When Men Attack Women, We Are Proving We Are Lost
Enough of men’s inaction and weak moral timidity.
It’s often said that patriarchal men fear women gaining power. That the war on women is born out of men’s fear of losing power.
I don’t buy that argument at all. There’s no fear here for men. The war on women being waged by MAGA and Project 2025 here in the US and by other men globally is not some kind of irrational response. Among its leaders, it is a cold-blooded, cynical, carefully premeditated effort by patriarchal men to maintain power.
Cascading down from that is violence by individual men. Again, not fear. It is the assertion of anger and power over. To paint it as some kind of a panicked response at any level is to diminish the degree to which it is an utter and unrelenting premeditated moral failure.
When men attack women, they are not afraid, they are doing evil. Just as the millions of men who continue to sit on the sidelines in silence and watch women under assault are also doing evil. Enough of men’s cruelty and bullying. Enough of men’s inaction and weak moral timidity.
When we root men’s need to have control over women in fear of losing their position of superiority instead of in such men’s appetite for power, we infantilize men, saying in effect they’re scared little boys. It grants a degree of moral ambiguity in how we judge their actions.
The war on women is systemic and structural, utterly premeditated and rooted in an appetite for power over women. That’s not fear.
While many note that men are driven by fear of loss of power we must go one layer deeper. Without the appetite for power over women, the fear of the loss of it would not exist. That appetite for power over women is the core driver of toxic masculinity conditioned into boys and men by our Man Box culture of masculinity. Rejecting that conditioning is the root moral choice point.
Men need to stand up with women as individuals, as our partners, and as our leaders. Enough of this dark ages power-over destruction of everything. We’re running out of time for our species and for our planet.
