how to explain to my 8-year-old son why society hates women

if the right thought explaining being gay or trans was hard...

trying something new by adding a voice over, if you prefer to listen than to read. there is a bit of a crackle here and there, but i did get it done before my neighbour started mowing his lawn!

yesterday while walking to the car after school pickup, my son told me that he had talked about how he liked Taylor Swift in class when they were building a playlist for a dance party friday afternoon. he said he talked about liking her music, even though there were a group of boys there. uh oh.

where did he get the idea that boys don’t like TS? not in my house, as i’m sure anyone who even glanced at the 31 songs for 31 days challenge i issued for myself in august. not from my husband, who breaks in all his new headphones with a diet strong in TS to get the pieces of the headphones warmed up and flexible. no, not here.

my son, who loves me, who loves his aunties, and his grandmothers, and who loves female musicians and champions playing TS, and Chappell Roan, Florence and the Machine, and Rosa Linn. my son, like so many other people’s sons who are currently grown men who would tell you they love their mothers, and their aunties, and their sisters, and wives, and daughters. those men who are grown who still hate women.

i remember when people were up in arms about same-sex marriage - how will we explain this to our children, they cried, but that was easy - people love each other, men and men, women and women, women and men, two-spirit and women, and on and on. love is love. easy.

i remember when people were up in arms about being trans - how will we explain this to our children, they cried, but that too was so easy - some people feel like boys, some people feel like girls, but sometimes their bodies don’t match. you have to be who you feel like you are. “so like how i feel like a boy?” “yes, and i feel like a girl, but that isn’t the same for everyone and that must be hard, right?” “yeah”. easy.

this stuff is so obvious to him, he doesn’t need my help. Generation Alpha is ON IT. shout out to the millennial parents who are killing parenting while it slowly kills them. you’re doing great.

for those of you who don’t know, because you don’t know me personally, i have a phd and research has been pretty much my life since the age of 18 or so. i have been a teaching assistant, a research assistant, a research associate, a research scientist. i have designed surveys and interviews and scripts to assess medical students on their skills. i have conducted surveys and interviews and conducted ethnographic observations. i have analyzed data about primary health care, medical education, health care teams, space and place. i have worked with international teams, presented at conferences, published articles, and have taught university classes online and in-person.

and the more i read and the more i researched, the more i didn’t think i could write this piece. men who hate women and men who don’t know that they hate women : the reading is long, it is dark, and it is entirely overwhelming.

i’m not sure what the breaking point was. i know i was feeling really affected by how many horrible examples are out there. the examples from the past two weeks alone are depressing. it feels hopeless, frankly. and you don’t even have to look hard to find a plethora of examples. school shootings, domestic violence, hatred of a woman for supporting her boyfriend at a national football game, insulting women who love cats, insulting women who don’t have kids, insulting women who are single, hating on women for having opinions on the internet, threatening women for being politicians, threatening women for refusing to date men/sleep with them. i’m so tired. all the women are so tired. the good men are tired - specifically of shitty men making them look shitty too.

i was reading the key findings from the 2020 bastarache report (the rcmp is the national police force in canada) which reported sexism and homophobia in all rcmp operations and extensive (i would say endemic) sexual harassment and 131 cases of officer-on-officer rape. what the hell? how are you supposed to turn to your police force for support when many of these officers are themselves perpetrators of similar crimes? this. feels. hopeless. it’s completely too much.

i wish men could understand how exhausting it can be to simply exist as a woman. do men feel safe when they are parked at a light in traffic? do they feel safe walking to their cars after work? walking home? walking their dog as evening sets in? do men understand that when you walk behind me when i am out walking my dog, especially if you started walking only once i passed you that you make me extremely nervous and hyper-vigilant? of course you were just going to the bus stop around the corner. you turned right and i turned left. you aren’t out for murder, death, kill. you’re going to work or home or out with friends. but i have to worry about you following me. about how much you possibly outweigh me by and how busy is it out so if i screamed, would someone help me? would my dog actually stick up for me or would he just yell? where would i aim, if i had to defend myself? do i have a plan? i can’t stand it. it is a public health crisis. misogyny is an epidemic.

in canada, between 2011 and 2021, police reported 1,125 gender-related homicides of women and girls. Of these femicides (call it what it is), two-thirds (66%) were perpetrated by an intimate partner, 28% a family member, 5% a friend or acquaintance and the remaining 1% a stranger.

in the US, a total of 45,817 females were murdered by males in single victim/single offender incidents between 1996 and 2020 as reported to the FBI UCR’s Supplementary Homicide Report (SHR). 92% of women knew their male killer and of those, 61% were murdered by an intimate partner. intimate partner violence accounts for 5% of male deaths, some of which occur when women protect themselves from abusive male partners. Rates for Black women and girls and Indigenous women and girls are even higher (3x and 6x those of white women, respectively). trans women are also extremely vulnerable.

for a bigger picture, the UN reports that 89,000 women or girls were killed intentionally in 2022. as with the statistics from canada and the us, most women were killed by their intimate partners or family members. if you break it down, 133 women or girls are killed every day by a male they know.

by someone they know. you can’t unhear that.

this doesn’t include the number of women who go missing, including and in particular Indigenous women in canada who are 400 percent more likely to go missing. it is such a silent crisis that the government doesn’t know how many women have gone missing or been murdered, but estimates it could be as many as 4,000 Indigenous women and girls. seeing the above information from the bastarache report on the canadian rcmp, you won’t be surprised to know that terminology such as ‘runaways’ and other slurs might deter responding officers from taking reports of violence seriously.

and in terms of sexual violence? data on sexual violence is only drawn from police-reported crimes, and we all know that a significant number of sexual violence survivors do not report. why don’t they report? i’m so glad you asked! women don’t report sexual violence and sexual assault because most of the time, we aren’t believed. other times it gets swept under the rug. remember the gian ghomeshi trial? the judge found him not guilty of four counts of sexual violence and one count of choking because, and i quote from the judgement, each of the listed charges “is based entirely on the evidence of the complainant. Given the nature of the allegations this is not unusual or surprising; however it is significant because, as a result, the judgment of this court depends entirely on an assessment of the credibility and the reliability of each complainant as a witness.”

in all, 20 women came forward to talk about their experience with ghomeshi, but only four were involved in the trial. even with that many victims on the record about his behaviour, he was acquitted. after the fact, sarah polley wrote about her own encounter with him in her powerful memoir, run towards the danger.

the judge cited behaviours he felt were not in line with the expected behaviour of victims of sexual assault, including continuing contact with the accused. he accuses the women of having left out additional information that he feels would have been relevant and having deceived the police or court on purpose. he notes, “The harsh reality is that once a witness has been shown to be deceptive and manipulative in giving their evidence, that witness can no longer expect the court to consider them to be a trusted source of the truth. I am forced to conclude that it is impossible for the court to have sufficient faith in the reliability or sincerity of these complainants. Put simply, the volume of serious deficiencies in the evidence leaves the court with a reasonable doubt.”

did you report your sexual assault? i didn’t. did you act weird afterwards? no? me neither. i acted like it didn’t happen. why? so many reasons! did i continue to interact with that person? yes! for years because it was expected. and because no one else knew.

will i talk to my son about this? probably. i mean, it’s a great way to talk about tricky people isn’t it? to tell him how i was touched inappropriately by someone i trusted? my family trusted? small child, can you now see how tricky people can, in fact, be the exact opposite that you would expect them to be? see how other people interact with them? tricky people aren’t necessarily out there with white vans full of candy or puppies. they’re in our homes, our schools, our churches, our dentist offices, our public service, our doctor’s offices, the house next door, hospitals, and on and on. and if you don’t believe me, you can read about this case right here. and no, of course, not all men drug their wife and solicit men to rape her for decades. please don’t trivialize this. because as

Caroline Criado Perez

says right in the title of her excellent article, Not all men…but how many? But. How. Many. because they exist.

in a piece in the Toronto Star, Josef Azam writes that there is a lack of representation of men’s experiences and perspectives in society as though the high-level deciders of things aren’t men themselves. our boardrooms and c-suites, and political offices are mostly comprised of men. so much of the material we see every day - newspaper articles, tv shows, movies, books, etc. - are decided upon by men.

i think he’s trying to say that there isn’t enough diversity in the portrayals of men and so society is being force-fed a depiction of men that is not necessarily representative. that the types of masculinity that are shown and celebrated are too limited. i should have started there because i do agree that we need to talk to our kids about victim mindsets and mental flexibility. we need to talk about respect and equity and justice. and yes, absolutely we need more positive role models and throughout the lifespan of these kids.

it’s challenging to be the mother of a young boy. a child i want to grow up to be kind and sensitive and creative and wholly himself, whomever he may be one day.

but we live in a world where there are men who light their ex girlfriends on fire. where men shoot up schools and workplaces. where they abuse their partners, children, pets. where madmen run countries. it’s all right there for everyone to see. the seething hatred of women isn’t even embarrassed for itself. it’s out there flying its flag, banning books and abortions, stripping away women’s rights little bits by little bits, and by broad strokes.

i don’t want this for my son. i don’t want this for anyone’s child. i want a society that functions and where seething hatred is put where it belongs : directed an inequities and injustices. how do i lead him along a different path if i can’t understand this mess myself? my husband is a non-woman hater. he’s an excellent partner, parent, and ally. my son has a great role model. but that’s not going to be enough.

misogyny is so deeply embedded in our culture that i don’t know if i have the skills to parse it out plainly and visibly for all to see. and that’s the thing about misogyny : it can be hard to see and hard to understand that you yourself are participating in it. misogyny is in part such an insidious tool of patriarchy because it only affects those women who won’t ‘fall in line’, who are ‘unruly’, who won’t agree with men because they want us to, because we don’t threaten the order of things. so if you’re amazingly successful, but you don’t threaten the position of your CEO or company founder or boss, or whomever, maybe you won’t experience misogyny in the ways that someone else might. but it’s always there.

misogyny is hard to see and hard to see yourself doing. when i am commenting on women’s bodies or women’s behaviours, when i play along for the sake of keeping the peace, i am engaging in misogynous behaviour. sometimes i’m so confused by my own internal misogyny that i can’t tell if a woman who is doing a thing is acting in line with the patriarchy or against it. remember Madonna’s reveal of her new face at the 2024 Grammy’s? was she being subversive? was it not subversive? was commenting on her face and/or age misogynist?

and this says nothing of your experience as a woman if you are racialized in any way. Black, Brown, Asian, Indigenous, trans bodies are significantly more vulnerable to misogynist attacks and/or erasure than White women are. moreover, adding other variables for an intersectional analysis renders the disparities clearer and clearer. this is not a female friendly place and i don’t know how to peer pressure my child in the ultimate peer pressuring that will out-peer-pressure his friends over time so that he will be a decent human being who respects women.

last year at school we had an ongoing situation in which another boy in my son’s class would continually call him ‘Holly’ instead of ‘Ollie’ because of his longer hair. this child would also repeatedly call my son a girl, again because of the hair. children of seven. seven years old and here we already are with the old female-related-thing as insult. exhausting. of course his teachers dealt with it right away when we made them aware because teachers are out there doing some seriously heavy social lifting on behalf of all of us.

i told him that sometimes people will use things about girls and women as insults. they will say you throw like a girl. or if you cry it’s girlie. or wearing pink is for girls. or having longer hair is girlie. and it’s so absolutely tiresome. and didn’t they sound silly? wasn’t it ridiculous that this kid was saying that about him like it wasn’t fine to be a girl? and he didn’t care about being called a girl, but he hated this kid not calling him by the right name. i get that.

i know now that by seven at least, some kids are already internalizing messaging about expected gendered norms. but it’s not just those kids i’m worried about. i’m scared of the adults who are purposefully seeking out our youth to radicalize them. Laura Bates, author of the soul crushing Men Who Hate Women, says, in an article for Vice, that extremist groups are trying to gain access to boys at younger ages. “I’ve read manifestos from leaders of these communities explicitly saying boys as 10 or 11 [are] their main targets, describing the use of memes and images as a delivery system to get these misogynistic ideas to take hold.”

i think - i don’t know what i think.

i am overwhelmed by the idea that adults target children. i know about grooming. i’ve read about the gymnastics teams and the ballerinas and the figure skaters. i’ve read about parents who push their kids into sports with hopes of professional careers. i’ve read about child predators. but in none of these readings until now have i come across the idea that adults are trying to access very young children to radicalize them. ten years old? children that they don’t have physical access to. suddenly, the internet feels like rolling out the welcome mat for child predators of all types, doesn’t it?

Bates writes that the online growth of the far right is a significant problem not least because of their access to “neutral boys” – ones who aren’t on men’s rights forums or actively feminist – who are being swayed by the more extremist ideas about women without realising it.” and we don’t talk about these online groups as radicalizing our youth. we would if it was ISIS or another recognized terrorist organization, but these men’s groups are domestic terror groups (Bates 2021:13) and we need to call them that and take them as seriously.

Bates reminds us that the majority of men are good and kind and that those aren’t the men we are talking about here, but she reminds us, necessarily, that those men who are predators don’t live in a vacuum. our social construction of masculinity needs to change. the traditional construction of masculinity is weaponized against both men and women. it isn’t healthy for anyone. Bates reminds us that men are not the enemy and this is a valid reminder. the news can be overwhelming. it was never all men. but all men can help solve the problem and in that way, let it be all men.

to dismantle destructive versions of masculinity, women and girls and men and boys have to protect each other. it isn’t the immigrants or non-white men. it isn’t gangs and ISIS. it’s the patriarchy. it’s expectations that are based in nonsense. these groups of men who seek to radicalize our boys are organized. we should be less concerned of terrorist groups radicalizing them than domestic groups of men who hate women. and while not all the men who engage with these groups are white, there is a distinct targeting of white boys, youth, and men who are being sold ideas that they are facing discrimination; that their rights are being threatened. extreme and fringe are a lot closer to home. our politicians now flirt with such discourses publicly. you can see it. it’s all right there.

i feel confused about how i am supposed to balance the line of not letting small comments pass unchallenged, while also not making others feel like they’re being policed. but Bates’ research shows us that innocent approaches are how these groups target our youth. little memes and shorts. this is an everyone problem. this is a boy-parents, girl-parents, youth, adult, LGBTQ2S+, Black, Indigenous, White, Brown, Asian, Everyone problem. the enemy isn’t each other. we need to engage openly and often with these abstract concepts of patriarchy, misogyny, masculinity, whose abstract nature makes it all harder still to talk to my child about.

Bates talks about how this hatred of women is insidiously ushered into belief systems. “it isn’t hating women; it’s standing up for men. it isn’t hating women; it’s asking for ‘real’ equality. it isn’t hating women; it’s accepting biological difference” (2021:482). and the part that rings truest for me is this : that it can’t be considered ‘hating women’, if everyone online is having a laugh about it. i mean, it’s not like they’re making fun of ONE person? no one’s actually getting hurt by this. right? RIGHT?

i mean, taylor swift doesn’t see all those comments people make about her. all those memes. all that hate. but the women do. the men do. the kids do. and all of that sends a message that something about taylor swift is unacceptable. those boys around the playlist commenting on taylor swift? they didn’t come up with those judgements on their own. so i ask my son, does he know why boys say they don’t like taylor swift? “people just like different music”, he says and shrugs. and i mean, technically, he’s right. people do like all sorts of things. but i know there are a certain groups of people who don’t like powerful, talented, public, vocal, visible, successful types of women. or women in general. or femininity. or the risk of being associated with it.

“you know:, i say, as casually as i can, “some men hate women because they are successful or because they’re out there, visible all over the place.”

“and they don’t like that?”

“no.”

“why though?”

oh no. “well, sometimes it can make people feel bad about themselves. like they’re not as good as that person or sometimes they might think that because that person has something, like a job or a friend or a toy, that it means they can’t ever have that too. like, remember when X told you that you couldn’t have other friends than him?”

he nods,

“but that’s not true, right? you can be friends with him and be friends with other people too. or like, if there is a job that i want to get hired for, but someone else gets it, it’s okay to be upset about it because that would be so disappointing, but it’s not okay to blame everyone because that person got a job and i didn’t.” don’t judge me. i’m trying here.

Bates calls men like my husband and some of my friends “men who hate men who hate women”. makes sense. they’re giving all men a bad rep. - men who try and who are not interested in being broad stroke included in ‘not all men’. these are the men who are pushing back against othering women when they hear the comments. these are the men who turn right when the woman in front of them turns left. they work to become aware of the ways they can help women to feel safer in social spaces. they work to listen to what it’s like to live in a world that makes you feel unsafe. they are willing to talk about uncomfortable things.

last night my husband was reminding me of when we first discussed the concept of othering - when we were in our undergrad and i first read edward said’s orientalism in one of my anthropology classes. that’s where it all started. he was reading analyses about how everyday Germans became mass murderers during the Second World War. we talked about what made people do the things that they do - classic anthropological/sociological stuff. culture. society. gender norms. and people say the social sciences have no merit?

we need to be able to think critically about what we consume because if we don’t, we end up on places like YouTube, where 70% of what people watch is suggested to them by YouTube itself. and the algorithm is designed to keep people watching and also, according to sociologist Zeynep Tufekci, cited in Bates 2021, to provide the audience with more intensive content. Videos about vegetarianism led her to videos about veganism. When she searched up and watched videos about jogging, she was suggested videos about ultramaratons. Bates tells us that this algorithm pattern might be how youth start with a funny video and then end up on right-wing content.

i know what my son is watching, for the most part. i can hear the videos while i am home with him. sometimes the content seems to slide a bit sideways, especially the youtube shorts, and i make some comments that both convey that i don’t agree with the content and also what it is that i find problematic about it. and as for online gaming, my son doesn’t yet have a headset that lets him talk to others online. i also game with him, as does his father. it is impossible to vet everything or be everywhere. it just is.

Bates says that early intervention is easier than unpacking it all down the road. so maybe all the little comments over time will provide a sort of armor for my son. and maybe if we all keep talking about this, we can normalize discussions about violence against women and change our language to signal who is committing that violence. it’s male violence against women. language matters. and if we can’t call it like it is, then we aren’t going to be able to address it head on.

my son is home sick today with a cold. we’re at the table together and he’s playing with these things called T-13s. They’re like crash test dummies, but smaller and hard plastic. he has a set that comes with five different colours, one of which is pink. we’re arranging them on the table and their knee caps keep falling off. when i stand the pink character up, he tells me, “a lot of the people online don’t like the pink one.”

“oh, what makes you say that, is it how they talk about it or..?”

“No, it’s that the pink one is not in any of the videos.”

“why do you think they don’t use the pink one?”

“cuz it’s a girl.”

he notices these things. he just needs to know more about why.

n xx