don't be a pro-choice softboy
be a good man
Have you encountered the pro-choice softboy?
His name is Adam, or something more niche like Beckett. He voted for Hillary but made an ironic post about hating it. He’s sporting tan corduroy pants he bought second-hand because fast-fashion is killing the sea turtles. Or maybe that’s plastic straws. Whatever. He’s wearing a hat about saving the parks. He “never goes on Instagram” but he’s always the first to watch your story. You met him at a dive bar where he explained his avoidant attachment style to you. He sneers at men who listen to Joe Rogan because he’s not like other guys. But while Joe Rogan has publicly taken a position on Roe being overturned, he still hasn’t.
If you asked the pro-choice softboy if he supports a woman’s right to choose, he’d be shocked, even offended you would even ask. “What do I look like… a Republican?” he’ll say with a contemptuous smile. But of course, the reason you have to ask his opinion about the largest disenfranchisement of women’s rights in modern American history is that he has been mute about it. He hasn’t texted you privately. He hasn’t posted publicly. He hasn’t even reposted a smarter person’s post so that he looks smart by osmosis. On the topic of the women he’s going to have sex with risking prison time, he simply has zero thoughts. And yet, he’s the one who is miffed about your question.
But the pro-choice softboy gets away with silence because the pro-life fuckboy is his foil. The pro-life fuckboy publicly support abortion bans, while privately benefiting from the individual and societal benefits of abortion rights. He will continue to believe he is entitled to sexual access to women despite actively denying the basic human rights that makes said access safe. The pro-life fuckboy’s inconsistency will make the pro-choice softboy feel superior, maybe even self-righteous. But what differentiates them, really? The pro-choice softboy is pro-choice presenting, despite having done absolutely nothing to deserve it. It will even probably help him get laid. Put simply, the pro-choice softboy collects the social currency and the sexual access that presenting as progressive gives him with the opposite sex, but does nothing to earn it. Worse, he’s actually enjoying the reproductive rights that the women he sleeps with have risked fighting for. He isn’t just a passive beneficiary of women’s labor, he is mooching off it.
The pro-choice softboy thinks he is different from other men, but very little separates him from his more overt sexist nemesis. I mean, at least the pro-life fuckboy is honest. It’s a special kind of gaslighting for the guys who purport to be on our team to be just as silent about our rights than the guys who aren’t. The pro-choice fuckboy’s passive acquiescence is louder than the anti-choice fuckboy’s misogynist racket, but both will continue to sleep with women despite the carceral power that their male body now wields in a post-Roe world.
We know the pro-choice softboy exists because we’ve seen the numbers. There is virtually no gender gap in the support for abortion rights, and yet there is a measurable gap is between who we hear speak about it. Women are posting, zooming, writing, shouting and marching to make their voices be heard. The near absence of men in these spaces is loud. Some of it rests on the media’s failure to take male stories about reproduction rights seriously and reflect them in the news or movies, but the fact that Roe being overturned will now probably help codify gay marriage, but not the right to contraception or abortion is a stain on men in the progressive movement. The fact that men over the age of 50 are the only demographic that have reliably become more anti-abortion is an indictment on the younger generations of men who have failed to push through the temporary discomfort of these cross-generational conversations with their dads, uncles and male relatives. If they stood up for women in the way that women stand up for them, we wouldn’t see this colossal chasm between two causes that both center on a universal right to privacy.
Nothing separates the good and the bad guys when neither recognizes that they are just borrowing their freedom from women who are at the frontlines of a war they haven’t bothered showing up to. Women are dressed up in artillery, strategizing, packing canons with gun powder while their male partners are barely bothering to help take lunch orders. How many bruises, cuts and injuries must women suffer before the men who sleep with them decide to show up to combat with them too? After all, male silence on Roe being overturned is not just irrational, it’s inconsistent with men’s own aspirations of who they yearn to be. I’ve interviewed a lot of men about masculinity for my book For The Love of Men and the one consistent variable I found across men of all walks of life regardless of orientation, is the primal desire and duty to protect women. So my question to men is that now that women are in certifiable danger, why aren’t you protecting us?
The irony is that of all men, the straight ones seem to have been the least vocal despite being the most directly impacted. My friend, an abortion provider in Quebec, Doctor Genevieve Bois, told me she was saddened when she witnessed male silence, even amongst those who are politically engaged. "Even in progressive circles, the number of men talking about it I can count on one hand and most of them were gay," Dr Bois said. “If women could get their partner in jail or ruin the future of their male partner, we'd be careful about how we have sex,” Dr Bois said. “Men aren't doing anything about the fact that women can end up in jail for having sex with them,” she said. The men who don’t sleep with women being more worried about women is a sad state of affairs and warrants some deep reflection from heterosexual men.
In a world where where abortion and some forms of contraception are criminal, all men who sleep with women pose an existential threat to them. Straight men don’t have to imagine the victims of abortion bans—they’re sleeping with them. Every sexually active man now wields a new weapon against the women he interacts with. In a world where women don’t have bodily autonomy, every ejaculation is a potential hazard to women. If that’s not the world sexually active men want to live in, maybe they should start doing something about it.
Don’t be a softboy. Be a good man.
You have given words and form to the rage I occasionally spout at my husband and other proximate males who DGAF about our rights. If they cared, they would ACT. We have all seen what the men we know are capable of doing when they really care about something. Imagine if 1% of the male energy and passion expended on chasing business success and professional sports - or just ONE! One professional sport would do! - were redirected to fight for gender equity.
I love how your writing challenges me to be a better man and requires introspection. I felt every syllable of every word you wrote. I am pro choice, but I admittedly have not been vocal enough. As you clearly pointed out, men, particularly heterosexual men like me have benefited from women’s access to reproductive care, specifically abortion. My life would be different without that access. I definitely do not want history to remember me as a pro choice fuckboy.