By Chris Apling, Iowa City
Dear straight men, as a fellow straight man, I wish I could make you love the women in your life that love you, but I can’t. I wish I could say: Once upon a time, the infinite universe exploded into existence stars and planets, and out of all of the infinite possibilities and eventualities, over an almost infinite amount of time, and another set of almost infinite possibilities, a woman gave birth to you, and now you are here, with a woman in front of you, with your atoms connecting to her atoms and out of all of the people in the world that she could care about she chose you. I wish I could tell you this and you would realize how special that is, that; like Carl Sagan said, we are the stuff that stars are made of, and her star stuff loves your star stuff, and love, romantic and platonic, is the most precious commodity on earth, more special than anything else humanity will ever do, but I can’t. I wish I could tell you all this, and that you would see how stupid it is that straight men throughout time demean, harm and hate women, i.e. Shane Gillis, but I can’t make you see that. I can’t make you see that it is bigger than him.
You see, you as a straight man already think you love women, but you probably don’t. Here are some good thought experiments to test if you love women. First thought experiment: If you think for one moment that the way a woman looks on the outside has any bearing on who she is on the inside, or it’s any of your business how she looks, you don’t love women. You love the idea of women. You are in love with an object in your mind when she is her own person. You are Narcissus in love with your own reflection on another person’s body.
Second thought experiment: If you love women for what they can do for you, you don’t love women. You love your truck. You love your hammer. You love your shoes. Loving someone only for the service they provide you isn’t loving the person; it’s using them like a tool and confusing control for love.
Third thought experiment: If you think it’s OK to do anything to a woman’s body without consent; you don’t love women. If you think women have a “place” that is somewhere other than wherever they want to be, you don’t love women. If you think women having lots of partners is a problem, you don’t love women. If you don’t think women have fundamental rights to their bodies, to choose whether or not they have children, you don’t love women.
I don’t know how else to say this, but straight men failing in our love of women also means we are failing at loving ourselves. We are two halves of the same zygote — two halves of the same universe. I wish I could make you treat the women in your life better, but I can’t. I can only hope that you realize that treating women as anything less than equal is killing your soul. Or to put it another way, by treating women as “less than” and not like one of the best parts of being alive, which in my humble opinion they unequivocally are, to quote Joni Mitchell, you are paving paradise to put up a parking lot.
So, what does it mean to love women? You should talk to the women in your life and ask them. Here’s a conversation starter: “What is the best way for me to show how much I love you?” In the meantime, you could start by learning from women that love women like Mary Oliver:
So many years!
Are the morning kisses
The sweetest
Or the evenings
Or the inbetweens?
All I know
Is that “thank you” should appear
Somewhere.
Author-provided bio: Chris Apling is a teacher and improviser in Iowa City.
