Most Is Not Enough

So what’s wrong with statements like “not all men rape”? First of all, they’re irrelevant. It’s called derailing; the fact that there exists a man who has not raped anyone does not mean we get to ignore that other men have. Statements like that steer the conversation away from what’s important.

Second, they’re so trivially correct that they’re useless. If I’m talking about how much I hate pepperoni on my pizza, reminding me that some pizzas don’t have pepperoni doesn’t add anything to the conversation. And when we talk about serious things like misogyny or gun control, it’s not as simple as just deciding to order a different pizza.

Third, they’re meant to convey the idea that the number of people who commit these atrocities is small, compared to the vast majority of people who do not. Scratch the surface on that, though, and you find the implication that the person making the statement, who is part of the group, is being unfairly punished for the something they didn’t do. The problem is that the change being sought isn’t a punishment, and certainly isn’t unfair.

Put them all together, and you get a statement that not only fails to add anything to the conversation, but actively redirects it away from the point, and adds a large helping of defensiveness on top. That’s the opposite of helpful.

When we’re talking about cultural change and the question of what we as a society can do to prevent these atrocities from happening, we have to think about balance. No matter what we do, there’s going to be fallout, but we want the positive effects to be bigger than the negative.

To pick an extremely controversial example, if we made private ownership of handguns illegal, it would restrict the social liberties of people who currently legally own handguns. Is that a trade-off that we want to make as a society? I know what my personal answer is to that question. I suspect that everyone reading this knows their own personal answer as well. But I’m willing to bet that many of those answers don’t match up, and that’s why social change is hard.

Here’s another thought: let’s find ways to teach our children to respect each other’s boundaries, and resolve conflict without verbal or physical violence. If we learn that yelling crude remarks at passing women is a violation of our cultural expectations that won’t be tolerated, have we lost anything? You’d have a hard time convincing me that the “punishment” outweighs the benefit to society.

That second example may be a slam dunk for me, and it may be blindingly obvious to me that we should be doing much more as a society to make life easier for currently oppressed classes of people (spoiler: that includes women), but I acknowledge that not everyone feels precisely the same way that I do. When it comes to change like this, the devil is in the details.

Look, nothing about these conversations is simple. It’s easy to get defensive when you’re a member of the class that’s being blamed for something, even if you haven’t done that thing. But the reason those of us in the privileged class need to stop talking and start listening—and I’m a white, male, upper-middle class, American citizen, so I’m smack dab in the most privileged class of them all—is because so often when we do talk, we actively detract from the conversation.

If we want to participate in the conversation, we need to learn how to be constructive. We have to stop getting defensive, we have to stop derailing, and we have to stop injecting pointless noise. Getting out of the way is the first step, but we also need to take positive action: we have to work to make room for the oppressed to be heard, we have to call each other out when we screw up, and we have to look outside ourselves and consider the greater good instead of just our own selfish gain.