I’ll Fight for Women’s Rights Like My Life Depends On It—Because It Does
When women’s bodily autonomy is under attack, every man who claims to care about freedom has a choice: stand up or fuck off
Note: issued the challenge, and stepped up and re-issued it. So here I am—taking an unequivocal stand. I am with women, 100%.
I am a gay man and I am a diehard feminist. Not the polite, “I support women in theory” kind. I mean the kind who shows up, speaks up, and shuts up when it’s not my turn. The kind who treats women’s bodily autonomy like my own cause—because it is. Freedom is not a buffet where men heap their plates and women get the scraps. Either we are all free to decide what happens to our bodies, or none of us are. Full stop.
Let me plant a stake in the ground: I will fight for women’s rights with the same ferocity I want straight people to fight for mine when the state tries to regulate who I am allowed to love, marry, or be.
And I’m asking—no, I’m calling out—every man who reads this: get off the sidelines. This isn’t a “women’s issue.” It’s a democracy issue, an economic issue, a human dignity issue. It’s your issue.
Here’s the reality check. Since Dobbs, abortion access has fractured along state lines. In 2024, fourteen states enforced total abortion bans; Florida and Iowa layered on six-week bans that are bans in everything but name, and the country now lives under a patchwork designed to exhaust, shame, and endanger people who can get pregnant. That isn’t a debate—it’s data.
The Supreme Court, in 2024, ducked a direct hit on medication abortion by tossing the mifepristone case on standing grounds. Access remains—for now—because the plaintiffs didn’t have the legal right to sue. That was a narrow, technical reprieve, not a sweeping defense of bodily autonomy. The opinion changed nothing about the ongoing political campaign to choke off access through other routes.
Case in point: the renewed fetish for the 1873 Comstock Act, a Victorian relic that censors anything “obscene” through the mail. Anti-abortion strategists have started testing Comstock as a nationwide back-door ban—arguing it blocks mailing abortion medications, devices, maybe even the instruments used in clinics. Public health experts are blunt: enforced literally, Comstock would function as a national abortion ban without Congress lifting a finger. That’s not paranoia; that’s the plan they’re trial-ballooning right now.
And while we’re talking about the slippery slope: Alabama’s high court managed, in 2024, to declare frozen embryos “children,” grinding IVF services to a halt until legislators scrambled to limit liability. Families desperate to have kids got caught in the ideological crossfire. If you wanted a neon sign that this crusade isn’t just about “life” but about control, there it is: even wanted pregnancies, even fertility medicine, are suspect under a theology of state power over reproduction.
So yes, I’m furious. I’m also practical. Because we’ve got decades of evidence that when women are empowered—educated, healthy, economically equal—everyone wins. Families are more stable. Kids are safer. Companies are more profitable. Nations grow richer. That’s not romantic idealism; it’s what the data shows about gender parity and economic outcomes.
If you’re a man who thinks this is someone else’s fight, I want you to hear this clearly and maybe uncomfortably: you’re benefitting from a system that still expects women to absorb risk, cost, and punishment for sex and reproduction while you float above the consequences.
That system is not neutral; it’s designed.
And it is absolutely fucking up our democracy.
I’m anti-pedophilia without apology or nuance. Predation is not a kink; it’s a crime. And any movement that tolerates men who groom teen girls, or that mocks consent as “woke,” is a movement that has already chosen violence against women and children. We don’t need more euphemisms. We need boundaries, enforcement, and culture change. Full stop.
Here’s what men like me—gay, straight, bi, trans men, all of us—owe women right now:
Show up politically. Learn your state’s laws. Some states preserve broad access; others criminalize it. Vote accordingly. Donate accordingly. Stop pretending that “both sides” are the same when one side is systematically stripping bodily autonomy. If you live in a ban state and have the means, fund travel and logistical support for people who need care. And push back when pundits paint this as a niche issue. It is a constitutional one.
Defend medication abortion and emergency care. Mifepristone stayed available because of a technicality; EMTALA protections for life-saving abortions remain intact—for now. That status quo can change with a single election or a different plaintiff. Keep the heat on. Support providers and legal funds. If your workplace offers health benefits, demand travel coverage and explicit protection for reproductive care.
Kill the Comstock zombie. The Comstock Act isn’t a museum piece; it’s a loaded gun on the table. Make it politically toxic to revive. Tell your representatives—publicly—that you will not tolerate a nationwide ban by bureaucratic memo. Put it in letters, town halls, shareholder meetings, and board agendas.
Fix your culture. If you manage people, audit your policies: parental leave, flexible scheduling, promotion pipelines, harassment enforcement. Don’t ask women to “lean in” to a broken structure; rebuild the structure. The payoff isn’t theoretical—gender-balanced leadership and equitable practices correlate with stronger performance and retention. That’s the bottom line, not just a slogan.
Practice consent like it’s oxygen. In dating, in marriage, in the damn group chat. Call out your friends when they cross lines. If you hear a guy brag about stealthing, “gray-area” sex, or pushing past a no—destroy the silence around it. Be the person who ends the story, not the one who nods along.
Listen, then amplify. Women have been sounding the alarm. Don’t barge in and mansplain; follow, fund, and amplify the women already leading. When you’re invited to speak, speak. When you’re not, help build the mic and hand it over.
Let me also say this as a gay man who’s been lectured about “tradition” by people who can’t define it without a Bible and a belt: the same ideology working to police women’s bodies is more than happy to erase mine. Just look at the Kim Davis case heading to the Supreme Court to overturn Obergefell.
Today it’s abortion and IVF; tomorrow it’s contraception, trans healthcare, marriage equality—hell, even private intimacy. If you think they’ll stop with women, you have not been paying attention. The playbook is government control dressed up as virtue.
I refuse to live in a country where a woman’s zip code decides whether she gets healthcare or handcuffs. I refuse to let 19th-century mail law determine 21st-century medicine. I refuse to shrug while courts flirt with theology and call it jurisprudence.
And I refuse to be the kind of man who stays quiet because it’s uncomfortable to speak.
This is my commitment, on the record. I will treat an attack on women’s autonomy as an attack on my own freedom. I will vote like it. I will donate like it. I will argue like it at Thanksgiving and on Tuesday afternoons. I will put my voice, my time, and my wallet behind organizations that protect access, defend providers, and expand equality. And if you’re a man reading this, I’m asking you to do the same—and I’m asking you to say it out loud, in public, so that other men hear you.
To the women who’ve carried this fight: I see you, I thank you, and I’m with you.
To the men: pick a side. Neutrality is complicity.
If you think the government belongs in a doctor’s office more than it belongs fixing roads, you’ve lost the plot. If you think a teenage girl owes the state her body, you’ve lost your humanity. And if you think the rest of us will sit quietly while you drag us backward, you’ve lost me—and a hell of a lot of men who are done being quiet.
This is my line in the sand. Women’s rights are human rights, and they’re my rights too. I will defend them with my vote, my voice, and, yes, my profanity when the moment calls for it.
Because sometimes the only honest response to injustice is to say—clearly, loudly, together—NO.
Not one more inch.
Not one more ban.
Not one more stolen future.
Not on our watch.
Nice! This is a powerhouse of a post! Thank you Lawrence!
Thank you so much!! Instant follow. Hope this snowballs, but I don’t have a lot of faith in straight men, who have more at stake … they can face unwanted fatherhood and partners endangered by pregnancy complications, but they ignore the issue diligently.