Vipers Dressed in Empaths' Clothing
Bloody urine and why women choose the bear.
TRIGGER WARNING. References to sexual assault and allegations.
Hi (No) Wonder-ers,
There’s something to be said for the element of surprise, and for how unpleasant surprises can hit like a worse betrayal than that bite of oatmeal raisin cookie you were certain was chcolate chip. Or the fart that turned out to be… more than a fart.
Or the matter of Neil Gaiman.
Over the course of decades, Neil Gaiman endeared himself to many with such legendary fantasy works as “Good Omens” and “Coraline.” He had also generated much goodwill with a seemingly wholesome social media presence. When a debut fantasy novelist tweeted that only two people showed up to her first-ever book signing, Gaiman shared that he’d had a book signing where nobody showed up… following which many other famous authors including Stephen King, Jodi Picoult, and Margaret Atwood shared their own stories of poorly-attended book signings. In addition to seemingly lifting literary colleagues up, he also favored LGBTQ+ representation in his work and encouraged men “don’t close our eyes and minds to what happens to women in this world.”
So it came as a disgusting surprise that Neil Gaiman is part of “what happens to women in this world” after all.
Vulture reported on some very disturbing sexual assault allegations in harrowing detail. Admittedly, I could stomach only a few paragraphs before disgustedly closing my computer and concluding that this guy is actually a sick fuck.
Not every predator will be transparent enough to advertise their predatory nature. Some, like Neil Gaiman, are what Taylor Swift called “vipers dressed in empath’s clothing.” I’m sure some online Monday-morning quarterback will slide into my mentions and tell me they always knew Neil Gaiman was a monster, but the salient point is that others have no way of knowing whether a man is “one of the good ones.”
So I can’t take it personally when women don’t trust me, or when they would rather encounter a bear in the woods than someone who looks like me. This is why I don’t react viscerally when women point out the realities they face in Living While Female. It has nothing to do with me personally. Taking it personally would be a cognitive distortion on my part. Specifically, personalization.
“But hashtag-NotAllMen! It’s UNFAIR to paint with such a broad brush! Blah blah blah.”
Yeah, miss me with that. Getting murdered by their male partners is the leading cause of death in pregnant and postpartum women. Over half of female homicide victims are murdered by a current or former intimate partner. Women can’t tell men “no” without fear of getting killed for doing so. The stakes for women’s interactions with male strangers, specifically death and survivor’s trauma, far exceed those of our bruised fee-fees.
Diana Cheng
CDC
admin
So unless we’re in Iowa and ate a Deep-Fried Jalapeño Twinkie on a Stick that's currently wreaking havoc on our stomachs, we don’t get to complain about “fair.” Fair jumped the shark, harpooned it like Scorpion from Mortal Kombat, and grilled the remains. Guy Fieri tasted it and it took him to Flavor Town.
My mother, who spent decades impressing upon us that “life isn’t fair,” is reading this with the biggest smile on her face. See ma, I listen!
OK, let’s talk about bloody urine now. (Bear with me, I promise it’s relevant to my point.)
If a patient comes to my office with microscopic blood in their urine (“hematuria”), there is statistically about a 3% chance that it turns out to be some kind of cancer. Mathematically, this means a 97% chance that the microscopic bloody urine is NOT cancer. Admittedly, the majority of bladders that microscopically bleed turn out NOT to be cancer. Does this mean that I can dismiss every microscopic hematuria consult as #NotAllBladders and proceed as if the risk is 0%? Does this mean that we ignore the stories of those whose hematuria turned out to be muscle-invasive bladder cancer, or that these survivors are making their stories up, or that their stories aren’t valid, or that they are being unfair to the poor innocent bladders who bleed benignly? Of course not. Every bleeding bladder deserves due diligence: a workup in the form of imaging and a camera in the bladder (“cystoscopy”). Once we’ve confirmed that there’s no nefarious underlying cause of the hematuria, only then do we exhale our sigh of relief.
Thus men are like bloody urine: both may often prove innocuous, but that doesn’t make such an assumption categorically safe enough to ignore the potential for harm. Nor does it give us men the right to get all butthurt when women acknowledge their sexist reality or exercise due diligence in assessing us. To put it mildly, we have historically not earned the benefit of the doubt. We’ve created a sexist, patriarchal rape culture where too many Marilyn Mansons, Neil Gaimans, and Danny Mastersons are allowed to be predators for far too long – with the tacit support of too many Ashton Kutcher-esque “good guys” who pat themselves on the back for their “goodness” while upholding this status quo. Many soi-disant “good guys” seem much more concerned about defensively and dismissively asserting their own supposed personal virtue than they are about acknowledging and changing rape culture. While the #NotAllMen knee-jerk may be true on the surface, it is ultimately dismissive and unhelpful in addressing the systemic cultural problems that create too many SA tragedies. Thus, fellow men, the answer to this not to gripe and moan about being “unfairly” judged, but to acknowledge and change the sexist, patriarchal culture that benefits us and harms women. Or at the very least, acknowledge the validity of criticisms against men who are not personally us.
The knee-jerk #NotAllMen MRA’s who take any such scrutiny as a personal affront would do well to ask themselves why they do. After all, a hit dog hollers.
Nothing Personal,
Merrit