“Alright, so I’ll do better next time.”

Well, ok, listen…

First, there ain’t no way out for women, and that’s what a lot of men don’t understand. Patriarchy is a system. Patriarchy continues to reproduce itself. We have to actively work against it in order to eliminate it, and the truth of the matter is that not enough are doing that. Too many of us are busy making excuses, particularly if we are marginalized in some way.

For example, I am a Black queer man. I get flack for my Blackness, my queerness, and my mental illness. I deal with white folks, men challenging my masculinity, my own insecurities, capitalism, and much more. We all have our battles, right, so then we explore ways to reclaim that power we felt we are due. Sometimes that reclamation may involve misogyny or sexism, rather than actively fighting against our socialization. What then happens is something many men think women do all the time, “slander all men.”

But here’s the thing: it’s not slander if it just so happens to be true, and it is not untrue just because a few of us stopped or “never acted like that.”

Second, men are taught — not born — to be pieces of shit. It is not something that we naturally do from infancy. We observe gender relations in our homes, at our schools, in our churches, on TV, in films, and more. We begin to emulate what we see and what we know of what “manhood” is. This often means violence, hypermasculinites (an extreme form and/or performance of masculinity), and toxic masculinities (a particularly damaging form of masculinity). In order to unlearn what we were taught, we practice with women, and that right there is where the cycle begins.

So on our way to become “better men,” many marginalized groups have to deal with our learning process, bearing the brunt of the weight. In this case, it is most often women, femmes of all genders, nonbinary folk, and queer folks. Learning requires test subjects, and those test subjects are the recipients of all of the mistakes we have to make in order to unlearn the oppressive ways we interact with women and treat them as objects, not humans.

However, women gotta “deal with” the bullshit since birth, during girlhood, during adolescence, during youth, and in old age. So even our elders have to repeat the same exhausting cycle of learning and unlearning from their potential partners, children, grandchildren, and the random men who just keep popping up. And let me tell you, patriarchy has not disappeared and won’t disappear anytime soon, all genders are socialized into this same system that teaches men to be shitty. So even if our communities combat all of the things that make women’s lives hell, everything around us teaches us that men are better than women in almost every damn way. We learn this from a young age and it just does not stop.

This process never ends; women gotta “deal with it” their whole lives.