What Happened To Real Female Empowerment?

When the #MeToo movement started, I was alarmed. Coming of age in the ‘80s and graduating from law school in the ‘90s, I never thought of myself as a frail victim needing protection from men. In law school, my study partner was a guy with smelly feet which was the only toxicity I feared. 

---

“Black Victim To Black Victor” Book by Adam B. Coleman. Rated 4 1/2 Stars on Amazon!

“Adam B. Coleman puts his arm around the people he has lived amongst his whole life, providing them with honest and incredibly personal insight.”

“Wow. I had no idea when I started to read this book, how important the message is for every single one of us.”

Wrong Speak Publishing’s First Book! Purchase Now from WSP’s Store or Amazon!

---

Coveted spots on Law Review, which alas I had no hope of obtaining, were made up of men and women. Big law firms swooned over them - male or female. I later joined a defense firm headed by a woman with a majority of female attorneys. I never heard a client demand a male attorney; it would have been a bizarre concept. They only wanted competency. 

Today I look upon young women as if they are from a different time - when women were deemed fragile and in need of protection from harsh realities such as the dangers of men. Despite what the media tells us, women don’t need to run around daily fearing a man will assault them. 

To know the potentiality exists helps a woman prepare - to look out for warning signs and ‘exit strategies’ if need be. It is like driving a car. You are dependent upon and trust that other drivers operate safely, but you also have to accept that some will be dangerous and be prepared. 

Accepting the co-existence of these truths is empowering, not crippling. In high school, there was a rash of kidnappings/murders in our area. My father instructed me, "Let them kill you in the parking lot so there will be witnesses.” I never forgot the explicit message nor the implicit one that my safety was my responsibility. This surely saved me in college when I walked home alone late at night. 

Three young men drove by and slowed their car. I knew their intent. Understanding this allowed clarity and the creation of diversions yielding valuable minutes for me to get away. To this day, I stay keenly aware of my surroundings allowing me to walk in peace and not fear.  

Other friends, of similar age, have a similar mindset. We don’t look at men as possible predators. We see them as friends, colleagues, bosses, and strangers in front of you at the store. In essence, they are humans just like women, only the ‘opposite sex.’ Yes, like me, they have had creepy experiences when younger. And what did we do? We let them know they were out of line. 

A crude remark was met with a reference to anatomical inadequacies as the impetus for the remarks. While not exactly mature, it was a ‘checkmate’ of sorts. It is with sadness and confusion to hear young women view men, in general, as threatening, and toxic. 

Good men have been on the receiving end of the mantra ‘I don’t feel safe around you.’ Ironically it has come about when women have been asked by men to act honorably in a business transaction or to be courteous in a restaurant. So the mere request to act decently is now categorized as a soft hate crime. And quite honestly what does ‘I don’t feel safe around you’ mean? Is it an accusation that a physical assault is going to happen? Or is it their mere presence of testosterone that is threatening like a nuclear reactor? 

Shrouding the accusation in fog seems to be the intent when one does not know how to respond. By its nature, fog doesn’t take a definitive shape; it just encapsulates you, disorientating you.  The men, and again men of character, are crushed by such accusations. Men who are jerks, or sociopaths, don’t care. The result is that decent men are victimized by the fog of words but so are women. Some are brainwashed that they must use sinister manipulation to navigate the world fearing men will smash them. That is not a step forward but one decidedly backward. 

This view is also incredibly selfish considering what men have endured. Take for example our country’s endless wars. Young men and it is mostly men, are marched to war. Some will die, some will suffer life-long injuries and some will be guilt-ridden about how they survived but their friends did not. 

Combat soldiers are then asked to rejoin society without inconvenient baggage from what they have endured. As Frank Hooper wrote of the Vietnam War, “[w]e all fell off a Norman Rockwell calendar and into a banker’s war.” And for their efforts, they were spat on upon their return.

As the drumbeat of war is again upon us, I fear the demand that my son register with the selective service. 

The irony of registering young males while simultaneously checking their ‘male toxicity’ seems lost on warmongers. If no man should have a right to choose what a woman does with her body, why should congresswomen have a right to order men to sacrifice their bodies for war? It is like a game where you spin a person around with a blindfold. But they keep spinning and spinning and spinning until the disorientation evaporates whatever the male self is.

In the ‘80s women were not wilting daisies. We were roses with thorns. I wish this belief for younger women. I wish them to be athletes in their own spaces. I wish them to relish their emerging intelligence and everything else that comes with being young. 

I wish them to know of warriors like Barbara Jordan, the prominent Black congresswoman from Texas who got her start drinking Cutty Sark with the boys at the State capital charming them with her wit and intelligence. I wish them to know of the four American Catholic women called to serve the poor in El Salvador knowing the risk of rape and torture by men women rightly feared, which they ultimately endured. For an ‘80s girl, these are women to admire, to hold up on a pedestal. 

I may be a faded rose, but I still have my thorns.