The Cost of Silence Isn't Behind Us

Cassie McClure
Fri, 20 Mar 2026 21:00:00 -0700
Lifestyle

Different silences have built modern America, and we don't like to talk about them. They don't make it into the speeches or even some of the history books. They are the parts that get cut, softened, or turned into something easier to admire.

When we talk about labor rights, we thought we knew the story. Then we learned what Dolores Huerta carried quietly to keep a story moving.

We like to think we've moved past that kind of bargain, that we are quicker to name harm and less willing to look away. And in some ways, that's true. But at the same time, something else is happening culturally: a backslide dressed up as clarity.
Updated: Sun Mar 22, 2026

Different silences have built modern America, and we don't like to talk about them. They don't make it into the speeches or even some of the history books. They are the parts that get cut, softened, or turned into something easier to admire.

When we talk about labor rights, we thought we knew the story. Then we learned what Dolores Huerta carried quietly to keep a story moving.

We like to think we've moved past that kind of bargain, that we are quicker to name harm and less willing to look away. And in some ways, that's true. But at the same time, something else is happening culturally: a backslide dressed up as clarity.

Last weekend, I watched "Louis Theroux: The Secrets of the Manosphere" with my husband. We tend to watch TV interactively, pausing at certain points to insert a thought before continuing. My first pause came in, "Who are these guys? Do you know them?" Obviously, my algorithm doesn't include me as someone they're likely to influence. But my son might be.

Only a few minutes in, an influencer introduced a woman as his "dishwasher." I hit pause so hard that I creaked the plastic in the remote.

"Would he say that in front of his mother?" I yelled, sitting up in my recliner. "So help me if I ever hear our son say that or refer to a woman as a female."

I had to take a breather before restarting and steeling myself for a whole host of nonsense straight out of Reddit's Red Pill threads. In short, a woman's worth is her youth and not much else.

How'd those 23-year-olds get there? Because I didn't want my 10-year-old to end up on that road.

When the baby fat finally slid off, I started to get a glimpse of the man my son might grow into, a balance of humor and care. And yet, he's young enough to make fun of his future voice change, dropping his voice into a deep cadence and laughing. He didn't enjoy that he couldn't give me hugs while I had the flu this week, and he kept checking in on me. He called me beautiful a few weeks ago, but then said, truthfully, after I suggested that I might be the one in the cart when we go shopping as I recover, "I'll push! I mean, I'll try. I mean, you're not fat, but I'm only so strong."

That's fair, kid.

It was about this time last year when he told me sadly that the girls in his class preferred to play only with girls. I had no neat reply to give him, but it gave me an inkling of the divide that was starting that I couldn't mend for him.

I can feel the pull to treat this like a problem I can solve at home. If I say the right things early enough, stay close enough, I can get ahead of the onslaught of outside influences. I can work it out alongside him like math problems at the kitchen table, because yes, our modeled behavior as parents matters. But it's not the whole story that he'll be told.

By the time a boy leaves your table, he's already absorbing messages from everywhere else, and a lot of them are louder, simpler, and more rewarding in the short term. An increase in accepted misogyny is one thing to clock as a cultural shift, but it's another to realize your kid has to grow up inside it.

But responsibility for change doesn't sit on mothers, or women alone, no matter how much we might feel it does. It sits with what boys hear from other men, what gets laughed at, what gets shut down, and what gets rewarded. It comes down to whether respect reads as strength or weakness in the rooms they move through. It shows up in small moments, in language, in whether anyone bothers to push back. It's up to all of us.

The silence that once protected movements can also protect the attitudes that underlie them. At some point, keeping quiet stops serving the cause and continues feeding the problem. If that's where we still are, then breaking that silence isn't betrayal, it's continuing the work.