Letter to My Boys On Misogyny

My dear ones, there's nothing easy about being human. There's not even one way to go about it. I can't help you understand the ways in which people will try to reduce everyone into seemingly neat and incontrovertible categories. Though this sorting is everywhere, it is not rational or natural.

Already your cartoons sometimes portray girls as prey, as objects for conquest, as silly and superficial, as petty and inconsequential. Sometimes your media tells you that there can only be girl things and boy things. The boys will have grand adventures. The girls, sleepover parties. And if the girls are loud, quirky, smart or strange, it's made clear that these girls are not normal.

My loves, there is no normal. The world feeds us these reductive stories so we forget our hunger for our own truths. You know that boys make sensitive, good friends and girls are fun, brave co-explorers. You know that everyone gets hurt feelings and our strength comes from our connection to others. You know that there are many different kinds of intelligences that occupy all kind of bodies. You know that none of us need to be limited by gendered expectations and stereotypes.

Even if your own mother struggles with her limitations. Even if every adult around you struggles to overcome those false stories inside them. The stories that portray inequality as inevitable, that dismiss injustice as trivial, that normalizes a racist, classist, ableist, misogynist, disastrous status quo.

My dear dears, I took you to vote for a woman president once. So you know that people vote for women leaders, even imperfect ones, just like others continually, unabashedly vote for imperfect male ones. I take you to protests. So you know that the way things are now is not the way things have to be. Like many of the women who march, organize or lead, with or without pink hats, I volunteer at your school, cook your meals, clean your bodies, and I make it clear that it's a choice I make. So you know that our world relies on the invisible labor of women. I write so you will have a record of my truth, which also belongs to all of us and has a rightful place in the public sphere.

But I don't know what the future holds, in which direction that moral arc is curving. I am learning how to live with a radical faith. To hold space for imagination, possibility, grief, fury, mistakes, and miracles.

Believe women, gender non-conforming and nonbinary people. Listen to the rage and outrage of those who are most affected by injustice. Then, believe in yourself and in our capacity for justice. Live a foolhardy life beyond binaries and reductionism and cynicism. Live fully out in the world and let others live their full lives too. There is no easy, clear-cut path to an equitable world, but it starts with a wide, critical and caring attention to all the suffering things in this world. This is your, our undeniable power, and this changes the world.