A 2-star QB scrambling for potentially the national-championship-winning touchdown on 4th down in his hometown against his hometown team after winning the Heisman for the most losing program of all time while his mother with MS screams for joy from her seat is possibly the limit of how good sports can get
"It's time that the macho, patriarchal society that trivialises rape changes,"
"It's time we changed the way we look at rape."
- Gisèle Pelicot
These words Gisèle ends her time on the stand with carry the voices of countless women who have endured lifetimes of a rape culture in a society that routinely subjugates women and erodes their strength. Yet, women in this fight cannot be the only ones to dismantle these abusive patriarchal structures that men built. Men must join too.
Whether you help build or perpetuate it, we are all collectively responsible to help tackle these structures. They exist in our homes, our social lives, working lives, the institutions charged with protecting us and delivering justice... there are opportunities everywhere to support women and tackle abusive men.
Ordinary men in society commit acts of violence against women, and ordinary men watch on. Ordinary men make sexist miosgynistic comments, and ordinary men think that's as far it goes.
It is not. If anything, this case should teach you that.
Behind closed doors, behind the frontages of many ordinary looking men in society there are abusers, perpetrators of violent emotional, coercive, financial and physical acts against women. It's time to stop pretending the prevalence of male violence is small and stop saying good men are not part of the problem. If you're not part of solution, you're watching on. And what good is there in that?
I challenge every man to think about Gisèle's words from this case, and that of many other women's stories, and recognise there is a need to act and to do something in your lives. Don't make the mistake in thinking you don't have power, you do, you just don't realise it.
I have friends asking me election night plans wanting to have a little party or go to a bar and I'm just here like "I will probably be in my apartment with MSNBC on the TV and multiple election websites on my laptop as I scroll Twitter on my phone and clutch a glass of whiskey trying to get through the night"