lesbian body in between my Year 6 teacher and her dumb boyfriend who made her cry in the maths room at lunch. When I was 23 and my best friend told me what her partner had done to her, I wanted to perform a citizens arrest and lock him away for life. Of course, despite the damage he did, much of it illegal, she was too scared of how it might fuck up her life to report him to police. So he was free to fuck up hers.
As an adult, I can’t tell you how many women I know that have declared at some point in their journey of being attracted to men, that they wish they were gay, or would try it to make sure they really couldn’t make it work. Despite this conversation being a difficult one for many queer women, it speaks volumes about the disillusionment many heterosexual women experience in romantic relationships today.
Call me a man-hating lesbian or a self-important dyke all you like. I may be those things, but I am a woman first. And I know what it’s like to fear men’s bodies, in a way that makes my memory wince and my left eye twitch. The phrase ‘If you know, you know’ rings too true and tragically through our sex.
There is no decision to be made. History has made the bed of men – because their mothers or wives have done it for them their whole lives, and they never learned how. The malignant iteration of man that we have tried for so many years to rehabilitate is too far gone. It’s time to call it.
As a survivor of men, this is a searingly vulnerable thing to speak. I feel clumsy and inept in the presence of these words, much like I do in the presence of men.
As I write, I’m on a train packed with men who are sitting on the scarcely available seats while single mothers stand with their weary children. I’m on my way to work a job I’m staying in because it’s 90% women and I feel safer in this office than I ever did on busy film sets with barking men, or quiet dressing rooms ringing with the sudden absence of a witness.
I’m not sure that I have the courage to publish this. After all, I’m still a woman, still human, still on a train alone.
While I decide how this will end, I’ll leave you with an Instagram story that I scrolled past before I began:
Men: but if we’re not here, who will protect you?
Women: from who?
TN