AOC's Fight for the Future

Article here. Excerpt:

'We’d agreed at the onset of our conversation that day to lean into difficult questions about gender—with a specific focus on what men need to be doing to combat misogyny—and so I asked the congresswoman why she believes men so often opt out. Certainly some guys are just jerks. But what about men who are more introspective? The call for men to step up and speak out is neither new nor novel, yet still seems unheard.

“I think there’s plenty of well-meaning reasons why men may feel like it’s not appropriate for them to talk about it,” she continued. “I think sometimes the way white folks don’t like to talk about race and they say, ‘We just want to center the person who’s most impacted, so it’s not my role to do anything or take a space and speak up.’ But we know that when white folks take up space and say the right thing in rooms of other white people, that is the most shifting activity that can happen, more sometimes than any protest or any person writing a letter to the editor or anything like that. And we need men to be speaking up in that way as well. But I think men, sometimes they think, I’m not a woman. This doesn’t affect me the most.”

But men also keep quiet, Ocasio-Cortez pointed out, because of the burdens and antiquated expectations of masculinity. Feminist writers and thinkers have raised this notion for decades, pointing out how men themselves are victimized by toxic societal constructs. “Men suffer from being under patriarchy,” the congresswoman said. “They don’t go to the doctor. They suffer from much higher rates of completed suicides. Even though they report lower levels of depression, that doesn’t mean that they suffer from it less. Just a couple years ago the American Psychological Association released a very deep paper and a campaign about how these traditional cultural markers of masculinity—stoicism, competition, domination, dominance—are leading to mental health issues for men. There’s a stigma around men being vulnerable.”'