I've been giving what I said earlier to you a lot of thought, and while I stand behind the sentiments behind what I said, I realize now after some reflection that I probably could have said it in a different way.

A year ago, I would have been right there with you. I know the stats for what women face, but I also know the stats for men now. Just as I'm sure you're well aware of men's ignorance of women's issues, I've come to learn that men live in a world largely invisible to us unless we're willing to take a closer look. It's so easy to get swallowed up in the anger about the injustice we women face even in first-world countries, and you're right that a majority of our documented victims are women. Before I get into the larger picture, I hope you'll be willing to entertain my personal experiences, as I think it will help illustrate what I'm getting at.

I have a twin brother and we have no other siblings. We lived in the same house with the same parents and largely the same experiences spare for our individual pursuits. We were both intellectually gifted, but we also grew up in an emotionally abusive home; our mother constantly compared us to each other and fostered one hell of a sibling rivalry, complete with knock-down, blow out fights that got us both our fair share of stitches. We hated each other. I had friends that weren't great, but at least I had them. My brother didn't have anyone, and at the time I believed he deserved it. I'm sure you know this, but isolation messes up a human being. It results in depression, anxiety, and it compounds as time goes on because a lack of social development gets harder as your peers move on without you.

When we were 17, he developed Crohn's disease, and doctors essentially gave him an unlimited supply of opioids that my family and I didn't know until a year and a half ago that he'd developed an addiction to. My brother finally made a friend toward the end of high school, and that friend liked to drink, so my brother would join him. As it turns out, my brother's pancreas couldn't handle binge drinking on top of his opioid use, and in 2013 he had a case of acute pancreatitis so severe that it shut down both of his kidneys. Isolation mixed with the prospect of a crippling disease like that is especially bad for mental health, so he went for broke and started doing all manners of other drugs.

For a long time I couldn't figure out what the hell had happened to him. We were the same age, grew up in the same household, and both of us were ridiculously stubborn, so why the hell was he going through kidney failure due to substance abuse while I was going through a review for my bachelor's degree at a school known for how hard it is on its students in my field?

You're absolutely right that men are disproportionately the perpetrators of violent crimes against women. They're also statistically more likely to be perpetrators of violence against other men and even themselves. It wasn't until I watched Brené Brown's second TED talk that the pieces of what happened with my brother started coming together, and once I started digging around more, I found that what happened to him is startlingly common among men, largely because we live in a culture that cuts men off from any sort of human connection unless it's from a partner or close female friend or relative. If the connection comes from an unrelated woman, men confuse that warmth with attraction because they're normally not used to that kind of companionship. They don't know how to be vulnerable because they've been effectively punished from an early age from it. It's horrifically damaging, and unless we address men's issues in tandem with women's issues, I can't see how we are ever going to come out of this. As much as we sometimes muse that the way women are treated is stuck in the 50's, that's still the reality of where we keep our expectations of men.

I could go on, but this is already getting pretty lengthy. Suffice it to say, when I started pointing out the shit men and boys go through in our society, I found that the men in my life were more willing to listen to what I had to say and argue on women's behalf to other men, then tell me about it. I've been with my boyfriend for nearly nine years, but he's only recently begun pointing out cultural expectations leveled at women and I suspect it's because he knows I don't allow the norms leveled at men slide anymore now that I see it. I can say from experience that empathy and understanding, if given first, will yield much better results in a much faster time frame than if you tell the men you encounter to shut up and listen to your side of things. Agreeing with them will disarm them if done genuinely, and I find they become more dedicated in unraveling all of the bullshit we're in because, as humans, we're hardwired for cooperation and men value trade. We women want more rights, and we can trade men their freedom to express themselves, but we have to start somewhere.