So, There Was Someone ELSE On The Stage, Right, People?

My dearest sons:

You all know that your mother is occasionally a little picky about things like table manners and homework and chores and saying nice things to your brothers, but not so picky about penmanship and getting your bed made every morning and wearing a coat when it's a little chilly out.

I haven't yet had occasion to be picky about this issue, so you may not know that it's in the Picky rather than Not Picky column.  But it is, and you need to know this.

Treating Women Right is in the Picky column.  Treating Hurting Women Right is in the Especially Picky column.

When you take a girl on a date, you give her your full attention and you don't ogle other girls.  If Angelina Jolie walks into the room, the right answer is, "Who?  Oh.  Is she famous or something?  Get back to what you were saying.  I'm really interested."

That's Treating Women Right.

When your boss is a woman, you speak respectfully to her and you do what she says and you don't undermine her authority by using the belittling language that men like to use when they're embarrassed about taking orders from a woman.

That's Treating Women Right.

When you are the boss and a woman works for you, you speak respectfully to her and you keep your comments focused on her work, not on her person, and you don't try to keep her subservient and dependent on you by paying her less than you would pay a man for doing the same job.

That's Treating Women Right.

Also under this heading would be things like avoiding gendered pronouns and descriptions for issues that are not sex-determined (like pretty much everything but reproduction and having prostate cancer), assuming you'll be doing a lot of the housework if you ever get married, and teaching your daughter how to read in at least two languages before you teach her how to put on make up.

Your daddy has given you a pretty good example to follow in this regard, and if you just ask What Would Dad Do?, you won't go too far wrong in life in general, nor in the Treating Women Right realm in particular.

You will meet a lot of hurting women in this world.  You will not have been the one to hurt them, I hope, but you will meet them.

Treating Hurting Women Right is not markedly different than Treating Women Right, but it 1) is even more important and 2) requires even more courage.

Treating Hurting Women Right often means going even more against the grain, taking an even more public stand, and sometimes, even, confronting the Hurting Woman herself with her brokenness.

Treating Hurting Women Right means not participating in the sex industry, even if you're in Nevada and the woman is supposedly okay with it.

Treating Hurting Women Right means being ready to shelter an abused woman if she gets up the courage to leave the abuse, or at least offering a ride home to a girl that's getting chewed out by her boyfriend in public.

It means not laughing--pointedly not laughing--when your friends make rape jokes.

It means leaving the party if somebody gets the idea to call a stripper.  It means offering to get the stripper to a safe place if the party next door gets out of hand.

It means being the one to bring up gender issues so that the women in the room don't have to feel like angry bitches all the time when they bring them up.

And when a girl is so hurting, so broken by her past or her present, so caught up in a destructive mix of unrestrained hedonism and even more unrestrained advantage-taking that she thinks performing a simulated sex act on national television is a good thing, it means refusing to be the guy she's grinding on stage.

Let me tell you, sons, if I ever see you doing what whatever-his-name-is did to a girl on live TV, I will not be telling the world how shocked I am at what she was doing.  I will not be telling the world that I didn't expect her to put her butt so close to your groin.  (Because, like, your groin was just innocently standing there when this girl's butt unexpectedly accosted it!)

And I will most especially not be commenting on how sharp your suit is.

You'd better get this one right, sons.  Because the world will not be writing blog posts and tweets and ponderous articles on your behavior.  They'll be heaping it all on the Hurting Woman and not asking themselves or anyone else how she found a guy so unchivalrous as to join her in her public self-degradation.

But I for damn sure will be asking that.

I will be in your face asking in very pointed words and at very loud volume why you weren't the guy telling her she didn't have to do this, asking her not to do it, giving her alternatives, giving her the healthy attention she needs rather than the poisonous attention she's become addicted to.

I love you, and I will love you no matter what, in life, you do wrong.

But don't get this thing wrong.  If a woman is hurting, help her.  If you can't, at least refuse to be the guy that keeps the hurt going.

Don't be that guy.

Don't. be. that. guy.