This is Everything

Imagine you’re a certified commercial pilot, and you’re among the 6.6 percent of them who happen to be women. You’ve passed all the same training as your male colleagues and proven that you can fly a plane just as well. One day, as you prepare for takeoff, you hear a male passenger say that he refuses to be flown by a woman. Do you just ignore him? Do you turn around and give a reasoned explanation of why your gender plays no role in your ability to fly a plane? Or do you kick him off the flight?

A Trip Airlines pilot went with the third option on Tuesday, May 22, after a male passenger stood up and shouted, “Someone should have told me the captain was a woman. I’m not flying with a female at the controls.” The unidentified passenger was ejected from the plane and met by police, who escorted him out of Belo Horizonte airport. The Brazilian airline later backed its pilot’s decision with a statement that it wouldn’t tolerate disparaging remarks about any of 1,400 women working there.

Your very existence makes them anxious. And their anxiety is particularly high because you have something no generation of girls has had before — globally connected communities of men and women who support your equality and freedom. Like guns, germs and steel, this transformative technology, which enables me to write to you here, alters geography, changes societies and dismantles systems of control — it makes the world a smaller place and it creates, even if slowlyin some places, positive change for girls like you. You see, until now, these men could count on, indeed they could ensure, that you and the women around you were house-bound and isolated. Many of you still are. But now, there are millions and millions and millions people who are thinking about you and challenging these men every single day. You have the speed of light on your side and unless someone permanently turns the lights out, those days are gone. So, although you might feel like you are alone, you are not.

At its most repugnant, the belief that women must be subjugated to the wishes of men excuses slavery, violence, forced prostitution, genital mutilation and national laws that omit rape as a crime. But it also costs many millions of girls and women control over their own bodies and lives, and continues to deny them fair access to education, health, employment and influence within their own communities.

Less extreme examples occur all the time, with sexism used as the small change of male interactions. At root it all assumes that the most basic element of male identity is hostility to women. You may not know anything about a guy, but you can always reach out to him by denigrating another gender. This is why I think writing off sexism and misogyny between men as “banter” is a mistake, and one which harms men themselves. Apart from the issue of how private discourse has an impact on our public space, it offers men a bleak and corrosive vision of their own masculinity. Their experience of being a man is reduced to a single hostile meaning, and their sexuality is co-opted as a means of degrading other people. It asserts that the baseline fact about them is a contempt for women, and the only solidarity they can expect is based on shared aggression. These kind of comments don’t assume relationships between men, they are attempts to create them, and in doing so to define what being a man might mean. On offer is a rotten definition, and one which I think we should all refuse.