Men

"I call myself a feminist. Isn't that what you call someone who fights for women's rights?" -Dalai Lama

I taught junior high and high school in Peru for a semester, before I was switched to preschool and elementary the following school year.

Iquitos isn't known for it's men. My next door neighbors were from the next town over and still called the men of Iquitos scumbags. Absolutely not worth it, they said. Nothing but cheaters and liars and chauvinists.

My neighbors weren't the only ones with this view.

I couldn't figure out the switch, or where it came from. My elementary students were sweet, playful. But I knew they couldn't be unaware. A preschooler was dropped off at school one day by her mom sporting a black eye. "Is your mom ok?" asked the preschool teacher. "My mom and dad got in a fight," the preschooler said. "And then my dad went boom boom boom with her head against the wall."

Boom boom boom, said the preschooler. Welcome to the reality of home life.

Back to my elementary school kids. They seemed innocent enough, though some boys kept trying to look up the girls' uniform skirts. Second grade seemed a little young for that, but it is Peru.

I talked with a lot of men while I was there. One had sex for for the first time when he was eight years old. Three more had been bribed by money or clothes and once with food to have gay sex with an older man. They're not gay. It's just stuff that happens that you don't really talk about.

Once again, you only get glimpses while at school. My high schoolers once asked me, 'Don't condoms hurt the woman? That's why we don't use them." The boys would constantly pinch the girls or slap them on the ass. The girls would giggle or hit back, and everything had a semblance of being normal.

Gossip is the number one pastime in Iquitos, so I was always getting the scoop on so and so and her cheating husband, or so and so with so and so who is twice her age and very rich. It wasn't a hard stretch of the imagination. My own boss, a bloated man in his late thirties with gold rings on his sausage fingers, was dating a student there who had just turned 18. She began to help out at the business, driving up on her new motorcycle and standing on tip toe in 5 inch heels to open the padlocks on the doors.

All these moments together add up to a tangled and twisted web of culture, abuse, confusion, need, and role playing. Not the dress up as a sexy nurse kind, no. The kind where the man hits the woman and the woman hits him back but sleeps with him anyway because those are the parts they were assigned in life.

Now, this is all a generalization.l I did see a good example, once, in my year and a half of living there. I had been staying with a family in their home. The woman is American and had married a Peruvian man. I often tell her she got the best of the bunch. She nods emphatically.

It was only a moment, but I'll never forget it. The whole family was sleeping, the mom, three kids, and me in the guest room. I woke up around 3 in the morning to a loud noise. I froze in my room, not sure what had happened. A moment later I heard the dad get up. He walked through the house, checking all the doors and windows, and he was praying. Not loudly, just under his breath, but praying protection over his family as he made sure they were safe. I went back to sleep almost immediately, waddled in peace.

I exaggerate when I say that is the only moment I saw. I saw fathers collect their kids from school sometimes with smiles and hugs and carrying tinkerbell backpacks for their daughters. I saw families, sometimes five at a time, crowded on a motorcycle with a mom holding babies in her arms and a tot helping his father hold the handlebars.

But it wasn't enough. Every time I saw a high school couple, I would cringe. They would both be in uniform, walking to or from school, usually holding hands or sharing headphones. And as we passed each other, I would have to hold back a shout. Run! I wanted to say. This cannot turn out well!

The highschoolers worried me the most. As my students, I could see how bright they were, sometimes lazy, sometimes funny, sometimes reflective and sometimes just smelling like boys. And I still worry about them. I don't know what the key is, the key that helps them to decide to turn into good men instead of bad men. There has to be a secret, somewhere, of stopping these boys from continuing the statistics. The statistics of abuse, of rape, of cheating, of leaving, of paying for their girlfriend's abortions not because she wants one but because he does. I looked at my students, at all the good inside, and I was at a complete loss of how to help bring that out.

I am completely convinced that men are the key. The key to change, the key to good families, the key to love and progress and completeness. I'm sick of the yelling, of blaming men for being the problem, or giving them a list of don'ts. I don't know what the answer is, but I know we're not there yet.

And so, I want to say thank you. I want to say thank you to the men that have gotten it right. Not just in the context of women, but in the context of how they treat themselves. I applaud the men who think, who stretch themselves, who question the culture they are in and try to be the best they can be. Tell me your secret, guys. How do we get more men like YOU?