"A man rose at the back of the hall with a pencil and paper in his hand. "You say that over 2000 women are raped every day in this country. I did some quick figuring. That makes about 40,000 a day worldwide." Significant pause. Then he exploded: "That's the number of children who starve to death every day! Think about that!" And he plopped down in his seat with a smug, duty-done look on his face. At that point, another man, encouraged by his colleague's outspokenness and impeccable logic, arose and pointed out that no matter how bad incest is (he called it "child abuse" since he was apparently unable to face the implications of "incest"), he was furious at my saying that what happens to females in incest is far worse than anything that happens to men in wars. How could I be so insensitive? How do I think he'd felt, leaving the blasted bodies of his buddies strewn all over Vietnam's battlefields? Didn't I have any conception that men were being tortured even as we sat there, in El Salvador, for instance?
What they were saying to me was very clear. As long as any male, anywhere is suffering, women are selfish to mention that they are suffering, too.
I'm sure neither of those men realized the woman-hatred behind their feeling that everything and everyone should come before women. I pointed out quietly that in every country where children are starving, women are starving also. In every country where men are being tortured, women are being tortured also. I was insensitive enough to point out that Vietnam is also strewn with the blasted bodies of women, and that many, many of those bodies were not simply blown up, but were also sexually abused-raped, gang raped, used up in prostitution, tortured. No matter when or where or what men suffer, women's suffering is on some totally different, more exquisite, plane.
But no one wants to hear that women are suffering. Men's ordeals are recounted and described and depicted in every conceivable way in every medium on earth, and have been from earliest history. We are always asked and expected to look at and listen to and understand and sympathize with men's pain and suffering, and we have always done it, all of us, men and women. But women's agony at the hands of men must never be revealed. If women steadfastly and courageously began to tell the truth and would not stop, would not be co-opted, would not become afraid, the truth of our enslavement would be undeniable, and the jig would be up.
That this might indeed happen is terrifying to most people. It would stand the whole world on its head. This is why any time women say, "Look at what is happening to us!" someone invariably rises up on the spot (as patriarchy has trained us all so well to do) and shouts, in order to divert us, to frighten us, to remind us of our vulnerability and danger: "But what about men?"
I explained to the distraught man whose buddies lie in fragments all over the corpse of Vietnam: ''You are performing this function here tonight. May I interrupt this well-rehearsed performance to point out that we have given men 5000 years of undivided attention." (Is it any wonder they have remained spoiled little boys?) As Pauline Bart points out: "We are not allowed, even now, to speak of women's suffering without someone saying, 'and men, too,' although we have always spoken of men's suffering without adding 'and women, too!'" Patriarchy has worked hard to make women's experience appear so trivial and so invisible that it is inconceivable to most people that we warrant any attention at all. Otherwise, it would not be so maddening to them to have to listen for a whole hour to a speech about women, though they listen willingly day after day, year after year, to talks by and about men. For many hundreds of years they have heard about nothing but men: their wars, their ideas, their art, their politics, their science, their blah, blah, blah, ad nauseam."
- Going Out of Our Minds by Sonia Johnson
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