Every man should watch the Barbie movie if only for the scene where Barbie and Ken first arrive in the real world and are both receiving a lot of attention, and the very different experiences they have being the object of the male gaze. It is certainly no spoiler to say there is an undercurrent of implicit violence in Barbie's experience that is completely absent from Ken's.

This is something that took me a long time to really understand as white cisgendered heterosexual man: that in every space we occupy we are an implicit threat to everyone outside of that group. And truth be told I can't fully understand it because I haven't had to live my entire life with that weight bearing down on me and that fear pulsing in my bones. What I can do is look at myself and how my presence and actions are perceived by others, regardless of how good my intentions might be.

I'm not saying that white cisgendered heterosexual men need to feel guilty about this (though we probably should a little), but we need to recognize that for us, as with everyone else, to be is to be perceived. For those of us handed privilege that we didn't deserve, that means being perceived as an instrument of that same corrupt and violent system of oppression that bestowed that privilege upon us and denied it from others. Did we ask for that privilege? No. Do we benefit from it at the expense of violence inflicted on others every single day? Absolutely.

So how do we reconcile that? We can't. It's just a bare fact. I can't say that I'm one of the good ones and exempt myself from responsibility for the damage it causes. What I can do is look at my own life and think about times when I might have made people uncomfortable, times when I was thinking more about my own experience and what I thought I was owed by women more than the woman's experience and what effect my actions had on that experience. We're all the good guy in our own head, and the protagonist of the story. We need to try to step outside of that false perspective to see the full picture.

If your first reaction to reading this is saying "not all men," you're missing the point. This is not a contest of who can be the best and most enlightened. It's just as absurd as saying "I don't have a racist bone in my body." Of course you don't, but you do have racism in your mind, I guarantee it. We are humans so by nature we are messy, flawed, contradictory creatures. For those of us with privilege it is our duty to recognize that our human flaws can have a greater effect on those around us than we might expect, because society amplifies those flaws—it has been designed to weaponize them.

We can't be perfect, so all we can do is try to do better. This is an ongoing process and not a destination. You can't work on yourself for a while and say you are done. If it feels oppressive to constantly have those second-guessing thoughts in the back of your mind, think of those who have had to live with actual oppression, second-guessing everything they do, without the luxury of ignoring those thoughts because the consequences of doing the wrong thing could be violence or death. Even if it's not always that severe, the threat is always there. Yes it's ugly. It's about the ugliest fucking thing that humans have ever created. But not looking at it isn't going to make it any prettier.