Jacob,

Thank you so much for responding and for responding earnestly. This discussion is not easy or simple and too many people blow by it at mach speed because they’re governed by narratives that don’t allow for thoughtful discourse.

I have to take issue with some of your premises just because I think you have missed the point I was making just a bit.

The first is that synecdoche is wrong no matter who it’s pointed at. Identity-based politics serve the wrong goal which is why they frequently have bad results. In some cases, they have the WORST results. Whenever people want to make a synecdochic claim, they ALWAYS frame it by saying there is a unique group of people who should be singled out for some historically and culturally valid complaint. I argue it’s an invalid way to talk about people. Usually it’s just harmless but it’s always wrong.

Someone’s ethnicity or gender is scarcely a very informative way to understand them as an individual.

But right now, we can somehow and without much allowance for nuance, simultaneously describe the responsibilities and shortcomings of both a poor latino pumping gas in El Paso AND the WASP CEO of a Fortune 500 company living in Seattle? One label fits fine on both an Armenian car dealership owner in southern California AND an out of work Nigerian factory worker in Wisconsin? A rapist in NYC and a rape victim in Rikers? Absurd on its face to try to group these people together in any meaningful way except to call them men living in America.

We make synecdochic appeals out of habit, but they never tell a very accurate story. You can look at averages to kind of gauge where you sit on the number line of different demographic possibilities, but the average itself doesn’t grant any certainties just because you are in that demographic — the same with examples on the margins.

The example I always use: we’re constantly reminded that there are so few women who become Fortune 500 CEOs. That’s true and maybe it’s even some kind of proof of sexism at publicly traded company board rooms. What it doesn’t mean is that any given man has some kind of privilege imbued to him by virtue of the fact that 0.0005% of the people he shares a demographic trait with inhabit CEO offices. If we look at strict probabilities, any given man has a tiny statistical edge when it comes to the likelihood that he will become the CEO of a large company. So maybe I have a .0005% chance while my female cohort has a .00015% chance.

That minute statistical likelihood doesn’t put any food on my table or take any off of hers. I have more in common with my retired next door neighbor than I do with ANY CEO of ANY billion dollar company, male or female.

The same with rapists or domestic abusers: I don’t get demographic vibrational responsibility because some white guy across the country rapes his date.

That’s the tacit claim made by people citing averages or looking at marginal examples. That’s the claim of the Gillette ad: that some men act badly so therefore all men have a responsibility to do something about it.

You’ve made some kind of Svengali sleight of hand in your response — you say that of course you don’t blame all men, but then you say that men allow things to happen. Wouldn’t abdicating responsibility mean culpability? What’s the difference?

Let’s take your line and shoe-horn in another demographic group — let’s see how it holds up:

“ My only real point in this piece was to say that all Muslims— yes, all Muslims— have a duty to recognize how they set up an environment where this kind of behavior is encouraged or normalized. Their actions, behaviors, language, and silence all allow this to happen.”

Is that the responsibility of all Muslims? What about the overwhelming majority of Muslims who don’t know anything about terrorist plots? It would seem silly to have to even say “Not all Muslims” and even sillier for people to dismiss “Not all Muslims” as some kind of attempt to derail anti-terrorism. Right?

Would we say that to Muslims, or would we recognize it to be a little patronizing to suggest that Muslims frequently look the other way on terrorist activity or that they (all of them!) maybe subconsciously aren’t doing enough to stop it in some way? I think that would be roundly criticized as a form of Islamophobia. Maybe I’m wrong.

We can only speak from anecdotes.

In my anecdotal experience, most men aren’t unsympathetic bystanders to sexism or bullying or harassment. One case of rape or harassment or abuse is too many. But this sort of thing is not so common that men are waltzing by them every day, uncaring or uncritical. Maybe it is common for you.

But telling all men that they are uniquely responsible in some way doesn’t seem accurate from my experience. Most men I know aren’t sitting in halls of institutional power either. They’re under the same boot. So when I hear that all men are on the hook to stop some men from acting badly, it sounds like synecdoche. It sounds like racism when we do it to black people or classism when we do it to poor people or ageism when we do it to old people, etc. Men are not in a unique position except as individuals. And as individuals they don’t have any more culpability than any other individual.