The fabulous Melissa McEwan of Shakesville has written a fabulous post about, well, why women don’t just trust men. But that doesn’t do it justice by any means.
The Terrible Bargain We Have Regretfully Struck
There are also individual men in this world I would say I probably hate, or something close, men who I hold in unfathomable contempt, but it is not because they are men.
No, I don’t hate men.
It would, however, be fair to say that I don’t easily trust them.
My mistrust is not, as one might expect, primarily a result of the violent acts done on my body, nor the vicious humiliations done to my dignity. It is, instead, born of the multitude of mundane betrayals that mark my every relationship with a man—the casual rape joke, the use of a female slur, the careless demonization of the feminine in everyday conversation, the accusations of overreaction, the eyerolling and exasperated sighs in response to polite requests to please not use misogynist epithets in my presence or to please use non-gendered language (“humankind”).
Please, go and read it. I guess that many people will have had a look already, because they read Shakesville themselves, or because Tigtog put out the word at Hoyden about Town, but I’m also guessing that many people in New Zealand won’t have seen it yet.
