What this reasoning does not grapple with — and it is a perennial rejoinder to discussions of sexual assault and women’s vulnerability — is that no one escapes unwanted male attention because they don’t meet certain beauty standards or because they don’t dress a certain way. They escape because they are lucky.

Sexual violence is about power. There is a sexual component, yes, but mostly it’s about someone exerting his or her will over another and deriving pleasure and satisfaction from that exertion. We cannot forget this, or the women and men who have been harassed or assaulted but aren’t “conventionally attractive” will be ignored, silenced, or worse, disbelieved.

And then there are the ways that women diminish their experiences as “not that bad.” Because it was just a cat call. It was just a man grabbing me. It was just a man shoving me up against a wall. It was just a man raping me. He didn’t have a weapon. He stopped following me after 10 blocks. He didn’t leave many bruises. He didn’t kill me, therefore it is not that bad. Nothing I deal with in this country compares with what women in other parts of the world deal with. We offer up this refrain over and over because that is what we need to tell ourselves, because if we were to face how bad it really is, we might not be able to shoulder the burden for one moment longer.

In the wake of the Weinstein allegations, a list appeared online, an anonymous accounting of men in media who have committed a range of infractions from sleazy DMs to rape. And just as quickly as the list appeared, it disappeared. I saw the list. A couple of people didn’t belong on it simply because their behaviors weren’t sexual in nature, but some of them were men whose behavior called for a warning and who deserved public shame. Even where I live, outside the media bubble, in a small town in Indiana, I had already heard some of the stories that were shared.

There are a great many open secrets about bad men.

As the list circulated, there was a lot of hand-wringing about libel and the ethics of anonymous disclosure. There was so much concern for the “good men,” who, I guess we’re supposed to believe, would be harmed by the mere existence of an accounting of alleged bad men. There was concern that the “milder” infractions would be conflated with the more serious ones, as if women lack the capacity for critical thinking and discernment about behaviors that are or are not appropriate in professional contexts. More energy was spent worrying about how men were affected than worrying about the pain women have suffered. Women were not trusted to create a tangible artifact of their experiences so that they might have more to rely upon than the whisper networks women have long cultivated to warn one another about the bad men they encounter.

Meanwhile, there was a hashtag, #metoo — a chorus of women and some men sharing their experiences of sexual harassment and assault. Me too, me too, me too. I thought about participating but I was just too tired. I have nothing more to say about my history of violence beyond saying I have been hurt, almost too many times to count. I have been hurt enough that some terrible things no longer even register as pain.

We already know victims’ stories. Women testify about their hurt, publicly and privately, all the time. When this happens, men, in particular, act shocked and surprised that sexual violence is so pervasive because they are afforded the luxury of oblivion. And then they start to panic because not all men are predators and they don’t want to be lumped in with the bad men and they make women’s pain all about themselves. They choose not to face that enough men are predators that women engage in all sorts of protective behaviors and strategies so that they might stop adding to their testimony. And then there are the men who act so overwhelmed, who ask, “What can I possibly do?”

The answer is simple.

Men can start putting in some of the work women have long done in offering testimony. They can come forward and say “me too” while sharing how they have hurt women in ways great and small. They can testify about how they have cornered women in narrow office hallways or made lewd comments to co-workers or refused to take no for an answer or worn a woman down by guilting her into sex and on and on and on. It would equally be a balm if men spoke up about the times when they witnessed violence or harassment and looked the other way or laughed it off or secretly thought a woman was asking for it. It’s time for men to start answering for themselves because women cannot possibly solve this problem they had no hand in creating.