For the first time in your life, you will be the one forced to listen.

Your whole life you have lived in a space where it is acceptable for you to listen to no one other than yourself. People make excuses for your actions. Hell, they make phrases that normalize your destructive behaviors. Second grade: the first time I heard the phrase “boys will be boys.” A male teacher’s response when a boy pushed one of my girlfriends. This also being the first, but not the last, time I learn that going through the system that already lacks compassion for my kind, simply doesn’t work. If you’d like more information on that, talk to your local Teenage Trans Student, who is not able to use the bathroom in their own school. But I’ll bring that up in another poem. I want to say I almost feel sorry for you. You have had to face nothing like this before. You have NEVER seen women so pissed off and tired of letting men abuse and shame them. So complacent in other’s dehumanization that now, when we refuse, you simply don’t know what to do. See… us? We are strong. Our walk to a car is a fight. Our EXISTANCE is a fight. You get mad when women on Twitter say you ain’t anything, then turn right back around and prove their point. I do feel bad ignoring the ones whose personalities are not so drowned out by toxic masculinity that they know: if it isn’t theirs; don’t touch it. A lesson that we have had to reiterate to boys since the first grade, yet they still can’t get. However, from what I’ve seen: those men are hard to come by. Yes, I understand, good men do exist, and I appreciate you, more please. But this poem? This poem is a cry for help. A cry for justice. This poem is an attempt at a spark of a flame because if you really want to make that statement true, and you really want it to not be all men, you must hold other men accountable. I’m talking about Brock Turner. I’m talking about Harvey Weinstein. I’m talking about the men whose names we will never know because they got away with raping young girls of color, because our society already devalues them. Someone in the U.S. is sexually assaulted every 98 seconds. Just by the time you are done reading this poem, 4 people will have been assaulted. So, whilst it may not be all men, it IS a lot. Not to mention the male privilege that every and I mean every man receives. And no, this does not mean you will never face a single problem, it does however mean: you will be paid more than a woman for the same job. You don’t have to walk to your car, keys between your fingers. You don’t fear for your life in the night, on the sidewalk. There is serious systematic oppression happening, and you cannot merely say ‘not all men’ to justify it. If you are aware of the problem yet do nothing the help it: you are part of it. Something else you learn through struggle: silence is just as much an act of violence. You ignore the problem only to exclude yourself from any possible solution. Lastly, if you must say “Not ALL men,” you’re exactly the man I’m talking about.