Where Are the Goddamn Men? [View all]

[babylonsister]

http://www.smirkingchimp.com/thread/robert-lipsyte/101647/where-are-the-goddamn-men

Where Are the Goddamn Men?
Abortion Rights | Social Justice and Activism
by Robert Lipsyte | May 20, 2022 - 6:25am


— from TomDispatch

For 50 years now, people have told desperate, heart-breaking stories about what it was like to search for an abortion in the days before Roe v. Wade. These were invariably narratives of women in crisis. They sometimes involved brief discussions about economic inequality, police-state intrigue, and unwanted children, but for the most part men were invisible in them, missing in action. Where were they? And where are they now that a wall of fundamental rights seems to be crumbling away not just for women, but for all of us? This is another example of what I used to call the Bystander Boys.

snip//

It's time, though, for the boys to become men, to step out on the streets, organize, demonstrate, march (maybe wearing knitted penis caps), guard clinics, escort patients, make noise. Older men like me who can evoke the terrible pre-Roe days should tell their stories, at least to their grandsons, especially the ones who claim that their impractical progressive ideals prohibit them from voting in lesser-of-two-evils elections (too common these days, it seems.)

Just hold your nose, sonny, if it means doing the right thing.

And perhaps it's most important to keep reminding ourselves and everyone we know that abortion isn't the whole abortion story, that the bullies are preparing to go after the entire schoolyard, not just the girls, and (as has become so common these days) they're going to stomp into the school-board meeting as well. Sooner or later, they'll try to take over the school itself and, eventually, the mind and soul of this country thanks to the holes they're about to tear in the Constitution. There are more of us than them and, if we stand together and fight, we can still win. No place for bystanders now.

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