Dear straight white friends

Palma‘I wish I had the security of a straight white man’ is a phrase we’ve adopted in my group, and one we say more often than we’d like. We’re mostly gays and girls and we don’t have that many straight white male friends. Perhaps because of that, because we’re not used to it, we can quickly distinguish the overconfidence of some of them. They are gestures with which they show that the world loves them unconditionally, that they always land on their feet, that they don’t have to ask for permission or forgiveness, that they don’t have to question anything. It’s doing things without having thought about it at all, advice they assume you need, a comment or an unfinished sentence with which they expect you to make the effort to understand them, instead of them making the effort to explain themselves. It’s a feeling of impunity and immunity that is frightening. It’s audacity, in short. And I love them all the same, though, because they are my friends.

It's been a while since I first told my boyfriend that I was tired of educating men and that I wasn't going to do it anymore. I wasn't thinking about my dear three or four straight white friends (not even my dad), I was thinking about those who will never give up the privilege of ignorance. At first, I don't think he took it well: it sounded like defeat, recklessness, and irresponsibility. He told me that we wouldn't get anywhere with this attitude, that we couldn't just give up on that part of the population. And I answered him that I wasn't giving up on them – those who can afford to resemble Julio Iglesias more than Borja Iglesias – but rather leaving them in his hands.

It's not that I don't want to do more educating, it's that I don't want to do the work a man should be doing. The time has come for you to confront your colleagues, your straight white male friends. It's a matter of redistributing the work, of being fair and freeing ourselves, so we can focus on what's truly important: stopping your attacks. Because it's us who take care of your corpses; who pick up the remains of our friends, mothers, cousins, sisters from the floor, in an audio message or over a Pornstar Martini; who repeat "no, darling, the problem isn't that you're a Virgo and he's a Scorpio"; who rebuild from scratch the personality of that woman because we learned it by heart just in case, in case that moment arrived. We'll take care of the first aid. You try to make sure none of this happens again. Okay?

Dear friends and not-so-friends, white heterosexuals, if you want to deconstruct yourselves beyond the mullet, the tote bag and the Filmin subscription, you should start by taking responsibility for your dead selves and stop being accomplices. It's feminist 101 to know that to get in, you'll have to lose. And if you're not even willing to have an uncomfortable conversation with your friend, what price did you expect to pay? This is like social security: we all gain from it, but it has a price. It's like ceasing to be a teenager. The only thing we expect from you is that, little by little, you learn to give up your comforts and manage certain contradictions.

I would like you to learn from this, to do it like when you enter your mother's kitchen, with a face of "how can I help?", and she asks you to peel the potatoes or chop the onion. That you are willing to do the dirty and less glamorous work, and that you don't hesitate to flip the omelette and tell your colleague that he's a grump, for example. In short, that you be empathetic and don't let your friend be a victim of his white heterosexual male security, that you encourage him to swallow his pride when he's rejected, that you warn him that it's very 2012 to worry about the body count of the girl he wants to sleep with, that you explain to him what the trans law is about, or that you make him blush when you ask him how many artists appeared on his Spotify Wrapped.

I want you to stop betraying us. Because if we are still the bitter ones, it's because you haven't stopped being the screwed-up father of the relationship. We are the bitter ones because you act as a counterpoint: you are the relaxed, fun, and appeased position in front of a situation that requires a single stance. You expect a looser reality than what it is; you have flexible morality, as Soy una pringada (Esty Quesada) would say. And we need you to commit, not just when they throw a drink at you at the club, at La velada with Ibai, at a football match, or against everything you consider fascism. Because, sometimes, fascism also hides within the complicity of your camaraderie.