Before you start shouting #notallmen, consider your role, not as a perpetrator, but as an enabler of men’s violence against women.
When was the last time you let down a woman by letting a sexist comment slide? When did you last make the decision that you prioritised your own https://twitter.com/realcarrickryan/status/1384676341446893569

status/privilege/ranking amongst the bois/in the workplace/at team sports/within your extended family over doing what is right and needed? When was the last time you should have said something but chose to stay silent?

When there’s cake at the office for someone’s birthday, do you step in when women are setting the table/cutting the cake/cleaning up? Do you frame participating in housework&childcare as “helping” your partner or are you just pulling your own weight as an adult&father?

I think a far more powerful exercise than shouting #notallmen is to actually sit back and reflect on the many ways you yourself benefit from gender inequality. Bring to mind the times you didn’t speak out when you should have. Decide that the price for MVAW has to be paid by men.

Men rarely want to give up status within their own peer group by pulling up a mate when that isn’t “cool”, but it’s time men pay the price instead of that man being enabled, led to believe his attitude is tolerated and women ultimately suffering for it.

A simple example is a client of mine telling me he had a colleague in the office making slut-shaming remarks about a tinder date he’d gone on over the weekend. My client thought that wasn’t on, pulled him up on his remarks&challenged his 1920s attitude towards women.

He doesn’t think he needs a cookie for doing the bare minimum (this convo only came up because we were talking about an adjacent topic)&most importantly this actually needs to occur every single time this happens. It’s only when we change the peer culture that we will see change.

This exercise is also powerful for other forms of oppression and privilege. Ie a white person thinking about the many times they let a racist comment slide, a hetero considering last time they assumed heteronormativity.

Rather than pointing the finger at others and how we are not “like them” which allows us to subsequently pretend we aren’t part of the problem, it’s actually necessary we understand our role as bystanders and the very enablers of the problem.