Dear Men,

You might not know this, but a woman you love was groped. Maybe she was fondled in the breasts. Maybe the crotch. Maybe she was kissed when and where she didn’t want to be kissed. Maybe some coach said something sexual about her body. Maybe her privates were grabbed by her friend’s creepy uncle in a barn. Maybe a total stranger squeezed her tit while she was hustling through a crowd in Times Square. Maybe some pallid thug flashed her. Maybe a self-styled playa sent her a shot of his erect penis via Facebook message.

But whatever happened, she was violated. As a kid, as a teenager, as a woman: she was violated. And not just one woman you know was violated. Many women you know were violated. More than you ever realized.

You don’t know about it because they never told you. Maybe they never told anyone. Maybe they were too embarrassed. Maybe men have always been so dominant in our culture, in our families, in our day-to-day interactions, that we automatically diminish our selves, our points of view, our feelings of worth. We are less than men. We’ve been less than men for so long that we struggle to explain why we’re not. When a man tells us that we’re being pushy, whiny, bitchy or defensive, we have a hard time saying: No, I’m only being human. I’m only being as much me as you’re being you. And when a man grabs us somewhere he shouldn’t, somewhere that’s ours, we have a hard time saying: No, I’m more than an object. Your object. Your idea of who and what I am.

What we should do: Kick the asshole in the nutsack, then tell everyone in shouting distance.

What we usually do: Curl into a ball, feeling dirty and flushed with shame.

Right now, dear men, I want you to try something. I want you to imagine that some woman you love, possibly several, at some point in her life had good reason to kick a man hard. But didn’t. Then carried it with her, all of it — the violation, the icky-sticky embarrassment and gnawing anger, the unleashed, phantom kick — for decades.

Picture it. The whole thing. What happened to her then. What happens to her now every time she learns it happened to someone else. And the next time some repellent pig brags about groping a woman, then dismisses it as “locker room” talk, don’t laugh. Don’t brush it off. Don’t ignore every story that comes out in the aftermath, including the latest allegations from violated women who sat quiet for years.

And for God’s sake, men. Don’t vote for him.

I love the sounds of late-summer nights. As I write this, I’m sitting on my porch in the city of Albany, listening to the endless trill of crickets as a fan whirs above me and moths smack, kamikaze-style, against the light. Thanks to my late husband, who had a fine streak of whimsy in him, the ceiling is sky blue and dotted with clouds. He painted it when the kids were wee, and I’ll never paint it over. To me it means family, and childhood, and picture books, and love. It means warmth, even in the midst of winter.

But sitting out here on a muggy August night, I feel close to my own childhood on a lake in Connecticut. Most every night I would step out onto the porch and hear that same, thrumming chorus of crickets. And the peepers! I loved those beautiful frogs, considered them my pals and even wrote a little poem about them — for the record, one of my least-bad efforts at adolescent versifying. It’s short. So short I can remember it in full, which rather shocks me, given the unmemorable nature of my teenage poetic output and the unreliable nature of my memory banks. It goes like this:

I love the peepers

My sweet froggy souls

As they sing their sweet hearts out

Through mud, gnats and night

They always sang loudest from the tiny creek that trickled beside the house. I would walk past them and down the hill to the lake below, where I dangled my feet from a stone fence above the sand. There I would watch, at peace for a lovely, lasting moment, as bugs dappled the dark water and the distant whine of cars echoed from the opposite shore.

Sometimes my cat Peter, a fine old gentleman with a cracked “meow,” would mosey down and say hello, and we would sit there, we two, contemplating the universe as a soft breeze played across the water. I loved doing that. Doing nothing in the lazy warmth of a summer evening. Just thinking, drinking it all in, looking up at the stars or the haze of a moon, hearing the bark of a neighbor’s dog or the plash and chug of a slow boat creeping back home through the dark.

Those were my late-summer nights. I still have them somewhere, lodged in the back of my mind and the start of my life, keeping me tethered to a long ago that never really left me. As Faulkner once observed, and I am constantly repeating, “The past isn’t dead. It isn’t even past.” Not tonight, as the crickets hum and a dog barks in the distance. Not tonight, and not ever.

Like everyone else in the country, I can’t stop thinking about last week’s events. I can’t stop trying to figure out a way to comprehend them — first the senseless deaths of Alton Sterling and Philando Castile, then the senseless deaths of Brent Thompson, Patrick Zamarripa, Michael J. Smith, Lorne Ahrens and Michael Krol. Somehow, we’re compelled to make sense of the senseless. We know we can’t, but we also know we have to try. We have to talk. We have to figure out some way to discuss race and injustice, guns and hatred, police and people of color, fear and sacrifice, and the abrupt, outrageous victimhood of everyone who dies at the end of a barrel in these inflamed and disunited states where we now live.

But how do we start? How do we even talk about race when anthropologists tell us it’s a social construct? When our best selves believe that it shouldn’t even matter? Well, here’s how white people can kick things off: by admitting that it does.

Like most Caucasians, I never thought much about being white. Whiteness always struck me as a negative state, a bleached racial canvas defined by what it wasn’t. As a kid I knew I wasn’t black or brown, and I knew that people identified by their blackness or brownness suffered terrible prejudice — but what this meant in terms of my own whiteness, I couldn’t tell you. I knew that my dad was Italian, my mom was English-Scottish-French-German, and I was a mash of both. But white? That meant nothing to me. My parents discussed racism with me and my sister in the language of sweeping moral imperatives and prohibitions: Treat everyone the same. Never use racial epithets or tell racist or ethnic jokes. Speak out when someone else does. But they never spoke to us about being white. If, as they assured us, everyone’s alike, then why bother parsing the differences? There weren’t any, right?

So when Justin Timberlake took heat for tweeting out a tone-deaf “We’re the same” in response to Jesse Williams’ remarks at the BET Awards, I cringed. He was no more oblivious than most well-meaning white folk, all of us adamantly believing and repeating the standard line on race that our well-meaning white parents taught us: That there is no difference. That we’re all alike. That we’re all brothers and sisters. That we’re all born and made of the same essential human stuff.

And so we are. In the eyes of our Creator, there is no difference. But it isn’t the Creator’s eyes (which are, at this point, weeping) that are causing the problem. It’s our eyes, the eyes of society, the eyes that see and pass judgment on a black man with a broken tail light and a license to carry a gun, the eyes that narrow with fear at the guy in the hoodie running an errand, the eyes that regard a brown boy with suspicion when a white one is viewed with confidence and calm.

This is where my parents were wrong. This is what has taken me, your Typical Clueless White Person, far too long to understand: Not everyone is the same. My whiteness means that I’ve never had to worry when I send my teenage son to fetch milk or ice cream in the evening, because his whiteness protects him after dark. My whiteness means that I’ve never had to sit him down for the talk that mothers give their black sons about safety on the streets and dealings with police.

My whiteness means that in every conversation I’ve ever had about race and the failures of our justice system, in everything I’ve ever read about mass incarceration and economic imbalance and the pernicious effects of institutionalized racism, in all of my sympathetic, heartfelt, horrified responses to same, I have never asked how I play into it. How I might be privileged, complicit and complacent. What my whiteness means. Which is, in its way, proof of just how privileged, complicit and complacent I’ve been. I still don’t know what it means, but I know that it means something, and I know that I have to question this something to change the status quo. And maybe that’s a start.

So as we grieve and object to the taking of lives last week, all of us — the whole spectrum of Americans — can hope and pray that more lives aren’t taken in reply. We have to, because we can’t let violence become the conversation. We need to talk, and we need to listen. We need to figure this out together.

I’m thinking of getting a cat. Thinking. Maybe two cats. But I’d stop at two, because A) I would like to limit the number of cat butts dispensing cat poop in my house; and B) I have no interest in becoming a Weird Old Cat Lady (WOCL). Weird and old, okay. I’m already one and well on my way to the other. But cat lady? Nope. Not that. Ever.

Growing up, I had one cat. Peter. He was, and I am not overstating this point, THE BEST CAT EVER, a 20-pound half-Maine Coon tiger with beautiful long belly fur, a broken meow (ihh-errr was all he could manage) and scars all over from tangling with dogs and other creatures around the nabe. He was a fearsome combatant in such battles but the gentlest being alive when relating to small children. When I was 3 or 4 I yanked out one of his whiskers from the root, and the shocked look he gave me before he walked away – I’ll never forget it – said merely, “Child! You are not allowed to do that!” There was not a hint of violence in this message, only succinct didactic purpose. He was instructing me.

Peter and Mama

Some years later, he defended me from a vicious German Shepherd who took to chasing me up the hill from the school bus each afternoon. After witnessing this barking assault on multiple occasions, Peter finally leapt at the slavering thing from the top of the porch steps — claws extended, arcing with fat-cat grace past my awed head — and slashed the dog’s ear down the middle. My hero. (I wish I’d had him around for my subsequent run-ins with the animal kingdom, especially a certain heinous turkey.)

He was also, I’ll have you know, THE SMARTEST CAT EVER. I’m not overstating this point, either. When he developed an abscess on his noggin after a vengeful blue jay dive-bombed him, Mama took him to the vet to have it drained and then brought him home and shut him in an upstairs bathroom for reasons I don’t recall but probably, probably, had something to do with his needing to be in a semi-sanitary space for a day or two. As you might expect, Peter objected to this arrangement and moaned loudly for hours in that awful guttural feline lament that cats tend to emit before barfing. We were all profoundly relieved when he finally shut up. This shutting-up lasted 10 minutes. After that: a terrible, smashing crash from the bathroom, after which he screamed bloody murder in an urgent Cat vernacular that translated roughly as I’M DYING UP HERE I’M DYING UP HERE OH GOD. Mama, of course, took this as her signal to run upstairs and open the door. When, of course, he bolted. He wasn’t dying up there at all, oh God. He was merely plotting his escape.

It was epic. He was epic, that fine, proud creature who slept on my head and woke me with a purr to raise the dead. When Mama called me at college to tell me he’d died at 18, that’d he’d expelled his last breath in her arms after a fine and proud life, I wept and wept and wept.

In all this time, I’ve only had one other cat. Oliver. A rescue. A friendly brown-and-black-and-white fellow who jumped on my legs when I got home, just like a dog. He never slashed any canine ears on my behalf, but I never held that against him. Had him and loved him for a decade. And then, the March after my husband died, after long years of not venturing outside, he zipped through the front door, never to return.

So now I’m thinking, thinking, of getting another cat. Maybe two cats. But not three. I promise. Not me. Nope. Never.

MY FELLOW AMERICANS,

In the wake of last night’s “debate,” if that’s what we’re calling it, I would like to find some shared ground as Americans, as human beings, as children of parents, as parents of children and as possessors of common sense.

We hold these truths to be self-evident:

1) NOBODY WANTS TO KNOW THE LENGTH OF THE CANDIDATES’ WILLIES. Nobody even wants to think about knowing the lengths of the candidates’ willies. The fear of potentially knowing this information makes many of us violently physically ill, and this violent physical illness does NOT put us in the mood to vote. It does the opposite. I am serious about this. NOBODY. WANTS. TO KNOW.

2) SHOUTING OVER EACH OTHER DOESN’T HELP US UNDERSTAND WHAT ANYONE’S SAYING. Instead it makes everyone unintelligible! It’s true! You want Americans to actually comprehend some point you’re trying to make? Well, then, you need to pipe down and take turns, people. Otherwise, what’s the point of a debate? Why not just stand there and spit? Hurl bowling balls at each other? Set each other’s hair on fire? (No. No. Don’t.)

3) NAME-CALLING IS CHILDISH. It also does absolutely nothing to advance any form of dialogue. And we are still, at this point, pretending that dialogue is the aim, unless we all secretly long to see the field of presidential aspirants scream NYAH-NYAH, then stick out their tongues and go pppllllllllllllllllllllllllllll. But at this point, maybe Bronx cheers would be an improvement.

4) NICENESS MATTERS. Didn’t our mamas and daddies raise us to say “please” and “thank you”? To not interrupt when someone else is talking? To be decent to other people? To not pick our noses in public and then wipe the goober on somebody else’s sleeve? Because we are almost at the goober-wiping stage of this election cycle, my friends. You know it’s true. It’s why you dread reading the news each morning. (As for whether one of the candidates consumed a booger off his lip last night, I’m not entering that fray. To me it looked like alpaca sweater fuzz.)

5) Returning to the matter of childishness, WE NEED THE CANDIDATES TO BEHAVE LIKE ADULTS. Why? Well, I’m glad you asked: BECAUSE WE NEED OUR CHIEF EXECUTIVE TO BE A GROWN-UP. Or at least, you know, a fairly mature 15-year-old. (Elect my son! He’d be great!) This is why the founders set the minimum age for the job at 35, not, say, 2, at which age President Thunder Pants might need occasional help with the potty.

I’m not even talking about The Hand On The Button and all that hairy-scary nuclear-apocalypse stuff. I’m just talking about having someone in office who won’t shove the other kids in the sandbox. No hair-pulling. No toy-grabbing. Take your turn at the swings.

What do you think? Can we all agree to these truths? There are only five of them, and they’re obvious enough. Or they should be.

Women like to be taken seriously. Why is obvious enough: Too many of us have spent too much of our lives not being taken seriously, or living in fear of not being taken seriously, or suspecting that even if we’re being taken seriously now, we won’t be in a minute or two.

We like to be taken seriously by men. We don’t like being: shouted down, patronized, ignored, regarded over the tops of our heads (whether literal or figurative), dismissed, psychoanalyzed, diagnosed or otherwise mansplained. We resent it when men try to tell us what we’re thinking and why, how we’re feeling and why, what we should be thinking and feeling and why. And we especially don’t like being told that our motives for doing something are other than what they are.

We don’t like it when women do that, either.

And that’s about all I have to say in response to Gloria Steinem and Madeleine Albright and their much-discussed attacks on the women — the young ones especially — who support Bernie Sanders over Hillary Clinton. By now you’ve read all about Steinem’s now-weakly-retreated suggestion that female students were flocking to Bernie for the boys; Albright’s hellfire proclamation damning such women for eternity; and all the responses, both sympathetic and outraged, that pit This Kind of Feminist versus That Kind of Feminist.

But that, too me, is not the issue. Bernie or Hillary is not the issue. The campaigns of both are not the issue. The issue, to me, is anyone of any sex on any side not taking any woman seriously. If some double-X Democrat says she’s voting for Sanders because she’s more closely aligned with him or she distrusts Clinton’s motives, BELIEVE HER. If someone else says she’s voting for Clinton because she’s experienced, savvy and gets things done, BELIEVE HER.

Don’t ignore what a woman is actually saying. Don’t shout her down. Don’t shut her up. Don’t shrink her, scoff at her, dismiss her point of view and impugn the validity of her thoughts, feelings, actions. Take her seriously.  Take her at her word. That’s all we ever ask.