When “Not All Men” Becomes the Problem

Questioning, correcting, and de-centering women's voices.

Women are posting about the CNN reporting of the rape cite. Some women are saying, men are violent, men slam doors and want to slam women. Men are misogynistic.

And the responses come.

Here is a sampling — from men and women both:

• “It hurts when women won’t say ‘not all men’ — because it’s true, and it can coexist with ‘most men,’” said one man.

• “I slam doors to discharge energy, not to threaten. I was dysregulated, nervous system fried. I’m not proud of it but it was never a threat,” said another man.

• “Underneath men’s violence toward women is how hard they want to hit themselves — it’s self-directed shame displaced outward,” said one woman.

• “Some men were raised being hit and are trying to move that energy somewhere other than another person,” said another woman.

• “We should give men as much grace as we give ourselves.”

Each response, in its own way, moves the conversation away from the woman — and toward men or the man writing.

Some of these came from men. Many came from women. Both groups so practiced at cushioning, contextualizing, and protecting that it happens without thinking. It feels like fairness. It feels like accuracy. It feels like the reasonable thing to do.

That feeling is the training.

When a woman says men — when she speaks from the accumulated weight of years, decades, centuries of experience — she is not making a statistical claim requiring a fact-checker. She is speaking an experiential truth. A psychic truth. The kind of truth that doesn’t arrive with footnotes because it arrived through the body, through fear, through anger’s clarity, through a lifetime of reading rooms and reading men and knowing what a slammed door means even when the man insists it means nothing.

To respond with ‘but not all men’ is to insist that her truth be corrected into a more accurate statistical claim before it can be heard.

Here is what must be said clearly, directly: the correcting, the contextualizing, the “actually it’s more nuanced than that” — that IS the power dynamic. Not a commentary on it.

The person who gets to slow a conversation down, shift its focus, require consideration, demand precision is exercising power in a way that is complicit with the violence being discussed.

The person who has to stop and justify why she spoke her truth in her way has already been moved off her ground.

This is what makes it so difficult to name — it doesn’t look like dominance, bullying. It looks like reason. It looks like fairness. It feels like an old overcoat worn so long it doesn’t feel like a choice anymore. It just feels like being responsible with language.

Here is what I said to one man in the thread: Hold your hurt. Bring it to a brother. And allow the woman’s voice and heart and experience to speak in its language.

Because that’s what genuine witnessing requires — not agreement, not silence, not abandoning your own truth forever. But the willingness, for this moment, on this post, to step out of yourself and into her shoes.

A wound that has gone unheard for a long time amplifies. It gets louder. More absolute. More unqualified. That’s not dysfunction, narrow mindedness, inaccuracy — that’s nature. That’s what unwitnessed pain does. It perseverates until someone finally receives it.

The fury isn’t too much. It’s still barely being heard.

And every time someone responds with but not all men — however gently, however reasonably — the wound goes unwitnessed one more time.

In some way, the most radical thing a person can do in that moment is simply this: receive it. Let her truth speak. Don’t correct. Don’t contextualize. Don’t protect the men in the room from the discomfort of her words.

Take it in. Feel its truth inside your own body, your own life. Carry it a ways, witness it in the world around you.

That’s not patronization. That’s not capitulation.

That’s just eldership, witnessing another. One small part of what healing looks like.

David Bedrick · The Unshaming Way