Men Are, in Fact, Monsters

TW: Rape and sexual assault: I’m going to discuss it very frankly. This is a topic I do not truly understand from the perspective of survivors, so I hope I do an adequate job. Unfortunately, I am an idiot, so caution is always smart.

One of my most memorable regrets happened right after my first kiss. As you might have guessed based on my other blog posts, I had expected my first kiss to be a watershed moment of romantic fulfillment. I expected someone special and the beginning of a beautiful romance. In reality, my first kiss was in the middle of the night in a dorm room. I was drunk, and I had just learned her name. Evidently, she decided to kiss me, and I was like “sure.” So, I had my first kiss five feet from the bathroom where my roommates and I had been showering and pooping all year. I called it quits on the kiss soon enough and I withdrew into OCD, thought about a billion things. I walked her to the end of the building as nerves bubbled in my stomach, and she said some words and hugged me, but I was descending into panic rapidly. Then, she walked out the door and I stayed. 

Months later, it occurred to me that I should have walked her home. It was my obligation to walk her home. Literally, the RA had a rule that girls had to be walked to their dorm. I thought I was the one in trouble, getting tortured by my own brain, but she and I live in two different worlds. Everything turned out fine to the best of my knowledge, and my first kiss is a rather unimportant memory now. But the way I didn’t even consider that I had to walk her through campus in the middle of the night sticks with me. 

I have been paying a lot of attention to the sexual assault situation at the University of Vermont. My brother goes to that school and my kinda-sister kinda goes there too. So, I have a connection to the school, but I will try to summarize some points for those of you unaware. In most studies, the school has been ranked amongst the top ten in incidences of sexual assault, and recently, it has all come to a head. This has happened courtesy of two of the bravest women I have seen on the internet. The first woman was raped before the pandemic sent all university students home. This interrupted her reporting the assault to the school. Since, she has accused the school of attempting to cover up her report because it named a star UVM basketball player who is now an NBA player. The second woman posted one of the most stupendously courageous things I have seen. She posted on Instagram, a message directly naming her attacker.

I want to let those women’s stories speak for themselves. I have read several other accounts, equally as powerful. There are countless women speaking up, standing up, surviving at UVM and worldwide these days. Those stories are theirs and theirs alone, so I will leave my summary at that.

My goal here is to take responsibility for what has been happening in this world of ours from my perspective. The fact of the matter is, men did this. Men are doing this. And I am a man, so I want to find out what to do to help. I’ll start here.

About a year ago, I matched with a girl on a dating app. We texted for a while, and we had a pleasant rapport for at lest a week. We had wanted to meet and hang out, but it was complicated due to COVID. For me, there was another complication. I was, per usual: nervous, stressed, heartbroken, procrastinat-y. She would ask to hang out, and I would flake at the last moment. Finally, I got home from work one night and found the courage. I suggested we get a pizza and sit by the beach and get to know one another. At first, she was down, but when it got to me picking her up the texts slowed. Then, she said what I wasn’t expecting, “I don’t feel comfortable getting in your car.”

I was like, “How the fuck does she know I’m a shitty driver?” Of course, that’s not why she felt uncomfortable, and I’m sure every woman reading this knows that. I realized it too and was taken aback. I laughed to myself at the fact that she didn’t realize how scared I was of the date in the first place. Imagine thinking I was dangerous!

So, I got ready to soothe her worries with a text expressing that I am a perfectly kind gentlemen, but I had to pause. How the fuck do you explain that to somebody? Talking about all the bad stuff you won’t do to someone seems counter-productive and dare I say creepy. In fact, she had met me online a week ago and had never seen me in person. The truth was she had every right not to get into my car and every right to be apprehensive of me. So I told her that. I told her I understood her concern and said it was too late anyways.

It’s frustrating that we never did meet, but she did the right thing, and I think I did too.

The experience was another reminded that I am part of a world I don’t fully understand. I don’t have a woman’s concerns at all. To be fair, I know how to fear for my life. I’m scared of fucking glasses of juice, but women have to fear that half the population of the world might decide to hurt them, and you can’t say they’re wrong. All of it leads me to a conclusion.

Men are monsters. I don’t mean just the murderers and rapists and assaulters. I mean me and you. All men are monsters. Or, to put it more specifically, all men are powerful.

Imagine if you were having dinner with me and I just whipped out a big-ass gun and pointed it at your head with my finger on the trigger. I smile and I promise you that obviously I won’t blow your brains out. We’re friends. Then, I ask you to pass the butter. How comfortable do you feel? That’s a pretty extreme metaphor, but I think it works. You see, power corrupts absolutely. 

Look, I’m a good guy. I would never actually shoot you. I just want butter. Frankly, I need the last of the butter you have there. Damn it, I deserve it don’t I? I cooked the meal, I did the dishes, I’m hosting. You know what, I have a gun. I can use it briefly just to get my fucking butter, and then that’s it. I’ll use it just once  to get what I deserve. 

You see, it’s a different thing to want something and to have the power to get what you want. That’s when power corrupts. I’d love the butter for my bread, but I’m not going to get in a losing fight over it. You hand me a gun? Well, now I can get the butter if I just push my moral line a bit. And that’s a summary of the time I had dinner with Taylor Swift and she held me at gunpoint. I’m joking.

If you haven’t been following the metaphor, I’ll put it plainly. Men are physically stronger than women. Almost every man has the ability to take what they want from any woman. That is fucking terrifying. 

I would never hurt someone. I would never ever do the monstrous things that deplorable pieces of shit out there do. But, I could. It makes me sick to write that, but it’s true of me and every man. There’s a responsibility we need to take for that. We need to be responsible for what we can do. 

I’ll take it a step further. I recognize the root of evil actions in myself, in my friends. In my last post, I discussed unrequited love at length and the moral issues with it. Unrequited desire, in my opinion, is a different beast. Every human being knows desire because it’s a natural thing. Insecurity is another. The feeling that we are inferior, that we are falling short of some expectation. For men, it is the desire to be a man. To be cool and to get girls is a pressure almost every guy knows. These things exist in me, and I suspect they exist in my friends too.

But, none of that is an excuse. These are the reasons for being a monster that I can understand. I know desire and insecurity intimately. I know what it’s like to struggle with mental health. That said, the second a man uses these things to assault a woman is the same second where I don’t give a single shit about their “mental health,” and it’s the same second where I will erase these assholes from the planet.  We have to fight against unhealthy desire, we have to talk back to insecurity. This is what we can do to address the errors in masculinity before it’s too late. But, most of all, most essentially, we have to care about other people and do the right fucking thing.

I have one more story and then my final thoughts. 

I’ve mentioned a regret of mine and an eye-opening exchange, but my last story takes me back a few more years. Again, I re-consider these events in a new light. Like a lot of men, I asked a woman to be my date to a dance. On this occasion, I picked my date up and I drove her to pictures and then I drove her to the dance itself. After the dance was a party.  Now, she wanted to enjoy herself and drink along with everyone else, but she didn’t want to sleep over. Can you blame her? Those parties were fun but gross. Fortunately, I had no desire to drink, so I drove her home at around 3 in the morning. It safely ended what was a wonderful time, and I went to bed at my own home with a smile. Hopefully, she did as well; I bet she was still laughing about one of my classic jokes.

Anyhow, the point of this story is one memory that stuck from the next day, courtesy of my mom. She had heard from my date’s mom during the dance, the previous night. Her mom had said something along the lines of, “I’m glad my daughter is going with your son.” Honestly, it’s a pretty innocuous compliment that she probably didn’t think twice about, but it still means something to me. It’s not the comment itself that I think of but what it reminds me of. You see, before her daughter got in my car, her mother had to trust me. If only for a night, she trusted me with the most precious person in her life. 

I took that trust for granted at one point, but it is a solemn responsibility that I took on. Being a man is a responsibility every day. Of course, I was never going to fail that girl or her mom. But, there’s plenty other girls out there I can’t fail either. I asked this particular girl to a dance but how about when I do something as simple as get into an elevator with a random girl? How about a girl I meet at a bar? What about a study session alone in the library? These are all moments of responsibility. This is where we owe it to help each other. 

So, men, we need to recognize that we are monsters. And it is our job to be part of the solution.

Look to the women. Believe them and support them. And if you can earn the trust of women, that’s when we go from monsters to men. Let’s be good.