Keep Yapping!

and don't get me STARTED on men

Let me tell you some things I am sick of.

Rain. It’s been raining for about three days straight which, to the Irish among you, is nothing, I know. But in the winter, us Hoosiers (Indiana residents, no one knows why) have to endure months upon months of freezing cold, such cold that the snow – which falls in abundance during these months – doesn’t melt, and car parks all over the place end up piled high with filthy mounds of snow-turned-to-ice, and there is truly no respite from this cold and this snow, and sometimes it snows past April into May, and the one compensation we get for this is that the summer, at least, is hot, and dry.

So. I’m sick of the rain.

I’m sick of men. I keep seeing the joke that men should have to start their lives in prison and work their way out and it doesn’t really seem like a joke to me? (Except not my angel baby boys, they’re fine. So maybe “not all men” is accurate. How about this: all men who don’t live in my house.)

The other day, I sat in a cafe doing my work and a man sat down at the counter and started to tell people – people he didn’t know, at least not that I could tell – that “knowledge isn’t the only thing that goes into our decision making” at a volume that implied he was rehearsing for a TED talk and I just thought, guillotine. I’m sure, if given the option, he’d choose prison over certain death (but I’ve been wrong before).

It would be nice if there were women-only hours in cafes, and bars, and libraries. Sometimes, men sit beside me, and I think, please don’t talk to me, and then, mere minutes later, I think, why hasn’t he tried to talk to me? Is it because I’m over 40? Is it because my boobs look terrible in this top? What if he hasn’t even looked at my boobs? Is it because I have a resting bitch face? I should smile at him. Then I think, no, I definitely shouldn’t smile at him. But my traitor brain has already had the first thought and already I feel like a simp for the patriarchy, a wolf in feminist’s clothing.

Maybe I’m just sick of my own brain.

I’m sick of being told what to do by men I don’t know, which has been happening a lot this past week. (Gosh, I wonder why?!)

To be perfectly fair, there have been women telling me what to do, too. Somehow, that rankles less; the internalised misogyny is hard to get away from, sometimes, quite aside from which, women spend so much of their lives considering all avenues, carefully manoeuvering their way around other people’s feelings, managing the emotions of their partners and their children and their partner’s children (and their partner’s parents) and their friends and their friend’s partners and and and… they’re allowed to get it wrong sometimes.

But men* have no such excuse. They’ve been at the top of the pecking order for so long that they have no excuse for making the wrong choice. Jail first, remember?

All week, men have been telling me to be quiet, to go away, or both, but in far less polite terms. Today, a man came into my Instagram comments and called me “mate”; a few exchanges later, when I responded in kind, “good job not engaging with a single point, mate”, he said, “I’m not your mate”. Can they… hear themselves? Read themselves? What happens in those brains of theirs?

He started out asking a question I’d already answered, many times over; why didn’t I “come out” and make my “accusations” about Glen Hansard before he died? As if defamation law doesn’t exist; as if those who know don’t know that Hansard was extraordinarily litigious (in a way that feels very anti-Irish, by the way); as if it’s really easy to accuse someone of something and not be made small, or poor, or criminalised (or all three) as a result.

I’m never more patient than I am when I’m in the middle of a social media firestorm, so I answered him, repeating all of the above, despite having repeated it many times already, in the same comment thread; he stated (erroneously; men love to be loudly wrong, in my experience) that “defamation exists when someone dies mate” (wrong), that “his family can sue you” (wrong), that “you were all too worried about career repercussions, not lawsuits” (also wrong).

I’m sorry, sir, what career repercussions do you think I would have incurred, had I spoken out about Glen Hansard’s proclivities while he was still alive? I mean, it might have been hard to have a career from prison, although, had he sued me, I would’ve been rendered bankrupt, and I actually think bankruptcy would be good for my subscriber numbers. People love a rags-to-riches story, almost as much as they love to see a broke person make bad purchasing decisions, and I’m very good at that last bit.

I told him I “couldn’t give a shit about the impact on my career of calling out powrful men who are also creepy, pedophilic pieces of shit, but I’ve been threatened with lawsuits enough times to know that it’s not always possible” and then I asked, “what is it you think you’re fixing by trying to silence women speaking out about abusers, though?”

His response? “Keep yapping.”

All of this – the reaction to the “revelations” (sometimes we need a revelation, amirite) about Glen Hansard – has really activated me, I must confess. I am really sick of men telling me why, exactly, I chose to speak out about this; telling me I’m money-hungry (lol) and don’t care about the friends and family of Glen Hansard, who are grieving (timing is a big issue with these people); telling me that I’m making this up, that I’m trying to destroy a man’s reputation for no reason; telling me that I’m a failed journalist and pathetic loser who self-describes as a “content creator” and is, therefore, a loser and an idiot.

You’d probably be sick of this, too.

But the reaction has also made me think, wow, this is necessary. We need to speak up more about the terrible behaviour of powerful men. We need to push back more against men who tell us to shut up or sit down or be small, and honestly, when I talk about men, here, I’m not even talking about men in terms of biology or anatomy or gender identity I’m talking about patriarchy, and the tools of same, the people who feel as though we have roles in life that are tied to gender and that we shouldn’t stray from those roles lest we disturb Elton John’s great circle of life, or some such ridiculousness.

Those are the “men” I’m talking about (and therefore I’m talking about some women, too).

The idea of patriarchy; the idea of gender roles; the strict, rigid confines of masculinity and femininity and women’s roles and men’s roles and how those definitions inform our lives serve only to restrict and hurt and hinder not just women, by the way, but all of us.

These are the rules that make men feel they can’t cry; these are the rules that make women think complaining makes them shrill; these are the rules that cause children to say they can’t wear this, or that; these are the rules that make it so that women are less likely to become CEOs and men are less likely to become teachers and women are more likely to feel competitive with other women because they are told, all along, that there’s not enough room at the top for more than one.

These are the rules that keep us quiet and fearful and prevent us from being open and tender and honest, because we’re all too afraid of showing up in a role that’s not for us, in a way that’s not for us, in an identity that jars, that rankles, that rattles and shakes and scratches and doesn’t “fit”, and it all serves to make us – all of us – feel less free to be ourselves. It makes us all less free.

So yeah, keep yapping, mate. Keep yapping. I know I’m going to.

*Please, never forget that “men” is shorthand for cishet, white men and cishet white men, alone. Everyone else is great.