My plea:
Men, please do not protect her from her power, her capacity, her responsibility, her consequences, her inability to find her voice, her need to learn the demands of this life. Please do not make excuses for her through your institutions. Do not expect less of her than you expect of yourself (that is arrogance and it disables her). Do not treat her like a doll that is fragile and cannot handle the big girl responsibility of her choices.
Please please please do not presume or assert that you have more power than us. This, too, disables. Our challenge is not lack of power. We make the world go round with our power. Male peacocks grow plumage in order to court our creative power and men drive fancy cars (and do less desirable things like send dick pics) to demonstrate their worth and prowess. We are powerful beyond measure.
That means if we make a bad decision, we not only can but must go through the process of remediating that decision. If we have sex with the guy with authority (not power, never power) and he is as guys with too much authority tend to be – on overdrive, insensitive, disrespectful – well, we will not learn until we develop what is called the experience guru, our inner teacher that comes with consequences.
But get this, and I know it’s hard to hear: if a woman is over the age of 18, a man cannot “groom” her. Wouldn’t it sound ridiculous if you said that about a man over the age of 18? Do you see the implicit sexism and passive oppression of this view? Do not do this or say this. Giving us excuses benefits the patriarchy, not the women in it. It’s called enabling. You get the identity of savior but that means we must always be broken and saved. We remain children, fragile and dependent. And while this might feed your ego it cannot feed your realization. We can receive but we cannot hold; hold the line, hold a bar, hold the weight of our power, our sexuality.
You rob us of that. I’m going to give you the benefit of the doubt and say it’s because it’s the best you know. I’m not going to say – get out of the 1800s where you wanted us like property, chaste and virginal because chaste and virginal is easy to manage, has no opinion, no agency, and is pliant.
I’m going to assume that you good progressive men who buy women’s stories that we just couldn’t – resist, fend off, walk away – are doing so because you have not been initiated into women’s desire and the fact that we feel we must disguise it, conceal it, hide it under powerlessness.
That’s the punchline:
Where men and women come together to maintain the lie that the one with power should play powerless.
Do not let her get away with it; you are harming her if you do.
With love, always with love, know that she is a panther in a cage. Powerful beyond measure yes, but conditioned for confinement.
Lure her out, invite her out, let her out, provoke her out, tease and taunt her out.
But do not under any condition stand guard at the cage and allow her to sleep and acclimate to the cage.
It might be hard.
You might have to admit that your sweet little girl, your innocent woman, the woman who says she has no desire or hunger, is lying to you.
You might have to admit and see the double-bind of women: allow power and desire to flow and be exiled, or play chaste and be cared for.
Reverse it.
Make it that the women who demonstrate choice, agency, desire, hunger—the things of adulthood—get protected from the cruel Scarlet Letter Mind of the culture so that they do not need to dial back, pretend, retroactively deny their choice in all matters, sell their soul and their adulthood in order to belong.
This is the new male honor.