They are the co-workers who treat me with respect the editors who’ve shepherded my essays with insight and kindness and the men who are loyal, loving partners to my good girlfriends.

In her book “Men Explain Things to Me ,” Rebecca Solnit writes, “Violence doesn’t have a race, a class, a religion, or a nationality, but it does have a gender.” And in an interview with Democracy Now after the shootings in Isla Vista, in which Elliot Rodger spread terror across a college campus, Solnit elaborates, “Every woman, every day, when she leaves her house, starts to think about safety … women are so hemmed in by fear of men, it profoundly limits our lives.”īut I live in, if not a man’s world (at least, not always), a world of men. Sometimes I still wake up with that copper-penny taste in my mouth, only this time, it’s not just fear-it’s anger: Every day brings some fresh Hell of sexual and gender-based violence.

My father took a hammer to the circuit box, left me to wander the rooms of that dark house and the neighbor boy who made “a secret game” of putting his hands under my dress while we sat on the couch, watching videos of Disney princesses whose happy endings came in a man’s kiss, pulled me into the basement. My mind was still a dark house, waiting for positive moments-happy memories in the making-to light up each room. Something cowardly and brute, something that hit you with its belt and pulled you beneath your favorite Lion King blanket and stuck its fingers into your vagina. Until his family moved, I’d see him at the bus stop, and that copper-penny taste of fear would flood my mouth.īefore I could ever know anything different, this was maleness: aggression and protection, equally awful. And he was the axis of the turning world-at least to my mother, who sent my abuser (a choir boy, a Boy Scout) home to his parents with a polite explanation that he was simply “too old” to be babysat. We were bellies and backs and cheeks, the soft places that bore his anger, or any feeling that found expression in his fists. My mother and I were images in a photo frame that assured his bosses he was a family man, a man who could be trusted. My father was the flint-fisted epitome of the “alpha male” that the pick-up artists and the frat boy wolf packs aspired to be. When I finally told my mother that the neighbor boy she’d been “babysitting” - which meant leaving the two of us alone together while she watched her soap operas upstairs - had started “touching me in weird ways,” she told me, with a forcefulness I’d never heard in her voice before, to never ever say anything to my father, because “Daddy would kill him,” and “we’d lose Daddy forever.” And we certainly didn’t want that.

How to date men if you hate men