This girl started texting my older son. They had known each other since kindergarten but ended up at different middle schools for sixth grade. Whassup, was her typical opening gambit; then, What r u doing? Sometimes she went on and on, inflating balloon after colored dialogue balloon on the screen of my son’s phone.

I couldn’t quite get a fix on how the kid felt about it. He seemed flattered, I thought, and a little embarrassed; tickled; annoyed; unable, perhaps, to quite get a fix on how he felt about it himself. For over half his life, this girl had been a source only of that mingled tedium, irritation, and indifference with which little boys tend to regard their female classmates (and vice versa). On the other hand, she was a pretty girl, and their recent separation had no doubt dissolved some of the quasi-incestuous feelings of taboo that previously rendered them unappealing to each other.

My son’s response to her text messages, however, was consistent and uniform: He shut her down. Nothing, he would text back. I’m busy. I cant talk right now bye. My wife and I had attempted to impose some controls on texting as the new behavior came online in the life of our family. No texting while homework remains to be done; no texting during dinner; no texting at all after nine p.m. But even when, by family statute, he was perfectly free to text away, my son would tell this girl that he could not. With other girls in his class, he texted freely, but there was something different in his eyes about this particular relationship, a premonitory tinge of the romantic, which brings me to my point: My son’s response to the proffered attention of an attractive young female was, systematically, I would almost say with devotion, to keep his distance. To frost her. He leaped to grab his phone when it quacked; he saw that it was her; he smiled, clearly pleased to hear from her; and then he thumb-typed: g2g. bye.

So now, along with everything else—the rules of consent, the imperatives of sexual reciprocity, the fundamental principle of equality—I had to teach him not to be a dick to girls.

Right off, I could see a few potential obstacles to this task. First of all, in order to do the job properly, it might help if I were myself not a dick. And I would like to believe that when it comes to the primary women in my life—wife, daughters, mother—most of the time, and usually but not always for the right reasons, I am a pretty nice guy. Considerate, helpful, willing to show affection, responsive, attentive, loyal, polite, et cetera. But to the extent that this is the case, no credit at all is due to me; it’s purely a matter of long years of training, conditioning, and unstinting effort by women—my mother, my first wife, and my current wife of twenty-five years.

I spent the most intensely watchful and empirical years of my life—eleven to seventeen—observing as my mother, a steady and unflappable hand, attempted to steer a sometimes veering course through the treacherous archipelago of men. I can actually remember her telling me with a throb in her voice, three days into a weeklong period of silence and unreturned phone calls that followed some date she thought had gone unusually well, “Promise me that you will never do this to a girlfriend, when you have a girlfriend. If you say that you are going to call her, you have to call her.”

I know this made an impression on me—I still remember the conversation forty years later—but I don’t think any of my first few serious girlfriends got much benefit from my mother’s injunction. Alone, in private, I knew how to treat them with kindness, tenderness, generosity of feeling and expression, but whenever we were in public, in particular among my male friends—and when you are a young man, you are always in public, always watching yourself, listening to yourself, audience and judge, checking your behavior against that of the mental list of exemplary men that you have been busy compiling—I was kind of a dick, never serious, never forgiving, never willing to commit to anything that might entangle me in seriousness or the need to forgive. I saw an early episode of M*A*S*H recently and was surprised to discover that the character of Hawkeye Pierce—one of my first exemplary men, after my father and Groucho Marx, with both of whom he shared one of the central dickish traits of making a joke out of everything—was not just a total dick but a creep whose primary pastime, apart from alcohol, was unremitting sexual harassment of his female coworkers—or as it was known at the time, rather chillingly, “being a ladies’ man.” My mother had her share of heartache at the hands of ladies’ men.

She set a standard for me, though—keep your promises, be nice, remember the little things, call when you say you will call—and I grew up and got married to a woman who was older than I was and had certain expectations of how she ought and ought not to be treated. It was not just a matter of calling, keeping promises, maintaining the proper form. Even being nice, whatever that means, was insufficient. What loving a grown-up woman required, it turned out, was a kind of fundamental metaphysical shift akin to the move from Jewish to Christian law, from outward obedience and conformity with the commandments, as it were, to the cultivation and maintenance of a righteous soul. I was expected to reach outside myself, beyond the dome and eyeholes of my own skull, imagine the life that was going on inside the head of another human—her fears, wishes, needs, likes and dislikes, longings—and then take these into consideration before I acted. In order to be a man—a real man, by her lights—I must try to imagine what it was like to be a woman. I did my best. We got divorced, and then I got married again, and my daughters were born. And it is in this ongoing business of fathering girls that my root-level dickishness has faced its greatest challenge. With my wife, the process has been a continuing-education course, with those initial adventures in imagining the life inside that other head going far and deep, deeper and farther than with anyone else I’ve ever known, but somehow my failures with her—the inadvertent public putdowns, the lingering sexist assumptions, the small but crucial promises broken—have never borne the same constant freight of potential disaster as similar lapses with my girls.

Now, I know that when men are called upon to denounce sexual harassment and rape culture they will often preface or bracket their denunciation with phrases like, “As the father of a daughter . . .” or “Because I care about my daughters . . .” The implication seems to be that unless and until a man has a daughter, he remains incapable of mustering the empathy required to grant women full status as human beings whose rights and integrity must be respected. That’s not what I’m saying; in fact, I am saying something almost the opposite: I have been working most of my life, intermittently at first but pretty much constantly since I was twenty-four years old, to imagine myself into the minds and circumstances of the women in my life. But it was not until I had daughters that I fully became aware of—and duly horrified by—the damage that I myself, in my latent dickitude, was capable of inflicting. I remember once taking my older daughter to the hair salon, and when she rose from the chair with a new cut, an asymmetrical bob, going out on a limb a little bit for a fourteen-year-old in her set, saying, “Daddy?,” seeking my reaction, wanting to know if I thought she looked pretty, I— Well, I don’t know what happened. I had been reading a magazine, there was some random thought in my head, I looked up, my face must have looked blank, seeing nothing new, nothing remarkable, my mind miles away from where it needed to be right then. You needed something? And for a moment her eyes went wide with fear and doubt.

What a dick!

“Beautiful,” I told her, but I knew it was too late: she had a crack in her now, fine as a hair but like all cracks irreversible. I was shocked by my own thoughtlessness, and ashamed of it, but the thing I felt most of all was horror. Horror is the only fit response when you are confronted by the full extent of your power to break another human being.

To be a feminist, as a man, it’s not enough to acknowledge the violence behind the power that you inherited at birth, along with all the entrenched structures, from language to custom to religion, that have been put into place in order to help you maintain it. To be a feminist—defined most simply, so that even an eleven-year-old boy can understand it, as the radical assertion that women are human beings—you must repudiate the legacy of violence, and resist those implacable structures of power. But even that’s not enough. Even after all the hard work of repudiation and resistance, your privilege will still be there, assigning higher value to your labor, giving your words more time and attention, and basically letting you be as big a dick as you want, whenever and however you please. Against that the only hope is empathy, and for empathy you need to call upon the greatest of all your human inheritances, stronger than violence, able to leap the most entrenched hierarchies in a single bound. To feel the proper horror of the power you have to break someone, you need to use your imagination.

“How come you always blow her off that way?” I said to my son, the next time I saw the little SMS ritual enacted.

I could see the question caught him off guard. He didn’t know how to answer it; he probably didn’t even know if the question had an answer.

“It probably hurts her feelings,” I suggested. “If you think about it.”

My son had the sullen grace to acknowledge that this was a possibility.

“I know you don’t want to do that,” I said. “You’re friends. She’s a sweet girl.”

“She’s whatever,” my son said.

Not long after that, I suppose, the girl got the message. They never hung out, and she stopped texting him, and I don’t remember hearing too much about her at all until my son was about to graduate from high school, and one day her name came up in conversation. My son said that the two of them had lost touch completely, years before, but he had heard through the Berkeley-Oakland high school grapevine that she had pretty much gone off the rails: alcohol, drugs, wild behavior. My son shook his head, looking vaguely pitying, but I didn’t hear what I considered to be sufficient sympathy, let alone empathy, in his tone.

“It’s probably because you never texted her back,” I said, with a straight face, laying on a tone of serious reproach. It was a classic dick move.

I could see him doing the emotional math, charting the butterfly effect of his callousness toward her, all those years ago. His face got very grave, and his eyes widened. For a moment he looked adequately horrified.

“Maybe it is,” he said, and I could see that I had put a fine crack in him, too. But that was okay. Sometimes a crack is just what is needed, to let in a little shaft of light.