Proud to be a V-man
Saturday night I attended the V to the Tenth event at the New Orleans Arena with my wife. I found it to be a very enjoyable experience and found out that while I always try to see life from the eyes of someone else, there is still no way for me to really know what it must be like to live as a woman in a society that still contains many examples of sexism and misogyny.
This quote from the V-men section states it clearly.
It became clear to me (as it already was to Eve) that violence against women was not merely a female issue; it was a human dilemma twisting the lives and consciences of men as well; men whose voices needed to be heard in order for the dialogue that began ten years ago with the founding of V-Day to be complete.
Amen.
I was also very impressed that they compared the treatment of New Orleans by our administration to the treatment of women by abusive men.
If there was any negative about the night it was in the planning of the New Orleans arena in handling the bathroom situation. Seeing as there was a disproportionate amount of women to men at this event, one would have thought that they would have taken some of the men’s rooms and clearly marked them as ok for women to enter so that they could have additional facilities just in case. Unfortunately, I did not see this happen and while I was using the men’s room, some women came in and announced “woman coming in and I am not looking at your….”. Now, had I done the exact opposite an entered a women’s room like that, I would have been hauled off to jail. I guess that thought didn’t come to the women who attended. However, I can’t blame them… when you gotta go you gotta go. The New Orleans Arena should have taken appropriate steps to provide adequate facilities to the women while making sure that men also had privacy.
There is also the issue that they only had shirts up to XL (even on their online store). Kinda silly.
But at the end of a day it was a good event and I was glad to have gone with my wife to share the experience with her.