NOTE:  The phrase “physically intimate” or “physical intercourse” is substituted for the author’s words in many cases below due to abusive realities on the web and in the physical world.

In some cases there was no way to make the substitution work, and the word “xxx” was used instead.  Hopefully, there will come a day where this is no longer an issue…..

We, as men, need to focus, and fix the ways in which we are hurting our women and women in general, as our communities work to restore balance, power, and spiritual connected-ness, and as we continue to work to improve the quality of life in our communities and for our families.

As we go through our lives working to improve the quality of life for our children, or working to just to make sure our children have enough to eat, or working to just do the best we can in the middle of struggle, let us not lose sight of what is most important in life:

1) Love the people you share this life with as you love yourself

2) Love this Life you’re living, in God or whatever you believe to be the highest ordering Force in Life.  Love this Life / God / Highest Force with all your heart and all your soul.

The following is an adaptation from an incredibly insightful guest post, from Kyle T. Mays, on http://nativeappropriations.com/, addressing this issue:

I read my colleague and friend Adrienne Keene’s blog post titled, “The Native Harvey Weinsteins,” published on October 12, 2017, and it was the truth; the gospel truth. Over the past few days, I’ve also read the many stories based on the #MeToo hashtag going around social media. These have hit home for me and surely (I hope) other men. I sincerely apologize. While not trying to decenter particular experiences, I do want to talk with my brothers. But first, let me explain what I, well, what we need to apologize for. I/we don’t deserve your forgiveness, and it’s not even something we should assume you’ll be willing to offer, given the enormous damage we have caused. We men, our triflin ass, patriarchal ass behavior, is stopping the revolution / forward progress.

To women, relatives, to anyone and all of my kin that I have personally hurt, I apologize for being an emotionless, stone-faced asshole, who acted inhumanely; I will do better. Will my brothers join me?

I wanna apologize to all of the women I’ve hurt, known and unknown, for my behaviors, or more precisely MY toxic masculinity. I won’t offer any excuses. I was wrong, and I apologize. I want to apologize specifically for the emotional abuse that I’ve/we’ve caused. I/we will never truly understand the gravity of the pain we have caused. But still, I apologize. Here’s a list of the things for, all of which we men are complicit in, that women know all too well.

  • Xxx-ual assault
  • Xxx-ual harassment
  • Domestic violence
  • Emotional abuse
  • Groping
  • Actively celebrating and listening to xxx-ual conquering narratives
  • Street harassment
  • Being cold-hearted
  • Ignoring women’s emotions
  • having physical intercourse with/harassing/manipulating students
  • Ruining the career prospects of women, trans, non-gender conforming, queer, and two-spirit folx
  • Threatening behavior towards women
  • Womanizing
  • Locker room talk
  • Body shaming

I wrote this list in about 2 minutes, right off the top of my head. That means that there are numerous things I am blind to that I/we need to apologize for and to proactively stop doing. Shit, the whole list affirms a painful realization for me: that us, men, are a major reason our communities continue to suffer. I know, some will say colonialism is the problem; notice my audience. I’m not talking to colonialism, I’m talking to you, brother. More on that below. Our behavior indicates that we don’t actually believe in decolonization, at least not how women imagine it.

There are those who will say “not all men” and women who speak out against this behavior are being divisive. Some will also say that we should focus on settler colonialism. Yes, settler colonialism is a problem, and we are products of it. But that is not an excuse for our continued serial abuse—the habitual line-stepping—that so many of us continue to do. Yes, all Indigenous men, by virtue of being in a settler patriarchal society, are implicated.  ( Todd Cobb note: I would say men in societies all over the world should address this ). We need to do better.

I apologize because of my/our womanizing, that you now have trust issues in every new relationship. You can’t trust men, our motives, and that’s our fault.

I apologize for your attempted suicide and depression because of my/our emotional abuse. We should know that our toxic behavior can cause these issues.

I apologize for not expressing my feelings. I thought for years that as long as I never told someone how I felt, then the relationship would fizzle; it never fizzled, and I only caused more damage. That sort of emotional abuse leads to conclusions about our relationship that I was not even considering or prepared to offer.

I apologize for actively listening to men describe their conquering of women’s bodies. That listening made me complicit in the behavior.

We commit emotional abuse all of the time. We are often emotionless, stone-faced assholes. Even if our “xxx”-ual relationships are consensual, shortly after sharing an intimate moment, we ignore the person and then act like they don’t exist, which is terrible. Even before getting to this point, have a conversation with them about what we are looking or not looking for. Find closure. It doesn’t mean that feelings won’t be hurt, but at least there is clarity about where you both stand. And when we don’t do this, and the person wants clarity, we flip it and describe that person as crazy. They are not crazy; our asses are just triflin.

Men, Here Are Things That We Need To Stop Doing

Fellas, why do we even mention the fact of having a sister or auntie or niece or daughter when offering a reason as to why we are appalled about “xxx”-ual assault or harassment? That’s the same logic that wypipo ( the white people ) use when they say they have an friend and therefore aren’t racist. Men, when we do women wrong, we weren’t thinking about our sister or niece, so we need to stop bringing them up. We don’t have the right to mention the women in our lives when discussing our treatment of women. And when we get caught up, we don’t need to apologize first to our mothers and our family; apologize to the person we hurt. Our mothers did their best to raise us, and we failed them, and we actively did the opposite of what they taught us. Don’t make our mothers complicit in our toxic behaviors.

Don’t ask women to educate our triflin asses about shit. If you need to be educated on a topic, come holla at me. If I need to be educated, I should be able to pull on your coat.

Here is a retort that men often use: “we need to go back to our traditional ways.” What does that mean? Who will it benefit? Because when some women hear that, they think about their abuser, who is a “traditional” person in their community. That “traditional” man caused harm to them, and was not held accountable. If our idea of “traditional” shames women, it’s not a good idea. At. All, and is prolly pseudo-traditional.

Fellas, we don’t need women to call out, well, us. We need to do it ourselves in personal and public realms. We don’t need to gather all of the facts, sounding like a member of Forty-Five’s cabinet. We be sounding like him when he said there are “very fine people on both sides” in Charlottesville. We need to believe victims. And no, we should not receive nor do we deserve any praise for simply doing what’s right. We will not get a badge for becoming better people.

Normally, I don’t put limits on love and intimacy, but how we be actin, we might need to do it. Here is another thing we need to stop doing: having “physical intercourse” with students, graduate and undergraduate. In all seriousness, this is flagrant and foul. I know, there are those who will say that they got together consensually, and therefore the power dynamics are irrelevant; maybe. I’m not rollin with that logic. There is a clear and definitive power dynamic. We have seen numerous articles over the last few years (and through the Black, Indigenous, and Latinx grapevines) about male professors harassing and “xxx”-ually assaulting female students. That needs to stop. With all of the apps available to us, we should be able to find someone that will appreciate our/your old wack ass, and within your age group. We need to stop being emotionally immature. We can’t be damn near 50-years-old and still hitting on every woman we see at a conference; that’s not a good look.

Let’s stop referring to ourselves as feminists. We don’t deserve the label. We have barely been good accomplices, perhaps slightly better than white liberals, and that slightly is debatable. Our patriarchal, ain-shit-ass bullshit continues to subjugate women, and we need to admit that.

Finally, we need to be better relatives. Using colonialism, as I stated above, as a justification for why we are trash, is no longer an excuse. We can’t talk about building futures, nationhood, or decolonization while also creating hurt among all of our relatives (I mean relative broadly, here, including those we are literally related to and those we are not), which festers and destroys an possibility for change. That shit don’t make sense.

If we are serious about decolonization, then we need to decolonize our behavior, ourselves, and imagine new ways of being men. Being an man is not about how many women we can have “physical intercourse” with, but rather about how we can build a future where women don’t have to fear simply living as the bad-ass people they are.

Men, how we’ve been living is wack, and the way we’ve treated women, we need to mourn forever, and deal with the fact that we did our relatives wrong, forever.

To women, relatives, to anyone and all of my kin that I have personally hurt, I apologize for being an emotionless, stone-faced asshole, who acted inhumanely; I will do better. Will my brothers join me?

Kyle T. Mays (Saginaw Anishnaabe/Black) is an Assistant Professor of African American Studies and American Indian Studies at UCLA. He is on twitter, @mays_kyle. 

The original post:

Note about the adaptation of the text:  This adaptation is intended to allow the non-Native-American reader to focus on the central meaning of the post, in a way that would connect to the wider audience that I think would benefit from it.

After-word:

I would add that when give our women a chance, by being the men we can be, we give them a chance to push forward with that Yin energy and advance our connected-ness to Life, and in Life, and the benefit received in our families and in our communities is…. invaluable, incalculable …. non-negotiable.

I would also offer, by removing unnecessary hardships and obstacles to advancement in women’s careers and pursuit of their desires and goals, we double the force of our thrust forward in all our endeavors as a people!

Note about the issue of false accusations: Let us be strong enough to press forward for progress on the issues of harassment, at the same time that we work to address the underlying causes and solutions for the issues of false accusations.