Twenty years ago I sat at a table at my high school reunion with two friends. One of them had been my best man. The other was a Black man I’d grown up with – genuinely one of the kindest, funniest people I knew, someone I’d always wanted to spend more time with.
My best man said something racist. Ugly and specific and deliberate.
I panicked. I did what I always do when I don’t know how to handle something emotionally – I made a joke. I told myself I was mocking him, making him the target. Turning it around.
But I watched my other friend’s face. And I saw the hurt land. Not just from the racist comment – from me too. From the joke. From the person who was supposed to be his friend choosing to make the moment lighter rather than making it right.
I didn’t know what to say. So I said the wrong thing. And then I froze.
I’ve thought about that moment almost every day since. Not because I’m a racist – I’m not. But because I failed him. I made his pain smaller so I could stay comfortable. And I’ve never really forgiven myself for it.
Today women in this country are under attack on every front. Reproductive rights, voting rights, domestic abuse protections, access to opportunity. Everything sliding backward, fast.
Recently it came to light that there are websites where men gather to learn how to violate their wives. That these places exist at all is a moral, ethical and legal failure of this nation. But it’s the traffic numbers that show the true scale of it. This isn’t a fringe thing. This isn’t a few broken people in the shadows.
My wife brought it to me. And I did what I did twenty years ago at that reunion.
I joked. I argued the numbers. I looked for the exit.
Because if I accepted what those numbers meant, I had to accept something about the culture I live in. The one I’ve been comfortable in. And maybe – I’ll be honest here – I didn’t want to face what that acceptance would require of me. A man who believes in high morals, high empathy, high conviction. It’s easy to hold those values when they cost you nothing.
What should I have said twenty years ago?
I should have looked my best man in the eye and said – that is not okay. Not here, not anywhere. You need to ask yourself why you can hate someone that kind, that generous, that full of life. What does that say about you?
I didn’t say it. I made a joke instead. And I put the weight of my cowardice onto the person who was already hurting.
And last week when my wife brought me the truth about what is being done to women in this country, I did it again. Joked. Deflected. Argued the numbers. Anything to avoid what it required of me.
Here is what I know now.
When you joke it off you are not diffusing anything. You are telling the person being harmed that your comfort matters more than their pain. You are taking something already terrible and making them carry it alone.
And when you stay silent about what is being done to women – the rights stripped away, the violence normalized, the culture that produces men who seek out instructions on how to violate their wives – you are not staying neutral. You are casting a vote. Silence is always a vote for whoever has the power.
I am not powerful. But I have a voice. And I am done joking.
I am fifty something years old and I am only now beginning to understand how much the way I was raised both made me and limited me.
I was taught to suck it up. To deflect with humor. To never show the wound. I was not taught how to sit with someone else’s pain without flinching. I was not taught how to speak when speaking is hard. I was not taught that silence has consequences.
I have a wonderful wife of over twenty five years. Loving parents. A home. By most measures a charmed life.
And I am utterly alone with the hard stuff. No close friends to call. No one to sit with the weight of what the world is right now. I protect my wife from my own darkness because I don’t want to add to hers.
I don’t think I’m unusual. I think most men reading this know exactly what I’m describing. We just never say it to each other.
That isolation is not separate from the problem. It is the problem. Men who cannot speak honestly to each other, who have no language for pain or fear or shame, will always default to the joke. To the silence. To the vote cast by saying nothing.
We were handed broken tools. That’s not an excuse. But it is something we need to name before we can fix it.
Here is what I know.
There are more of us than there are of them. More men who love and respect women. More men who are quietly horrified. More men sitting alone with the weight of it, defaulting to the joke because nobody ever taught us anything better.
We have to find each other. We have to stop letting the loudest, most toxic voices claim to speak for all of us. Every time we stay silent we hand them the microphone.
Not for abstract reasons. Not for politics.
For the women in our lives. The ones who are brilliant and passionate and carrying more than they should have to. The ones who deserve better than our silence. The ones who need us to be brave enough to say – not here, not ever, that is not okay.
I am a struggling entrepreneur. I am not famous or powerful or rich. I am a bald middle aged man trying to stay in the middle class and figure out how to be better than my upbringing taught me to be.
But I have a voice. And I am done being quiet.
If this lands for you – if you recognized yourself anywhere in these words – say something. To one person. Today. Don’t make the joke. Don’t argue the numbers. Don’t stay silent.
For me. I believe that’s where it starts.