1dietcokeinacan:

The most telling evidence that men in no way experience the trauma women do is how readily they disclose how they have, or at least know how to, “overcome” this trauma they supposedly understand. If they knew what we were talking about they would recognize immediately that there is no way to resolve these issues on an individual scale. They would recognize how deep and entangled the pain is, how difficult it is to pinpoint, how pervasively it affects our navigation of the world. If they wanted us to believe they were truly included in the experiences we describe, they would honor the intensity, the darkness, the hopelessness we discuss them with. But that’s not why they do it.

Men so badly want to lay claim to our suffering not because they wish to feel it too, but because it provides them an avenue through which they can trivialize that suffering. The notion that there are aspects of the human experience they’ll never even somewhat understand makes men deeply, existentially anxious. And so they use the concept of our suffering as a tool to reaffirm their place as the unmarked, universal subject. “It’s not that women are really faced with insurmountable traumas of dizzying complexity and unspeakable pain from birth, it’s that women are dramatic and irrational by nature and so of course they are just overreacting to ‘normal’ pain, the same kind I experience. They are misconstruing the gravity of this pain because they are too weak-willed to handle it.” In other words, men’s insistence that they be included in women’s oppression stems from a need to center the framework of possible experience around themselves. They do not realize that doing so rhetorically will not change the actual violences at play. It is a delusion they embrace gleefully so that they needn’t sacrifice their conception of their perspectives as all-encompassing and complete. It is a delusion they have been taught to seek refuge in.

Men do not listen to us. They do not take in our descriptions of our oppression, of our pain. They do not, cannot, ever fully process our explanations because they’ve already assumed we’re exaggerating before we’ve even begun. They only insert themselves into our narratives to place them under suspicion. They do it to discredit us. They do it because they have to — because they are the ones too weak-willed to handle the knowledge that they know nothing, are nothing, feel nothing. That they would be crushed under the weight we carry always and everywhere.