You’ve heard of #YesAllWomen, but what about #AllMenCan?
Elizabeth Plank dreamed up the heartening flip side to the #YesAllWomen coin. Searching through the #YesAllWomen tag, you’ll find tweets detailing the hurtful minutiae of sexism which plague daily life as a female.
Since the #YesAllWomen posts have left me feeling like I’ve been dragged through the dirt, and the horrible related news stories piling up all over the web, I’m glad that #AllMenCan is here to pick me up and dust me off. This web trend has resulted in tweets with photos showing men with an earnest, no-BS look in their eyes, holding handwritten cards. Many of the suggestions the cards pose are tragically simple.
Sexists will often begin a point or end an argument with the words “not all men,” as if some outliers could disprove overwhelming evidence. Not everyone you meet is a murderer, but homicide is still committed. Just because not all men are sexist or do sexist things doesn’t disprove the existence of sexism.
Usually this knee-jerk (emphasis on the “jerk”) reaction is a result of men taking things way too personally. Typical, right? Some touchy guys feel like any attack on sexism is an attack on men as a whole and themselves individually. They don’t understand why we should say men commit certain types of violent acts proportionately more, because they don’t do those things. They would never do that. As the great Tina Fey puts it, “I don’t like Chinese food, but I don’t write articles trying to prove it doesn’t exist.” Using the phrase “not all men” is just another form of sexism: the assumption that if it’s not in your world, it isn’t there.
Maybe if men won’t listen to women saying, “stop,” they’ll listen to other men. One small step for #AllMenCan, one giant leap for #AllWomen? What do you think? Leave a comment below.
