All true Jessica, but you failed to make me nod my head with “she nailed it” because you (again) failed to understand the male population’s side of this.

As you say, most men don’t rape. And your thesis is correct, that those who do are often allowed to get away with it — definitely were in the past, perhaps are sometimes today.

But implicit in your narrative seems to be that most men are secretly thinking “Well, he didn’t mean any harm”. Most men are horrified by rape, as well as other acts of misogyny. The problem is, most men are usually not in a position to do anything about it, and those who commit acts of misogyny usually do so in a setting in which they will not be seen except by those who they feel would be supportive of their acts.

So you seem to imply that men, as a group, are silently complicit, and that’s just not the case. You have made a horrible indictment of men as a population.

You also wrote, “Knee-jerk sympathy for men accused of wrongdoing — something feminist philosopher Kate Manne dubs “himpathy” — isn’t new.” Well, perhaps that is because men — the majority of men — are tired of being lumped together with those who “make it easier for [the rapists]”, as you wrote above. There seems to be an “us versus them” attitude among many columnists today. Men who don’t objectify women and who would support women at any opportunity feel vilified by columnists who make sweeping negative generalizations about men as a population, labeling them all as complicit in misogyny.

What an awful thing to say about the male population as a whole, and it is not true. This awful mischaracterization of men as a group reduces the power of your article and the valid points you are trying to make about the enablement of rapists and misogynists by some men, which is a valid argument.