Ray Rice and #YesAllWomen

Editor's Note: This column originally appeared in The Projector's online edition on June 9th, 2014 as part of my ongoing 'Nitsky's Notes' series for the student newspaper.

I’ve felt like my Y chromosome has been under attack this past week. If you don’t follow the Internet, or watch any type of news at all, the #YesAllWomen hashtag has been trending in response to #NotAllMen, which hit Twitter as thousands of men felt as though they were being lumped in with a mass murderer from California.

A 22-year-old-man killed Cheng Yuan “James” Hong, George Chen, Weihan “David” Wang, Veronika Elizabeth Weiss, Katherine Breann Cooper and Christopher Ross Michaels-Martinez near the University of California, Santa Barbara campus on May 23 before killing himself. This much we know.

Reports say he committed the crime because of his mental illness, because of his hatred of women, because he was a deeply disturbed young man. He was known to follow misogynist websites, and he publicly posted a video displaying his hatred of women and his frustration with being a virgin at 22.

The reports of why the killer chose to go on his rampage led to some men feeling the need to say that #NotAllMen are misogynistic and mistreat women. While this is probably true, it doesn’t really matter. The point has become that #YesAllWomen do experience demeaning behaviour from men.

So when the #YesAllWomen tweets started coming in (I’ll spare quoting the tweets here, articles with tweets are just the worst), I got defensive. While I bit my virtual tongue, inside my head I was thinking, “I don’t do that, that’s not me, I’m not that guy.” It took me a couple of days to realize that this wasn’t about me. This was about #AllWomen and what a lot of men put them through.

In February, Ray Rice beat his then-fiancée, now wife, in an elevator. Ray Rice knocked her unconscious and dragged her on the ground. Ray Rice held a press conference where he said of the incident, “failure is not getting knocked down, it’s not getting up.” Ray Rice’s wife, Janay Rice, apologized for “her role in the incident” at the same press conference. This much we know.

We can assume that this sort of thing might have happened before. We can assume it might happen again. Ray Rice has yet to be punished in any capacity by the NFL, a league that prides itself on “protecting the shield” and handing out harsh discipline to players that hurt its image.

In a world where women feel the need to start an online hashtag to show everyone how poorly they’ve been treated by men, what does it say when a sports idol — in the biggest league in the world — can knock his fiancée unconscious on camera and may not suffer any punishment? What does it say when that same woman apologizes for her role in the incident?

I think it says that it doesn’t matter if #NotAllMen are “like that.” Clearly, enough of them are. So go ahead #YesAllWomen. If you can put up with misogyny, violence, and sexism on a daily basis, my Y chromosome can deal with a hashtag.