Where The Bloody Hell Are Ya, Men?
Art by Offhanded Drawing
In a sea of performative annual feminism, women just get on with it. As we always do, quietly and without chest beating. It is how this world actually keeps spinning, no matter the wars in the world of men or the disasters that lap at our homes and caravans of care. Running the usual gauntlets and battling the same old shit, getting more than our share done for less of the spoils and hoping for throwaway thanks.
We are all too familiar with how this world works. We have each in our own way been fighting for change, safety, equality, parity, fairness and to not be spoken over the top of by far lesser gods, for millennia. We stopped playing the games of the patriarchy to earn a chair with three legs and no backing a long time ago now.
This year IWD asks "us" to break the bias. Oh how we laughed. That bias lives in men, taught to them from the cradle by a world that cannot see properly out of just one eye. The only way any bias changes is for it to be thoroughly examined by its owner. Hauled out of the shadows and thrown on the bench with the bones of a dying world. Held upside down to shake the awful truth from its roots. Untucked, unlearned and undone by a willingess to bear true witness to all it has scorned, shamed and sullied.
Amends come next, once you know better. The only real apology is changed behaviour. The only real responsibility is reparative action. Results can only be reflected in the grateful eyes of women. Change must come through the hearts of men. The proof is in the pudding not the recipe.
And so on this annual day of not all men showboating and pontificating about how far we've come, I lay down the gauntlet we are so sick of battling at your feet, fellas.
May you reckon with your own shadows
May you pull the bias from you like a sword
May you lift up the women around you and the girls they protect
May you raise your voice in our defence and our honour
May you be the change we are aching to see in the world
May you do us proud and truly know the holy communion that follows right action
And if you cannot, please reach out for help to learn how.
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Responsiveness is a love language
~ @psychotherapy.central
Words c. Kerrie Basha 2022