Men, We Have To Do Better

Men, we have to do better.

We owe it to the women of the world to level the playing field. We owe it to girlfriends, wives, mothers, and daughters. And we owe a fair, just, and equal world to our sons as well.

It starts with empathy. It takes a lot more than that, but that’s where it starts.

It’s legitimately difficult to empathize with someone whose experience is totally different from yours. I get it. It might be easy as a half-hearted mental exercise, but it’s a monumental task for a man to honestly feel what it is like to be a woman.

To even get in her neighborhood, you have to strip back layer upon layer of schema — your internal construct of the world — that unconsciously drives your existence. You have to examine the very lens through which you view the world.

To empathize with anyone, you must first accept that you are indeed looking through a lens. That lens tints and warps your perception.

For men, our lens looks like this: through 99% of human history, one’s gender was the first, last, and only qualification for most rights. Because of the basic evolutionary truth that “might makes right,” being physically bigger and stronger gave your kind the only seats at the rules-writing meeting.

And we certainly didn’t hold back on slanting the rulebook to our own benefit.

For thousands of years, only men could own land. Only men could work outside the home. Only men could earn an…