It’s probably a mistake to wade into this one, but it really bugs me when men hear about sexual harassment charges and say “of course I’m against that stuff, I have a wife and a daughter”. It sounds to me like they’re saying there’s no way anyway they could understand or be offended by this kind of thing unless they had a wife or a daughter. The thing is, the kind of harassment Weinstein was doing isn’t that much about sex, it’s about power and humiliation. No matter if you’re a man or a woman, you can be steamrolled and humiliated by people who get off on abusing their power. A specific type of harassment is much more likely to happen to women. But it happened to Terry Crews too, and it shouldn’t be that hard for a man to put himself in the shoes of a woman who is being abused in this way. You shouldn’t have to have a daughter to have an ounce of empathy about this.
It’s the same thing with “I have a black friend so…”. Look, everyone shits their pants when they get pulled over by the cops. Now, imagine that you’re getting pulled over ten times as often and that every time you get pulled over instead of thinking “oh, shit, points on my license” you thought “oh, shit, I’m going to get shot”. How hard is it to understand and empathize with that? It shouldn’t be that difficult. You shouldn’t have to have black friends to understand that it’s problematic.
Women aren’t some being totally alien from men whose experiences are so out there that they can’t be understood at all by men. And that’s what “I have a daughter” means, it means that you can’t understand yourself but you’d be pissed if it happens to your daughter because you want to defend her.