The way society views male nature and male responsibility,
conversing on whether “Boys will be boys” 
makes my head spin in circles.

I grew up with fiction and film teaching me that men work extremely hard 
to control themselves from their frequent, inevitable urges to rape, harass, and assault. 
I grew up being taught how scared fathers are to leave their daughters alone with men-
even good men, and even their husbands. 

This all made perfect sense to me as a child, 
along with the idea that whether or not I had any value as a woman 
was directly linked to whether or not men wanted to commit 
sexual violence against me.

And yet now, this narrative makes no sense to me. 
Why would anyone think all men 
are compelled constantly to heinous crime?

And yet, I do not ask out of innocence. 
I hold this confusion knowing firsthand just how common it is for men- 
good men- to harass, assault, and rape. 
It is all too constant and familiar to me. 

And yet, I do not say that as the most hardened of females. 
They placed me on their scale of victimhood,
and I graced their bottom half. 

And so all this tells me is that every good thing is 
very thoroughly broken, 
and that men’s capacities should not be judged by their past performance, 
and that the measure of a woman's pain 
shouldn’t be judged at all.