There is a specific kind of quiet that settles over a room when a truth you’ve been actively ignoring finally demands to be looked at. It isn’t a peaceful quiet. It’s the deafening silence of a broken alibi.
For a long time, I walked through the world wrapped in the comfortable armor of the “good guy.” I didn’t hit anyone. I didn’t scream slurs out of car windows. I believed in equal pay, at least in theory, and I voted for the right people, and I nodded along when the topic of equality came up. I thought the baseline of simply not being a monster was enough to earn me a medal. I thought my passive, unexamined existence meant I was on the right side of history.
But as I look back at the landscape of my life, at the boardrooms and the living rooms, at the bar conversations and the quiet moments in the kitchen, I see a different story. I see a thousand tiny cuts. I see a slow, grinding machinery of disrespect that I not only benefited from but actively kept running. It wasn’t always loud. It wasn’t always malicious in the ways we are taught to recognize malice. It was just the norm. It was the air I breathed.
But I am a grown man with a functioning mind and a beating heart. I shouldn’t need a sociology degree to recognize when I am diminishing another human being.
I should have known better.
Let’s talk about the meetings. You know the ones. We are all sitting around the conference table, the artificial lights humming overhead. A woman speaks—she brings up an idea, a strategy, a concern. And what did I do? I let it hang in the air for a second, unacknowledged, before moving on. Or worse, five minutes later, I took that exact same idea, repackaged it in a slightly louder, deeper voice, and accepted the nods of approval from the other men in the room as if I had just invented fire. I watched her face tighten, watched her swallow the frustration, and I told myself that’s just how business works. I told myself it was a competitive environment, that she just needed to speak up more, to be more aggressive.
I took her intellectual property, stripped her of the credit, and then quietly judged her for not fighting me for it. I participated in a psychological warfare that told her, day in and day out, that her voice was merely rough draft material for a man’s final product. I saw the exhaustion in her eyes.
I should have known better.
Let’s talk about the tone policing. The insidious way we have engineered the rules of engagement so that women are always playing on a tilted field. When I got angry, when I pounded the table or raised my voice, it was called “passion.” It was “leadership.” It was “taking charge.” But when she expressed even a fraction of that same frustration? I looked at her with a calm, condescending patience and told her to calm down. I asked if she was feeling overwhelmed. I subtly shifted the focus from the very valid point she was making to her emotional state, immediately discrediting her in the eyes of everyone watching.
“You’re being overly emotional,” I would say, entirely blind to the fact that my own anger was an emotion, too—just one that society had validated. I used her natural, human reactions as a weapon against her, gaslighting her into believing that her perfectly reasonable frustration was a character flaw. I made her question her own grip on reality just so I wouldn’t have to cede an inch of ground in an argument.
I should have known better.
And what about the humor? The lifeblood of the boys’ club. The locker room talk that doesn’t stay in the locker room, but spills into the group chats, the golf courses, the after-work drinks. The jokes that reduce women to body parts, to stereotypes, to punchlines about nagging wives and irrational girlfriends. I laughed. Even when I didn’t think it was funny, I laughed. I contributed. I forwarded the messages. I let the casual misogyny wash over me because disrupting it would have been uncomfortable. It would have meant breaking the sacred bond of male solidarity.
I convinced myself that “just words” couldn’t cause real harm. I pretended not to understand that those jokes are the foundation upon which actual violence and discrimination are built. They are the permission structure we give each other to view women as less than fully human. By laughing, by staying silent, by refusing to be the “killjoy,” I was signing my name to a contract that actively demeaned half the population. I chose the fleeting comfort of fitting in with the guys over the fundamental dignity of the women in my life.
I should have known better.
We wage an economic warfare that is so normalized we barely even recognize it as hostile. It’s not just the blatant pay gap, though that is shameful enough. It’s the assumption of competence that I was granted freely, while she had to provide a portfolio of flawless victories just to get a foot in the door. I was hired for my potential; she was hired for her proven, unassailable track record. When I made a mistake, it was a “learning opportunity.” When she made a mistake, it was a cautionary tale about why women might not be suited for leadership.
And then there is the invisible labor. The dark matter of the professional and domestic universe. Who organized the office birthday parties? Who took the notes in the meeting? Who cleaned out the communal fridge? I happily let her do it. I assumed she was just “better at that sort of thing.” I took advantage of her socialized conditioning to be a caretaker, stealing her time and energy so that I could focus on the “real work” that actually leads to promotions and bonuses.
And at home? The warfare of the “second shift.” The way I would sit on the couch after a long day, waiting to be told what to do. “Just give me a list,” I would say, thinking I was being a supportive partner. I refused to see that forcing her to be the project manager of our household—keeping track of the groceries, the doctor’s appointments, the emotional well-being of our families, the endless, exhausting logistics of simply existing—was a profound disrespect of her time and sanity. I treated my free time as a right, and hers as a luxury she had to earn after all the chores were done. I watched her burn out, carrying a mental load I was too lazy to share, and I offered her a back rub instead of equal partnership.
I should have known better.
There is a spatial entitlement that we carry as men, a physical arrogance that dictates how we move through the world. I took up space on the subway, my legs splayed wide, forcing her to shrink into herself just to avoid unwanted contact. I interrupted her. I stood a little too close. I gave unsolicited advice, assuming that my uneducated opinion on a topic was inherently more valuable than her lived experience.
I walked down the street at night without a second thought, completely oblivious to the hyper-vigilance she was forced to maintain. I never had to hold my keys between my fingers. I never had to cross the street because a group of men was walking toward me. I never had to map out the well-lit routes, or text a friend to let them know I made it home alive. And yet, when the topic of safety came up, I was the first to offer patronizing advice about what she shouldn’t wear, or where she shouldn’t go, effectively shifting the blame onto her for the predatory behavior of men. I made her responsible for surviving the danger, instead of taking responsibility for the danger we created.
I should have known better.
Perhaps the most insidious part of it all is the modern facade we have constructed. The era of the “pseudo-feminist” man. I read the books. I learned the vocabulary. I learned how to use words like “intersectionality” and “patriarchy” in a sentence. I wore the label of an ally like a designer jacket, expecting to be praised for doing the bare minimum.
But when push came to shove, when my own power or comfort was actually threatened, the facade crumbled. I supported female empowerment right up until the moment a woman was chosen for a promotion over me. I believed in equal partnerships right up until my career demanded a sacrifice, and then it was automatically assumed that her ambitions would take a back seat to mine. I was happy to tear down the patriarchy in theory, as long as I didn’t have to give up any of the actual privileges it afforded me. I used the language of liberation to camouflage my continued dominance. I weaponized my supposed “wokeness” to shield myself from criticism, demanding infinite patience and praise for simply acknowledging that women are people.
I should have known better.
We have subjected women to a lifetime of micro-aggressions, of subtle put-downs, of economic disadvantages, and of psychological manipulation, and we have done it all with a smile. We have called it “tradition.” We have called it “biology.” We have called it “just the way things are.” We have built a world that requires women to be twice as good to get half as far, and then we have had the audacity to ask them why they are so tired.
And the hardest truth to swallow is that we didn’t do this out of cartoonish villainy. We didn’t gather in secret rooms and plot the subjugation of women. We did it casually. We did it lazily. We did it because it was easy. We did it because the system was designed by us, for us, and it is incredibly comfortable to sleep on a mattress made of someone else’s marginalized worth.
But ignorance is no longer an excuse. It never really was. You cannot stand on someone’s neck for a lifetime and claim you didn’t notice the lump under your shoe. The information has always been there. The pain has always been visible. The voices of women have been ringing out for generations, telling us exactly what we are doing, exactly how we are hurting them, exactly what needs to change.
We just chose not to listen. We chose to protect our egos. We chose to protect our comfort. We chose the easy path of the status quo over the difficult, painful work of looking in the mirror and dismantling the rot inside ourselves.
We can point to the past and say it was a different time. We can point to our fathers and grandfathers and say we are doing better than they did. We can point to the handful of women who have managed to break through the glass ceiling, despite the anvils we tied to their ankles, and claim that the war is over.
But it’s a lie. The warfare continues today. It is happening right now, in the silences we allow, in the jokes we tolerate, in the credit we steal, and in the space we refuse to yield.
I am done hiding behind the excuse of being a “product of my time.” I am a creator of my time. We all are. Every time we interrupt, every time we dismiss, every time we let a sexist comment slide, we are actively rebuilding the patriarchy, brick by brick.
This isn’t about wallowing in guilt. Guilt is a useless, self-indulgent emotion if it isn’t followed by action. This is about accountability. It is about waking up every single day and actively choosing not to be complicit. It is about listening to women, not to form a rebuttal, but to actually understand. It is about yielding space. It is about taking on the mental load. It is about calling out other men, even when it costs us social capital. It is about recognizing that equality feels like oppression when you are accustomed to privilege, and choosing to sit in that discomfort anyway.
It is time to strip away the facade. It is time to look at the wreckage we have caused, the potential we have squashed, the spirits we have broken in the name of our own convenience, and finally, truly own it.
I look at the women in my life—the colleagues, the friends, the partners, the strangers on the street—and I see the resilience they are forced to carry. I see the armor they have to wear just to survive the world we built. And I am ashamed.
I am stepping forward to say what every man needs to say, not as a plea for forgiveness, but as a statement of unalterable fact. We cannot erase the history we wrote, but we can stop pretending we didn’t hold the pen.
We diminished you. We held you back. We mocked you, we ignored you, and we fought a quiet, relentless war against your equality while smiling in your faces. We took your brilliance and called it our own. We took your labor and called it duty. We took your pain and called it hysteria.
There are no excuses left. There is only the harsh, undeniable light of the truth.
We should have known better.
Danny Ballan
Editor-in-Chief
English Plus Magazine
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