Charles Bastille
2 min readDec 4, 2024

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Thanks, Jay. I always appreciate your input. We'll have to allow our friendly disagreement to remain so, I think, but that's fine.

I'll just add that we can't do anything about MAGA men. They're a lost cause. What i do think we need to do is be willing to push the discussions further with men who aren't MAGA. If they say, "I'm not a Trump guy but...", let's believe that and engage them in more conversation.

But most importantly, we need to talk to our sons and nephews and other younger men who are falling into the Joe Rogan/Andrew Tate trap of neglecting the feelings of women. Women who voted for Harris feel very hurt by what has happened. Triggered. Angry. And for very good reason. Trump is a unicorn in his depravity, but especially with his extensive sexual assault history. Our younger men need to be confronted with, first, statistics about sexual assault, then with stories from the women in our lives who've experienced it.

We all know women in our lives who've experienced it. The younger men in our lives also know women who have. If you read about some of the attitudes about younger men toward women, it's a bit frightening.

So by doing enough, I mean this in a meta sense. If men who care about the women in our lives more aggressively reject the narrative of rape culture, perhaps we can put a dent in it.

Rape culture doesn't necessarily involve rape itself. It can mean something as simple, and common, as, "look at what she's wearing," followed by a snark about how she deserves what might happen to her, whether that's a cat call or something worse.

This culture I'm talking about is pervasive. It needs to end.

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Charles Bastille
Charles Bastille

Written by Charles Bastille

Author of MagicLand & Psalm of Vampires. Join me on my Substack at https://www.ruminato.com/. All stories © 2020-24 by Charles Bastille

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