How to be a good man: what I learned from a month reading the feminist classics

“He covered my mouth with his hand and introduced his penis. I thought my last hour had arrived. I had the feeling my stomach was turning.”

These are not the words of a woman testifying as part of the #MeToo movement, and they are not the words of Christine Blasey Ford, who testified against the US supreme court nominee Brett Kavanaugh last week – although the hand over the mouth, if not the reference to the penis, mirror her words. (Kavanaugh denies the allegations.) This is, instead, the experience of a young woman as recounted by the French feminist and philosopher Simone de Beauvoir in her 1949 classic The Second Sex.

I took that book down from the shelf about a month ago; it had sat there, untouched, for years. How many times had I pretended to have read it, nodding knowingly when someone mentioned it at a dinner party, or in a seminar at the Swedish university where I work?

A year after the first revelations about the Hollywood producer Harvey Weinstein, I wanted to to sit down and read about women’s experiences, to stay silent for a while, and hopefully learn something. It has been painful to listen to the stories of systematic sexual abuse that have emerged as a result of the #MeToo movement, and also an education; it has forced me to see things I had failed to see in the past. Before, I knew sexual assaults were endemic, but I didn’t realise they were this endemic. I also understood that the blame is often put on the victim. But I had never really seen this, not in such a concrete and shockingly visible way.

It has been a late awakening and, over the course of the year, a couple