Men Don't Care

I’ve been thinking a lot about this Giselle Pelicot case in France – the woman who discovered, after thinking she had Alzheimer’s and other unexplained ailments, that her husband had been drugging her every night and inviting 70-some men to come and rape her over 11 years. The men who refused to participate…also refused to tell the cops. OR HER. Ensuring that this atrocity went on for over a decade. Went to bed thinking that I could count on one finger the number of men I felt I could fully trust to be around, and that man is Keanu Reeves (just too many stories of him being completely decent – pretty sure he would have ratted this whole gang out if he’d found out about them). 

And it’s stuck with me throughout the day. Especially after reading male responses to women’s confirmations that no, they don’t trust men as far as they can throw them. There’s the “not all men” contingent (what about 74 men in a small town plus the 20 or so that didn’t report them tells you that there were some decent men in that place?), there’s the “women are just as bad in their own way” contingent, there’s the “please document with statistics that I can then take issue with and argue about” contingent, there’s the “obviously she deserved it because she wasn’t satisfying him enough with regular sex” contingent, there’s the “it’s the Internet’s fault, men aren’t really like this” contingent, there’s the “it’s her fault, she chose him” contingent….

The reason they argue so vociferously is because the system is working for them and they would like it to continue. After moving out of my ex’s house, and subsequently discovering his secrets – the affair with the college kid across the street, the guns – and his frantic attempts to JUST GET THINGS BACK TO THE WAY THEY WERE when I walked out on him…well, losing me meant that he was losing standing among other men. Your main chick left and you don’t even have your side chick anymore? It was never about me. It was about an all-consuming insecurity that led to an all-consuming contempt. The insecurity of being seen as less-than by his peer group (or an invisible peer group in his mind).

I can definitely see him pulling some shit like this. He used to joke that “women think men care about what they think, but men don’t,” but it only became clear to me later that it wasn’t a joke. And he REALLY liked to “wake me up” with sex. In other words, he liked to fuck me while I was insensate. It worked for him.

It’s the Lundy Bancroft question: “Why does he do that?” And the answer, Bancroft found, is simple: because he can. That’s power. It’s exhilarating. It works for them. It brings them many rewards – obedience, compliance, submissiveness, subservience. They don’t care whether a woman really loves them or not as long as they’re getting these other things. They don’t care what a woman thinks. Any woman. In fact, women having thoughts that are about anything other than getting a man what he wants…those are bad thoughts.

For so long in my life, I thought if I was “good enough” at being a woman, a man would very much want to be decent on my behalf. Which is kind of how I got good at everything – domestic skills (cooking, sewing, knitting, cleaning, organizing, timetables and menus), academic/artistic skills (music, reading, writing, interpretation and analysis), information science skills (understanding media and false narratives), and social skills (graciousness, diplomacy, charm). Who wouldn’t be proud to be with a woman like that? Who wouldn’t love a woman like that? Enormously capable, loving, and generous?

I was playing the wrong game.

And I quit. I don’t know if I’m happier now. But I’m more honest and less deluded. I’m more relaxed and less beleaguered. I’m more at peace and less conflicted.