For some reason, discussing my man-hatred seemed like a great thing to do with a man I was about to date. I was talking about feminism with a guy I had recently met at a conference. I had been distinctly uninterested in socializing with most of the other men in our program, and I was trying to explain why.

“I guess I don’t actually hate men,” I said. “I hate certain oppressive behaviors that a lot of men exhibit.”

“Yeah,” he said, “but women can be dicks too.”

***

I have been accused of being a man-hater long before I began to feel like one. One summer in college, I got a job in a new city, working with a bunch of people I had never met before. There were problems. In a “diversity” “training” in which we complained that as women we repeatedly felt silenced or ignored by some of the men on staff, other women responded that they had brothers, so they had no problem – they were cool with men (the gentlemen in question just ignored us, obviously, and then later wondered why the staff room had started feeling “negative”).

I was confused – I also have a brother, and he is one of my best friends. I’m not sure why that’s supposed to make me tolerate a dude monopolizing a meeting, literally falling asleep when women start talking, and then waking up and monopolizing the meeting some more. Why would having a brother make me okay with a male co-worker loudly “joking” in the staff room about the sluttiness of a woman who had rejected him?

My anger at men who treat me or others badly does not mean that I categorically hate all men. It means that I categorically hate being treated badly. Hearing women defend these men because of the other men in their lives made me wonder – are the other men in their lives like this? Is this how we are supposed to expect men to behave?

The one Bush quote I ever liked focused on the peril of “the soft bigotry of low expectations.” Though he was using it to justify an education policy with reprehensible consequences, the idea rings true. If any people are man-haters, wouldn’t they be the ones who expect and support men behaving terribly?

Over the course of the summer and since, I began to notice patterns. It was beyond an issue of a couple of individuals acting like jerks. Despite the fact that the staff had three times as many women as men, and all of my most experienced colleagues were women, the ratio of who would speak in staff meetings was about reversed – three men for every one woman. I have since seen this in almost every group I have been a part of, even the explicitly progressive ones – not usually at such a disgusting ratio, but men almost always speak more often than their numbers would predict. When a woman speaks more than her share, she is usually disciplined either explicitly or with rolled eyes.

This is where I come back to the rejoinder that “women can be dicks too” (which, come on, interesting choice of noun to indicate bad behavior). Yes, individual women can treat others poorly, but thanks to our good old friend The Patriarchy, they do not have the institutional and cultural power (or the socialization) to silence women as men do. When my friends of color talk to me about white racism, I don’t immediately bring up that sometimes black people act like jerks, because that would be completely missing the point. When I talk about male oppressive behaviors, I am not talking about that one guy who called me a bitch one time. I am talking about larger forces that we all play into.

To be continued…