Hello Rob! I was lucky enough to meet you backstage at Edinburgh Fringe Festival after your last show. You were so nice and said how happy you were to be flying back home to your family. After we talked I looked you up online and was thrilled with what I found. Thank you for being brave enough to be feminist and setting an example for other men. I'm very worried about the men in my generation and don't know how to find a decent one. Can you give me any advice on meeting a nice boy? Thanks :)
1. We show the world how to treat us. I get what I want in life because I was raised white, straight, upper middle class in the northeast of the United States in the 20th century. I was told I could have whatever I wanted. I believed it, I internalized it, and now it’s happening. I am a beneficiary of the patriarchy’s stranglehold on success in the modern world. I hope my fellows don’t mind me talking out of school. What’s happening now has happened in the past many times throughout history around the world, where some have power, and most do not. I am telling you this because I want to funnel what I’ve learned, witnessed and practiced to others who need it more than I do. Socialism of opportunity? I don’t know. I’ve always loved affirmative action in most of its expressions because WHEN WHAT HAPPENED TO A PEOPLE IS SYSTEMIC, ITS SOLUTION MUST INVOLVE SYSTEMISM (is that a word) AS WELL.
The thing I am getting at, obliquely, above, is that you demand, from the universe, the world at large, and the people you meet, a boy, or man, that treats you the way you deserve to be treated, which is to say with love and respect. Nothing, not a thing, less. Treat yourself the way he would treat you, then if he wants to fit into your life, he’ll have an example of how the fuck you get treated if he wants to stick around.
2. My wife teaches english at a public school and because of class size in a nation where education is a much lower priority than it should be, she literally cannot grade all her students’ papers. So I help her. And many of them are awful. ALWAYS, however, a few, a critical few, are brilliant. And that’s always been the way. So we’re really not in trouble (or rather not in any more than we’re always in). Pessimism is easy, and it’s not useful. Read Barbara Tuchman for some of my favorite, and I think, most objective, writing on history. P.S. she’s a woman, and my dad, a man, told me about her years ago. Today is DECIDEDLY not worse than yesterday. That doesn’t mean that each generation doesn’t have issues that are more particular to it, but condemnations of something as large and dynamic as a generation are not useful. To read about “millenials,” you’d never want to meet one. But you WOULD want to meet “Chris,” a 22 year old who works at a furniture store days and plays piano at night and did the Appalachian Trail with her mom last year. Know what I mean?
