He begins his New York TImes column, titled Checking My Male Privilege, with this paragraph:
With the recent rash of high-profile accusations of sexual harassment and assault — from Harvey Weinstein to George H. W. Bush to Mark Halperin — I found myself feeling shocked at the pervasiveness of this sort of behavior, and embarrassed that I was shocked.
He then cites statistics from the National Sexual Violence Resource Center, including that one in five women are sexually assaulted while at college, and a similar figure will be raped at some point in their lives. Similarly, 8 percent of rapes occur at work, and 63% of sexual assaults are not reported to police, with a shocking figure of more than 90% of sexual assaults on college campuses going unreported.
Blow lists each of these, and other, statistics, as bullet points, which pounds them home more forcefully.
He follows this with statistics on sexual harassment, which are just as devastating.
After telling us that as a father of a daughter he helped her report her own incident, he gives us 3 brief paragraphs which lay out the point of this column:
I have used this column to regularly condemn sexism, misogyny, patriarchy and toxic masculinity.
And yet, I am still shocked when I hear of another case that has real names and faces of people I know. Shocked every time!
This is not because I don’t listen to women or believe them, but rather, I think, because a personally lived experience is a far cry from a passively learned experience.
Blow immediately follows this by discussing himself as large (6’2”, 200 lb) and physically fit man not subject to much of what women experience, which he describes as
This is one of my male privileges, and I have to check it.
He then tells us
More important, I must follow the advice on sexism that I proffer on racism: If you are not actively working to dismantle it, you are supporting it. It is not sufficient to simply not be a sexist yourself if you are a man. You must also recognize that you benefit from the system of sexism in ways to which you may not even be aware.
Let me step away from the column for some observations of my own.
This is not the first time the nation has confronted an issue of male privilege in the face of heightened awareness of what women face. When Anita Hill reluctantly testified against the nomination of Clarence Thomas, we saw how she was attacked, and how the then chair of the Judiciary Committee Joe Biden did not allow testimony by a subsequent witness who would with her testimony have shown that there was a pattern of behavior by Thomas, that pattern being essential to demonstrating the unfitness of Thomas, that this was not an isolated incident. We saw an otherwise good man in then Senator John Danforth come down heavily in defense of Thomas who had been his protege — an action not dissimilar from men whose own careers have benefited from the patronage of Harvey Weinstein in our own time.
Yes, there is false reporting — as Blow cites, between 2 and 10% of rape accusations are false, but that means between 90 and 98% are accurate, and that is just of the small percentage of cases which would be covered by statute that are actually reported.
The inclination to rally around those with whom we can identify in some way, with whom we otherwise have positive relations, is undeniable. We see it not only in men who rally to other men accused (perhaps in some cases with lurking fears about their own behavior) but in phenomena like the Blue Wall of Silence around police and the Catholic Church moving problematic priests around and discouraging people harmed by them from reporting to the authorities.
The Clarence Thomas — Anita Hill matter led to a rise in women running for federal political office, although at that time without a concomitant success rate.
We have seen some rise in political activism as a result of the charges made against Donald Trump (and where are the law suits he said he would file?), but it was insufficient to keep him from achievinng the top office in the land.
Now with the increasing exposure of men with a pattern of noxious behavior not only in Hollywood but in journalism (Roger Ailes, Bill OReilly, Mark Halperin and Leon Wieseltier) we MAY be reaching a point where society is finally willing to take this issue head on. Maybe.
Or maybe not. After all, our aforementioned President has in commenting about the prevalence of sexual assault in the military that goes unreported tweeted the following on May 7, 2013:
Returning to Blow: it is really hard to give the full sense of this column, which you really should read, so to encourage you to do so, here again is the link to it.
He will tell us how we all must be feminists (men, are you listening?).
He knows the exhaustion that can ensue, because after all he is a Black man with all that still accompanies that status in this society.
He writes
I understand that all oppressions are, in some way, intersectional and connected to all other violence, that the empathic connections of ally-ship are multidirectional and reciprocal.
while telling us that he understands that in some ways “ it is hard to stay fully immersed in another person’s pain” when we have not ourselves experienced it — it is a very human limitation, but one that does not free us from starting by acknowledging that fact. We need to listen to the pain those who have been / are still being abused are willing to share
And we have to center the speaker and not the listener, center the person who lacks the privilege and not the one who possesses it.
I am NOT going to quote anything from what remains in the column, two paragraphs which should only be read as a concluding act after having read the entire column, to which I urge you to turn right now.
This is an important column, on a subject critically important right now, for the sake of our children who are watching, and for the sake of all who have been and still are afraid of reporting what they have undergone for fear of shame, of loss of status, of loss of income, of further being demeaned.
Please, go read the column and pass it on.