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Of Labels and Indifference: Why Men don’t Fall into Categories Verónica Fraile del Álamo & Isabel Pfleger
CW: mentions of sexual assault, sexual harassment, and abuse. We live in a world in which we like to divide people neatly into boxes. Good or bad; people can be one or the other. In the discourse surrounding the (mis)treatment of women, it is widely believed that men fall into one of two categories – the ‘good guys’ and the ‘bad guys’. The bad men are the ones that we as women are taught to avoid, the o n e s that
other men would acknowledge as being the perpetrators of bad actions against women. These are the men that society tells us do the raping and the abusing; they are the creeps and misogynists to whom other men compare themselves as adversaries. These adversaries are the ‘good guys’ (notice that in the discourse surround-
ing sexual assault in particular, this can often be a self-appointed title). These men may see themselves as the defenders of women, or at a basic level, they know that women should be respected just like anyone else. As women, we are taught that these are the guys that we can trust; we grow up assured in the knowledge that they won’t hurt us. Often, these ‘good guys’ are also who we refer to when saying that not all men harass, assault, or disrespect women. And certainly, not all men mistreat women – it would be insulting and counterfactual to insinuate otherwise. However, as many women discover sooner or later, plenty of the so called ‘good guys’ also hold problematic views or damaging implicit attitudes towards women. The real world is a nuanced place, after all. Real people don’t fit neatly into the confines of a good-bad binary like they so often do on TV or in books; reality is much more complex than fiction or stereotype. The real world is full of ‘bad’ people who also do
