Dear Diary: But it is "all men" or "almost all men" because "silence is complicity" ?
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This is the most serious version of the case against using the phrase "not all men".
The argument goes like this. The patriarchy isn't maintained by a few bad actors. It's maintained by a system, and systems require the participation, or at minimum the silence, of the majority to function. Men who benefit from male privilege and say nothing are complicit in it. So "not all men" isn't just a deflection. It's a statement from someone who is, at least passively, part of the problem. The silence of good men is what allows bad men to operate. Therefore it is, in a meaningful structural sense, all men, until they actively work against it.
That argument is genuinely coherent and I'm not going to pretend it isn't.
But here's where it breaks down.
First, it conflates two different things. Passive benefiting from a system and active perpetuation of harm. Those exist on a spectrum and the moral weight is not the same. A man who has never harassed a woman, who treats women as equals, who raises his sons to do the same, is not the same as a man who abuses his partner. Structural complicity is a real concept. But weaponising it to erase the distinction between those two men isn't analysis. It's a blunt instrument.
Second, the "silence is complicity" logic only works if the person being silent has actually been asked to speak. Not all men are in rooms where harassment is happening. Not all men witness the behaviour that needs calling out. Telling a man he is complicit because he didn't intervene in something he wasn't present for is holding him responsible for events he had no knowledge of or access to.
Third, and this is the critical one, if silence is complicity, then the correct response is to create conditions where men feel they can speak without being attacked for doing so. The current dynamic does the opposite. Men who try to engage with feminist discourse are told their perspective is inherently suspect, that their discomfort doesn't matter, that noticing a double standard is proof of fragility. You cannot simultaneously demand that men speak up and punish them for the way they speak up. That's not building allies. That's building resentment.
And fourth, the "all men are complicit until proven otherwise" position has a consistency problem it can't escape. We don't apply collective complicity to any other group identity. We don't say all white people are actively racist until they prove otherwise. We don't say all Germans born after 1945 bear personal responsibility for the Holocaust. Structural analysis is important. But it doesn't override individual moral accountability — and the moment you say it does, you've lost the argument on consistency grounds.
The real version of "silence is complicity" that holds up is this: if you see something, say something. If you're in a room where a woman is being harassed, speak up. If your mate makes a joke that degrades women, call it out. That's a fair ask. That's specific. That's actionable.
But "you are complicit because you exist as a man in a patriarchal system and haven't done enough to dismantle it" is not an argument. It's a position designed to be impossible to escape, which is exactly why it functions as a conversation ender rather than a conversation starter.
The real harm
The real harm is what happens when that unfalsifiable position becomes the dominant framework.
When "all men are complicit until proven otherwise" stops being a fringe argument and starts being the assumed baseline of feminist discourse, the consequences are practical and serious. Men who would otherwise engage disengage. Not because they don't care about women's safety but because the framework has decided their guilt before they've opened their mouth. And disengaged men don't become better allies. They become absent ones. Or worse, they go looking for a community that will take their experience seriously, and there are very sophisticated pipelines waiting for them when they do.
It also does something corrosive to the women inside the movement. When collective guilt becomes the operating principle, internal dissent becomes impossible. Any woman who questions the framework gets accused of protecting the system that oppresses her. The movement eats its own moderates. The voices most likely to bring new people in, the ones who hold the consistency argument, who believe in equality without exception, who could build the coalitions that actually change things, get driven out or silenced. And the movement gets smaller, louder, and easier to dismiss.
And the women who most need feminism to work, not the ones having the argument online but the ones in dangerous homes, underpaid jobs, and underserved communities, pay the price for a discourse that prioritised ideological purity over actually winning. That's the real harm. Not hurt feelings in a comment section. A movement that keeps losing ground while being convinced it's holding the line.
How to say this softly to your feminist voices
I'm not your opponent. I'm saying this because I think you're right about the problem and I think some of what we're doing is making it harder to solve.
The patriarchy is real. The harm is real. The anger is completely understandable. I'm not here to tell you to calm down or that you're overreacting. You're not.
But here's what I keep coming back to.
The women who most need this movement to succeed are not the ones having this argument online. They're in underfunded shelters, in dangerous homes, in workplaces with no recourse, in communities where the systems that are supposed to protect them don't. And what those women need is a movement with enough reach, enough allies, and enough political power to actually change things.
Every time we lose a potential ally because the language felt like a generalisation they couldn't sign up to, that's not a win. Every time a young man who could have been on our side ends up somewhere else because we told him his discomfort didn't matter, that's not strength. Every time a woman who privately agrees with us stays quiet because she can't afford the pick me label, we've made the tent smaller.
I'm not asking you to soften your anger. I'm asking whether the way we're expressing it is actually getting us closer to protecting the women who need protecting.
Because if it isn't, the question worth asking isn't who's ideologically pure enough to be in the room. It's what actually works. And what works is a movement that more people want to join than want to avoid.
That's not a betrayal of feminism. That's what winning looks like.