by Jim Herbert
He kept his job. She lost hers. Here’s why.
There is a conversation that keeps surfacing in our culture, arriving in different forms and in different headlines, but always carrying the same essential question underneath it all. That question is this:
Why do we keep holding men and women to different standards, and what does it cost all of us when we do?
I want to write about that question directly, because I think it matters enormously for the work we do in this community of men, and I want to write about it not only as managing director, facilitator or community member, but also as a man who has spent years examining his own relationship with power, accountability, and what it actually means to show up with integrity in this world.
Two stories landed close together in the news cycle last month that I have been giving a great deal of thought to since they surfaced. Truth be told, I think I knew that my turn was coming up for this blog and that I would likely give those thoughts some voice when it did.
In early spring, photos emerged of New England Patriots head coach Mike Vrabel and Atlantic reporter Dianna Russini at an adults only resort in Arizona. Both Vrabel and Russini are married to other people and both initially suggested the photos were taken out of context. The tone shifted fairly quickly, as tends to happen when the evidence is more clear than originally expected. As that tone shifted, Vrabel acknowledged that he had some “difficult conversations” ahead of him with his team and his family and then continued preparing for the NFL draft. Russini resigned from The Athletic following an internal investigation into her personal conduct.
In the end, Vrabel kept his job. I mean why wouldn’t he keep his job? His team made it to the Super Bowl in February, and in all probability, if he wins enough games next season, this chapter will be remembered as a footnote in an otherwise celebrated coaching career.
Even though Russini resigned instead of being fired, the ultimate outcome is the same. She lost her job while the man kept his.
I am not here to pass judgement on what happened between two people at a resort in Arizona. These were two adults who made their own choices and are free to live in any relationship dynamic that they choose. What I am here to say though, is that the outcome of that situation tells us something important about the world we are still living in. A man acknowledged that difficult conversations were necessary and moved forward. A woman was investigated and resigned. The behavior, whatever it was, belonged to both of them equally, while the life consequences were far from equal.
While I am writing about one specific situation, this is not an isolated incident. Might I remind you of perhaps the most famous similar incident of all time, involving Bill Clinton and Monica Lewinsky. Director Rupert Sanders and actress Kristen Stewart. Arnold Schwarzenegger and his housekeeper Mildred Baena. This dual standard of consequences is a pattern so ingrained in our culture that we have largely stopped noticing it, the way you stop noticing the hum of an air conditioner after it has been running long enough.
Men often emerge from sex scandals with a little sting. Women frequently emerge cloaked in shame, and sometimes are even labeled as whores by men who claim to be more righteous. You’re welcome to do a little digging into the story of Pope Gregory the Great and Mary Magdalene if you are so inclined, but I’ll leave any further thoughts about that out of this story to avoid inciting a religious debate.
Around the same time as the Vrabel/Russini story broke, CNN began reporting on what has been called the rape academy. I want to be fully transparent about my own experience of that particular story. As an abuse survivor, I had a genuinely difficult time engaging with the reporting of the rape academy story at first. I want to be absolutely clear that I am not claiming to have experienced what those survivors experienced, but I carry my own history with the misuse of power and the silence that surrounds it. Stories of predatory behavior enacted by men on vulnerable people hit me in a place that is still tender and still healing. I had to approach the story slowly and in small doses.
When I did engage with rape academy story more fully, the atrocities were exactly as bad as I feared, and one of the things that emerged from the public response to those reports was a phrase that I want to examine a bit more closely. That phrase is a phrase that has frequently been used in response to a woman expressing her frustration, grief and anger about all of this stuff. The responsorial phrase typically sounds something like this:
But it’s not all men.
I understand the impulse to defend the many good men that exist in this world. I have felt a reaction inside me that wants to defend as well. When someone speaks about men in a way that feels sweeping or absolute, something inside me wants to clarify, to distinguish, to say wait, that is not me, that is not the men I know, that is not what we are trying to build here in our community. That impulse to defend is perfectly human and it is not without some level of validity.
Here is where my teacher and mentor Dr. David Bedrick came in and helped me understand something that has fundamentally changed how I listen to the “but not all men” response. According to David, when a woman says men in a plural, frustrated and sometimes enraged sense, she is not making a statistical claim that requires fact checking. She is not saying that every individual man on the planet has personally wronged her, but rather she is speaking from the accumulated weight of years, decades, centuries of experience. She is voicing a psychic, experiential truth that has not been heard nearly enough or nearly loudly enough.
With that in mind, when an individual, or our society in general responds to her experiential truth with “but not all men” what they are actually doing, even if this is not the intention, is asking the injured person to correct their own experience into something more statistically precise before they are willing to really hear about that injury. They are, in effect, making her pain about their own discomfort with being categorized into something that triggers something inside them that they do not want to be categorized with.
In my mind, the “but not all men” response does not offer any form of support or empathy at all, which are the two things that those who are experiencing harm need the most. Shame thrives where unwitnesseds harm festers in the shadows. Once again, as David says, the “but not all men” response is nothing more than a deflection trying to be dressed up as fairness.
The men in the MenLiving community know something about what it costs to actually stay in the room when things get uncomfortable. We have sat in circles together, both virtually and in person, and practiced the discipline of listening to pain without immediately trying to manage it, reframe it, or make it smaller so we can feel better about ourselves. I know how hard that is to do, and I also know how necessary it is.
So here is what I want to say to the men reading this post.
The antidote to “but not all men” is not to argue about the statistics. The antidote is to be one of the men who makes the statistics less true.
Mature masculinity in my mind is to be the man who either keeps his job or not, but most importantly, also holds himself genuinely accountable, not just to his family and team mates in private, but to the culture he participates in publicly. A grounded, mature man leans forward and listens when a woman speaks her experiential truth about what men have done, rather than immediately looking for and naming the exceptions.
The standard we accept is the standard we set. If we accept a world where a man and a woman do the same thing and only the woman pays the consequences, or pays more severe consequences, then we are participating in and enabling that world, whether we intended to or not. In a world where the response to documented predatory behavior is a defensive clarification about all the good ones, we are making it easier for the harm to continue.
I am not writing about this with the intent to shame anyone. What I am more interested in is being a part of a community, and ultimately a world, that looks at the pattern and asks, “What are we willing to do differently?”
Responsibility understands that being one of the good ones is not a destination you arrive at and then rest, but rather that it is a daily practice of showing up, speaking up, and refusing to look away even when looking away is the more convenient thing to do.
The MenLiving community is built around the belief that men are capable of more than the culture of our society has asked of them and that men can be strong and accountable at the same time.
In addition to the vision of a world of healthy, intentional and connected men, I am so grateful to be part of a community of men who can hold space for someone else’s pain without making it about their own discomfort. When men can model something different for the next generation of boys who are watching everything we do and learning from it, we initiate that change with our actions and not only our words.
Vrabel will continue to coach and Russini will try to rebuild. The survivors of the rape academy, and the Epstein files, will carry what happened to them for the rest of their lives. And we will keep having this conversation until the standard changes.
I intend to keep having this conversation wherever and whenever necessary, and I hope you will too.
