During my senior year of college, I lived with four guys. For the most part, it was a blast, but there was one thing that bothered the shit out of me. And no, it wasn’t how messy they were, or how loud they were, or how often hungover bros were randomly passed out on our couch.

It was how they sometimes handled conversations about women.

You see, our house was the place everyone hung out. And since two of the guys were on the baseball team, it felt like we always had half a roster in our living room at any given time. And these guys—the teammates—were not what you would call feminists.

Now, the guys I lived with were good guys. One had a steady girlfriend he’d eventually marry; one was shy and awkward; one was funny and loyal; one was super smart and a total sweetheart who we later found out was gay. They weren’t the ones who demeaned and disrespected women in conversation. But, they let it happen. They said nothing. And their silence said a lot.

The guys that were over all the time talked about the kind of things you’d expect. Sports, beer, girls, sports, sex, sports, girls, etc. But the way they talked about girls… It made my blood boil.

They would rank girls we knew, not just by how hot they were, but by how easy they would be. How good they would be at giving head. Everything was related to their sexual pleasure. As if that was all a girl was good for. And yeah, if you could stand to talk to her, that was cool too.

There’s a whole boatload of commentary to be made here about masculinity and how men feel they need to project themselves to other men, but I’m not going to get into that.

Here’s the thing—college girls talk about guys too. All the time. But the difference is when we do, it’s not just about how cute they are or how big their biceps are or their dick is. We talk about their personalities. How smart someone is, or how kind or sweet he is, or how funny or how charming. Our sole concern is not his ability to get us off.

In the conversations at our house, though, everything about a girl was either supporting or preventing these guys’ sexual gratification.

And my issue is that when I called these turds out on their sexist bullshit, the guys I lived with, the ones I respected and I knew respected me, the ones I knew would step in if they ever saw a man try to physically assault me—well, they said nothing.

This is the problem. Good guys say nothing when they hear talk that disparages women. They think it’s harmless, that it’s just ‘guy talk’. And they’d rather keep the peace and let it go than take a stand.

But it isn’t harmless. It lets a future harasser, a future attacker, a future rapist know that it’s okay. It’s okay to talk about women like they’re objects. It’s okay to think about women as serving a man’s sexual fulfillment and nothing more. Your silence says it’s okay for them to care about respecting their dick and its horniness but not about respecting a woman as a fucking human being who has more to contribute to the world than just your pathetic orgasm.

Guys, we need you to break your silence. Call a fucker out. Say it’s not okay. And not just because you have a mom or a sister or a daughter. Do it because women are people too. And we don’t deserve this shit.