A male perspective on the metoo movement

I have two primary messages in this article; one for men, and one for women. I will start with the one for women, because it’s brief.

My message to women

My message to you is that I have no message to you; rather, I will do what us men have done far too little of — I will listen to you. I’m not going to pretend that I have anything of value on the matter at hand to tell you that you don’t already know a hundred times better than me. All I will say is that I’m sorry for the stupid and offensive things I have done, and that I will do better in the future. So if you have something to share, please feel free to post a response.

My message to men

Guys. We need to have a serious talk. I know a lot of us don’t want to hear it, but this isn’t about what we want to hear, it’s about what we need to hear.

A lot of times, the problems that women bring up as part of the metoo movement seem exaggerated to us, but in truth, they rarely are. Sure, there are cases of people unfairly taking advantage of metoo and making unjustified accusations, but those cases are in the minority. There are a lot more unreported cases than there are false cases, so focusing on the false ones is a mistake.

So when women talk about these kinds of problems, we men need to sit down, shut the fuck up and listen. If we don’t, we can’t complain when women bring up cases from the 80’s and say, “Why didn’t you tell us this back then…