amen sista!

Via my friend PPG, I read the following, and it is just so, so, so awesome that I am posting it here because I think as many people who can read this should read it.  ESPECIALLY in the wake of the gym shooting in Pennsylvania, which in my mind was absolutely a hate crime against women.  And the following doesn’t just go for men.  I’d say it absolutely goes for women too, and I’ll expound on that after you read THIS, by Kate Harding, whose blog I found recently and have fallen in love with (I censored the profanity because I know some of my readers have issues with it, not because I’m personally opposed to profanity):

You, dear male reader, are totally not one of those men. I know this, and I appreciate it. I really do. But here’s where all this victimy girl s**t concerns you:

• every time you don’t tell your buddies it’s not okay to talk shit about women, even if it’s kinda funny;

• every time you roll your eyes and think “PMS!” instead of listening to why a woman’s upset;

• every time you call Ann Coulter a tranny c*** instead of a halfwit demagogue;

• every time you say any woman–Coulter, Michelle Malkin, Phyllis Schlafly, Condoleezza Rice, Hillary Clinton, Britney Spears, Paris Hilton, any of us–”deserves whatever she gets” for being so detestable, instead of acknowledging there are things that no human being deserves and only women get;

• every time you joke about how you’ll never let your daughter out of the house or anywhere near a man, ’cause ha ha, that’ll solve everything;

• every time you say, “I don’t understand why thousands of women are insisting this is some kind of woman thing”;

• every time you tell a woman you love she’s being crazy/hysterical/irrational, when you know deep down you haven’t heard a word she’s said in the past 15 minutes, and all you’re really thinking about is how seeing her yell and/or cry is incredibly unsettling to you, and you just want that shit to stop;

• every time you dismiss a woman as “playing the victim,” even if you’re right about that particular woman…

You are missing an opportunity to help stop the bad guys.

You’re missing an opportunity to stop the real misogynists, the f*****g sickos, the ones who really, truly hate women just for being women. The ones whose ranks you do not belong to and never would. The ones who might hurt women you love in the future, or might have already.

‘Cause the thing is, you and the guys you hang out with may not really mean anything by it when you talk about crazy b*****s and dumb sluts and heh-heh-I’d-hit-that and you just can’t reason with them and you can’t live with ‘em can’t shoot ‘em and she’s obviously only dressed like that because she wants to get laid and if they can’t stand the heat they should get out of the kitchen and if they can’t play by the rules they don’t belong here and if they can’t take a little teasing they should quit and heh heh they’re only good for f*****g and cleaning and they’re not fit to be leaders and they’re too emotional to run a business and they just want to get their hands on our money and if they’d just stop overreacting and telling themselves they’re victims they’d realize they actually have all the power in this society and white men aren’t even allowed to do anything anymore and and and…

I get that you don’t really mean that s**t. I get that you’re just talking out your ass.

But please listen, and please trust me on this one: you have probably, at some point in your life, engaged in that kind of talk with a man who really, truly hates women–to the extent of having beaten and/or raped at least one. And you probably didn’t know which one he was.

And that guy? Thought you were on his side.

Anyway, I really hope you read all that. ALL of it. Even if you’re a woman. Because we all have guy friends, and we’ve all heard them say things like what’s described above, and we’ve probably even giggled along because we want to save face, or look cool, or seem cute.  But when we let stuff like that slide, we’re saying it’s OK.  And it’s NOT OK.  And we have more power than we know over the people in our circles to help them see how even they, charming, wonderful, sensitive they, are contributing to a culture in which a guy might get the idea that it’s OK to walk into a gym and shoot a bunch of women, because he believes it’s women’s fault he hasn’t had a relationship or sex in over a decade, as if that is every man’s right, even if he’s despicable scum.