A Message to All Men Who’ve Tried to Bond with Me Over Talking about Women

This is a message to all the men who’ve tried to bond with me over talking about women or any that will in the future.
Don’t make vulgar or crude jokes about any woman.
Don’t engage me in “locker room talk.”
Don’t call a woman a slut, b**ch, or any offensive word.
Don’t call a woman “easy” when men are just as “easy.”
Don’t tell me about how you are sleeping with other women behind your partner’s back.

Don’t try to gain my respect by talking down about a woman in any way.
Straight up, don’t talk to me about sex, unless we agree to respectfully discuss it.
This will all just offend me and put distance between us. You won’t impress me.
From now on, if this happens, I promise to speak out instead of sitting there uncomfortably. I will not sit idly by when any man speaks in any offensive manner about women to me.
I acknowledge that from my teens to my mid-twenties I was sometimes this offensive man I’m talking about today. I deeply apologize to all women and all the good men out there who I affected, whether consciously or not. I apologize to the youth who looked up to me at the time, who may have seen these actions normalized and then internalized them. I’m sorry to everyone, even the men I spoke this way with, which made it more acceptable for them.
I have changed myself from the inside out over the last decade, and I will only continue changing for the better. This I promise.
Men, if you want to bond with me, man to man, we can talk about how much you respect your partner and women friends… How you see women as complete equals to men… How you support their passions and purpose in life… How absurd the systems of inequality are and how we can change them… How you stood up to a guy who was speaking offensively about women… How we’ve made mistakes in the past and how we are changing to be better…
This is what we can bond over as men of integrity.
This is what I can be counted on from here forward, as a human of integrity… As a role model to the young developing generation… As an example to men of all ages. As an ally in the mission for equality and justice for all women.