The Talk

 I have been putting off having The Talk.

With myself.

But a swirling cloud of improprieties circling our governor and, now, a certain congressman from Florida have me thinking the reckoning is unavoidable. No doubt it is long past due.

Oh sure, I've heard from men who wonder aloud about the state of office politics. As if politics is all that's at play. They all wonder what offenses - what off-color joke or light flirtation - would upend their professional lives as they know them.

And I assure them that they would KNOW in the way we KNOW when things feel amiss.

But I don't know why I reassure them when undoubtedly they must do their own self-evaluation.

It is not enough to look at our actions through the lens of the familiar.

I'm not talking about cases. Whatever investigations reveal about evidence is still to be seen.

I'm talking about pinpointing the moment in time when the expectations shifted; when the light shone on the old boys' network and all we saw was the decay.

But I haven't heard from my daughter; who, like her mother, has been having trouble locating the middle ground.

But before we open our mouths and take that deep, buoying breath to unleash the torrent, we have some serious thinking to do.

Because it's not just one thing.

From "Me too," to "Time's Up" to "Not All Men we are in the midst of a reckoning.

Maybe the middle is where we've been all along. Making things worse.

What strikes me as an oddity in this back and forth the genders in all their complexities seem to be having is that we keep looking at the forest but pretending not to acknowledge the trees.

The common beliefs we have accepted in our lives for no other reason than we didn't have to think about them aren't holding up.

Dad fixes the car.

Mom fixes the lunch.

Doctors are men.

Nurses are women.

We just like to hug. It's part of our culture.

Don't worry your pretty little head about any of these details.

But the details we should question aren't salacious ones. The details are more mundane than you might imagine.

What do we expect? And why? 

All it takes for change is for the weight of the world -- or those in it who are unwilling to accept the state of affairs -- to shift in a new direction. Afterward, it probably won't even seem like a giant wave has capsized everything we know.

It will seem more like a clarifying correction.

Maybe it started after the dramatic downfall of a movie mogul that we lost a taste for the so-called Hollywood ending: the guy getting the girl as the credits roll. A few female names among a sea of male ones becomes so much harder to overlook.

This flipped script is more than some heady talk of disruption. There is real change coming. And it is long overdue.

There will always be time to talk. Right now, it is time to listen.