Let us love dogs, let us love only dogs! Men and cats are unworthy creatures.
- Maria Konstantinova Bashkirtseff
I only really noticed now how nobile's seemingly innocent quote is actually dead sexist. I know you guys love your cats, but let's brush that facet aside for a while and ask ourselves are more interesting question first: I often find myself wondering why it has become increasingly acceptable, in the current gender climate, to paint men in the media as dumb, inept and brutish? How come "equality", instead of providing equal treatment for both men and women, has come to denote such a grave difference regarding how the features and personalities of men and women are treated publicly and in the media?
Judith Levine offers us three handy, primary misandric stereotypes:
- Infants: the Mama's Boy, the Babbler, the Bumbler and the Invalid;
- Betrayers: the Seducer, the Slave, the Abandoner and the Abductor; and
- Beasts: the Brute, the Pet, the Pervert, the Prick and the Killer.
All these stereotypes seem to pervade our society: If a woman kills his son, she is a victim - if a man kills his son, he is all of the aforementioned Betrayers and Beasts. If a woman rapes a man, she is misguided; if a man rapes a woman, he is all of the Betrayers and all of the Beasts. And more. I recall a headline from the local newspaper, something along the lines of "This Girl Beats Guys!" Just imagine this headline reversed! The paper's mailbox would have been flooded by a tremendous backlash. What's worse, the article was about a high school girl being good in mathematics - why would this be news, anyway? Is the average woman dumber than the average man for it to be special for a girl to excel in maths? I think not - instead, the (female) author of the article had unwittingly submitted herself to the very values she was trying to "fight" against.
These very values, then, could be easily condensed into something like a Feminist Conspiracy: Despite complete "equality", men are still intentionally painted in the media as aggressive wife-beaters and idiotic rapists in order to repress and make them servile and submissive by utilizing their dependency to sex and sexuality all the while shaming them for having such a dependency (as well as the historical baggage of "sexual oppression") in the first place!
Similarly, what of the "sexual oppression" of women (rape, violence), then? Let me ask you! Is not the natural position of the weak to submit in order to survive? Women are still utilizing their seemingly inherent sex appeal to provide them with men-based affluence and security like previous generations have, only now they are, perhaps for the first time in human history, free of the responsibility and constraint of actually providing both sex and offspring to men. We could argue that men have willingly awarded them the advantage and power of sexuality but demanded zero responsibility in return.
The bottom line is, I don't understand how it came to be that men, increasingly dehumanized and diminished by these stereotypes, accepted their current situation. The scorn and ridicule is met with no resistance, which requires me to ask you: Have we really drifted so far away from our biological origins that women as human beings have ejected themselves from the very constraints of being human as well as treating men as such?
Warren Farrell wrote:In the past quarter century, we exposed biases against other races and called it racism, and we exposed biases against women and called it sexism. Biases against men we call humor.
Okay, so, this post is clearly the ramblings of a misogynistic Beast of a man... that's why I'd like to hear your two cents
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