The morning of the Dr. Christine Blasey Ford hearing before the Senate Judiciary Committee just a little over a year ago, I posted a meme on the internet that went on to be one of my top five most popular posts of 2018. It said:
“She’s someone’s sister/mother/daughter/wife.”
Then I laced up my sneaks and hit Central Park for a morning run. I do this run most mornings, using it as an opportunity to prepare for the day mentally and center my thoughts. I usually share a couple mutual nods with my fellow, early morning joggers.
But on this morning I was seething. I could not even look directly at the men who passed me on our regular route. My visceral, negative reaction took me aback. Here they were, seemingly without a care in the world, when Dr. Ford was about to be interrogated and forced to relive her sexual assault years before by Brett Kavanaugh, when they were both teenagers. Kavanaugh, of course, was about to be confirmed as a Justice of the Supreme Court. Dr. Ford would most likely be disbelieved. Or her experience in their youth would be deemed “kid stuff”and not bad enough to keep a worthy man from his rightful spot on our nation’s highest court.
That morning, I wanted the men jogging by to stop at every woman they passed and say they knew what was about to happen was wrong — and they were sorry. (Obviously an unrealistic desire, but one I felt nonetheless.) I was not alone in this negative feedback loop, and I know that because I spent the day working from my all-women’s workplace, where the air was thick of anticipation, anger, and fatigue.
Of course we know what happened that day. Dr. Ford testified. And, days later—one year ago this day, in fact—Judge Brett Kavanaugh was confirmed to the Supreme Court. For many, this confirmation was seen as a larger confirmation of our worst feelings about this country: That it does not believe, nor care for, nor treat well its women. I admit, to some extent, that I felt that too.
But there is a silver lining to this story. I have good news to report.
Last year, I started work on a book called Modern Manhood: Conversations About the Complicated World of Being a Good Man Today. This book is an amalgamation of nearly 75 interviews I conducted with men across the country from different geographic, ethnic, cultural, and class backgrounds about what they’re thinking, saying and doing as self-proclaimed “good guys” in a #MeToo era.
The catalyst to writing this book comes from my experience hosting a Peabody Award- nominated television series for the cable network Fusion called Sex.Right.Now. with Cleo Stiller. In 2017, when the Harvey Weinstein stories blew up and #MeToo hit the mainstream, I started receiving direct messages on social media from men, mostly straight, who watched my show and wanted to know if we were going to address “everything that was happening.” Because they had a lot to say, but they were too afraid to say anything for fear of getting in trouble. “It’s all so confusing,” one man told me. Everything they had been taught about being “a good guy” was now being called into question.
This cultural shift was impacting how they thought about every aspect of their lives, from dating—(“I’m single and terrified to approach women now. Everything I was raised to do is now considered creepy.”)—to work: (“I have a lot of hiring power, and I hate to say this, but I’m afraid to work with my female employees.”)—to parenting: (“How do you even raise a ‘good son’ right now, when we don’t even know what it means to be ‘a good man’ anymore?)
And one name that came up over again in the interviews with men who were genuinely concerned about what is happening right now and genuinely want to make the world a better place for women, men, and everyone in between? Brett Kavanaugh.
It started with a man I’ll call Jim. (His name has been changed.) Jim is a forty-two year old father of a four-year-old son living in Los Angeles and working in the media industry. Jim has been thinking about what it means to raise a “good man” in a #MeToo era when no one even seems to know what “a good man” stands for anymore.
“If my son grew up to be a Kavanaugh it would feel like the biggest failing as a parent,” he told me.
And who can blame him? Imagine yourself as Brett Kavanaugh’s father. Across the country, your son’s name is synonymous with sexual assault and male privilege. For years to come, a picture of his open yelling mouth will be the visual of not trusting or valuing women.
If you feel similarly, as did many of the men I spoke to, perhaps the first step is to ask yourself how to teach your sons about consent. And about consent’s own “parent”—empathy for others.
Case in point: another man I spoke to in writing my book, whom I’ll call Alonso. Alonso went to college when he was quite young and was the son of Mexican-Americans from deep in Texas. (“We didn’t cross the border; the border crossed us,” he says.) He was the first of his family to attend college. And he’d gotten into a good one: Yale. The school Brett Kavanaugh once attended.
Alonso’s memories of college are somewhat dark. He drank to ease depression and isolation, and though he’s pretty sure he never did anything really bad, he can’t say for certain. “The reason I say ninety-nine percent is because there’s like definitely one percent I can’t remember because there were nights that I blacked out,” he tells me.
In particular there is one woman he feels badly about. They used to only hook up when he was intoxicated. He’s not proud of his behavior and, watching the Kavanaugh trials, memories arose of Yale, drinking, and treating women unkindly—he could not help but call his own past into question. How could he condemn Kavanaugh’s behavior without reconciling his own? He was friends with the woman on Facebook, but they hadn’t spoken in years. He told me he messaged her recently and apologized if he ever made her feel “less than.”
“I wasn’t expecting forgiveness or absolution,” he says, “but I wanted to say it.” She hadn’t been expecting his apology, but she was appreciative and thanked him, he told me. Some women may be less receptive to this kind of apology and, not having spoken to the woman myself, I can’t say if she did genuinely feel Alonoso had made amends. But as I write in Modern Manhood, forgiveness is its own process. The apology—and making sure you never have to apologize for something similar again—is yours.
Conducting these interviews has been healing.
For those who think straight men do not care about what’s happening to women, men, and nonbinary folks, that is not the case across the board. Brett Kavanaugh, #MeToo and the current cultural climate more broadly are calling on all of us to show up, ask questions, support each other, and do better.
And many of us, many men included, are answering—or at least wanting to answer that call.