(Stock photo by Mathias Fengler/EyeEm/Getty Images)
Earlier this summer, I attended my 30th high school reunion in Cedar Falls, Iowa, and the event was one of the most eye-opening experiences I’ve ever had in Iowa. After my classmates and I moved past the typical catchup about families, careers, and major life events, the conversation turned toward how we look back on the life-changing experiences we had as children, specifically about sexual misconduct in the 1980s and 1990s.
The men at my reunion gave me a shocking, unexpected, and powerful lesson when they explained the confusing messaging they received on girls, women, dating, relationships, friendships, and romance while watching.
“We were told that we were the pursuers (in dating). We’re supposed to conquer.”
“Keep asking a girl out even if she says no. You have to get to yes.”
“I thought silence meant everything was okay.”
“The thought of doing all this ‘warrior’ stuff to a girl made me feel uncomfortable. I knew it wasn’t right, but I didn’t know what I should have been doing.”
“It wasn’t until I was in college that I realized what we were taught about women and dating was very wrong. But I still felt confused.”
After mulling over these disturbing comments, I realized these men were caught between varying competing generations and political agendas. My entire high school class is Gen X – people born between 1965 and 1980; a minority sandwiched between the Baby Boomers and the Millennials. Growing up in the 1980s, inappropriate behavior from boys and men was accepted, encouraged, taught or overlooked, as I’ve previously experienced.
However, Anita Hill and the Clarence Thomas Supreme Court confirmation hearings kicked off the dawn of third wave feminism when my class was starting high school. Picking up where second wave feminism left off, the third wave drew significant attention to sexual harassment, rape, reproductive rights, maternity leave, and domestic violence. This movement also sought to create a more inclusive and accepting society, especially in the workplace. But for men on the sidelines, there wasn’t much guidance and education beyond ceasing sexual misconduct.
Although third wave feminism and #MeToo brought about a tremendous amount of much-needed social progress, the United States went from one extreme to the other without much of a playbook for how to change behaviors. Movements of change don’t sustain long-term success if they don’t include everyone, not only the people who were initially harmed. No wonder progress on women’s issues has stalled or even gone backward on some issues.
The men I spoke to at my high school reunion knew what not to do, thanks to #MeToo, but they didn’t have a lot of insight or guidance on what to do instead. Quite a troubling position to be in for the last 35 years.
Gen X men everywhere, not only in my high school class, had to figure out how to reconcile what they learned in their childhood about sexual misconduct alongside new behavioral expectations regarding dating, friendships, relationships, marriage, and in the workplace without any direction whatsoever. No wonder there was an emotional paralysis from men on gender issues back then. Men’s behavioral immobility never went away and is still fairly prominent in public discourse today.
As I walked away from my high school reunion, the male perspectives I heard left my mind swirling with a lot of questions and fresh perspectives. All of these well-intentioned men were caught up in the same chaos and misogyny that the women experienced back then but in a very different way, leaving them directionless and baffled even today.
While no one can change the past, current and future movements for social change stand to gain a great deal when they are more inclusive and account for nuanced experiences of individuals who are neither victims nor perpetrators. The men of my high school class certainly deserved better – then and now.
Maria Reppas lives with her family on the East Coast. She lived in Iowa from 1978-1999. Visit her at mariareppas.com.