…to which I would offer the following, Mark: that he knows about. For most of us never speak of it.

I had a Medium follower, no longer, a fellow military man. Senior enlisted. He said (and this is an adapted quote) that the women in his family absolutely, positively tell him EVERYTHING.

My response was that this was precisely the kind of environment in which, as one of his daughters is currently serving in Afghanistan, the women are least likely to share anything that might not fit his picture of perfect military control. That is the knight in shining armor who protects his women. He can’t. I suspect this terrifies him.

My father was precisely the same way. As a result, he died never knowing that his daughter had been a party favor at a gang rape arranged by a senior officer, I had been assaulted at Walter Reed while on a gurney and drugged, and the very psychiatrist assigned to me to provide counseling was a serial rapist. I did not speak of these things for more than forty years. The gang rape had been buried so deeply in my subconscious that I only recently rediscovered. I had found some diary entries from 1976 while getting packed for a big move. It was like having it happen all over again. The SOB who did it is a retired Air Force LTC in Vegas. Slime living around slime, if you will.

These men have no clue what those women in their lives hide from them. Why? Because we fear censure, the same way other cultures stone women to death for being raped. Of course it was their fault. My father would have blamed me for what he felt besmirched his reputation.

The lack of understanding, the monumental blindness, the rigidity of their belief systems (no daughter, sister, friend of MINE ever had this happen) is precisely what feeds the blame the victim compulsion. Because fools take it personally, which is little more than an extreme reaction to the feeling that, as a friend, father, whatever, they weren’t there to protect these women. Guilt morphs into blame, the easiest way out. Stripped of the heroism they want to believe they have, it’s so much easier to say that the woman caused it, asked for it, rather than embrace the horrific helplessness that knowing that men can be such animals.

Partially woke men (an article I am doing now) perpetuate the problem.
They cling to the belief they are good guys while avoiding the truly hard work of attitudinal change, of challenging beliefs. The reality sucks. Of course it’s hard fucking work, Mark, that’s the very definition of evolving into our promise. Without that work, we are nothing more than what I saw in the Selous some years ago:

Five of us in a Jeep stopped to watch a monkey troupe by the wayside on our way back to camp. There was a rough circle, and a female made her way to the other side, cutting a path across the middle. Suddenly a male rushed out, grabbed her by the hips, fucked her furiously for about ten seconds, ejaculated and promptly walked away. She kept right on walking as though nothing had happened.

There was some laughter, but a few of us women shot knowing glances at each other. The analogies are obvious.

We haven’t gotten very far.