Let Him Talk

Here's a quaint story from an equally quaint American Midwestwern suburb. A decade ago, back in my mid 20s I had to live with my parents. Not the best of circumstances, but it did come in handy one night when my father was out of town and my mother got an acute stomach infection. I was awakened in the witching hour by a loud thud and the family dog whining pitifully in confusion. I discovered my mother unconscious on the floor, having collapsed trying to get out of bed.

Long story short, I find myself twenty minutes later stepping through the sliding doors of the nearest hospital's main entrance with a middle-aged woman shuffling beside me leaning on my arm, sweaty, weakened, woozy from dehydration and fever to the point she barely knew what planet she was on. Top it off with a bruise below her eye where she'd knocked her head against the bed frame in her fall. The nurse(?) behind the admissions desk asks my mother what the problem is. I start "Hi, she's-"
"Let her talk!" the nurse snaps, glaring at me, loudly enough to make the few people in the waiting room glance over in surprise.
Sensing me tense up my mother squeezed my arm, took a couple of deep breaths and gathered her strength to slowly, painstakingly convince the pinhead of a nurse that no, I wasn't an abusive husband and she wasn't a battered wife because
THIS IS NOT A FUCKING LIFETIME MOVIE OF THE WEEK.
Well, ok, she didn't word it that way, and in fact made no mention of the nurse's presumption but only presented her illness. My mater certa's a hopelessly polite person. Old World manners, dontchaknow.

The assumption was obvious. It was obvious to the nurse accusing me of beating a woman until she couldn't stand (and then taking her in to get treated???) and it was obvious to me, obvious to everyone else in the room, obvious even to the dehydrated little matriarch so weak she could barely speak, being delayed from her treatment to appease some knuckle-dragging pissant's self-gratifying paranoid fantasies about pervasive male violence against women. Nothing was said outright and it didn't need to be said. We all knew it already. We all know men are evil. We are born and raised to know this. Every stranger in that room already knew I was a criminal, as soon as a woman raised her voice at me.

This is just one tiny, low key, utterly mundane example of the injustice we take for granted. I wasn't even fired or arrested for unwittingly wandering across a woman's line of fire. A lot of men aren't that lucky. This is no newfangled conceit, either. It's the endlessly verified (pre-)historic truism which gave rise to #MeToo, medieval chivalry, the Violence Against Women Act and Popeye the Sailor cartoons. We are by default ready to believe that any man might harm any woman at any time... and to have him physically punished for the sake of our self-righteous blind belief.

By now, everyone in the anglophone world has heard of the Men's Rights Movement, possibly in deeply dishonest TV reports painting them as vicious extremists wanting to chain women to the stove or some nonsense. I actually have my own quibbles about men's rights activists, and even more complaints about what's been idiotically termed "the manosphere" on teh internets. For the moment, let's address the central issue: most media figures (even when they refrain from calling it a "hate movement") vilify the MRM as unnecessary at best, because what possible rights might men need?

How about the basic human right not to be presumed a violent criminal for the heinous act of driving my mother to the hospital?

Pretty sure that one was in the Magna Carta somewheres...