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Would you be comfortable with the level of respect in a song on the radio if the singer described two men who find a woman passed out on the side of the road, expose her private parts, and put something between her legs? How about a song in which a man displeased with a woman’s behavior decides to teach her a lesson by slashing her tires?
What if I told you that almost those exact songs are currently on national radio playlists? It’s true. Just reverse the genders in the descriptions above, and we have the songs “The Scotsman’s Kilt” and “Before He Cheats.”
…Did finding out that the songs’ victims were actually male make those songs acceptable in your mind? If so, why?
Do you suppose the versions with female victims could have made it past censors to receive radio play—and if they were so played, do you think they would have been greeted with the same lack of major feminist denunciation? Doing away with the hypothetical, ask yourself one more question: Why do so few men speak up for themselves when women treat them poorly?
Large swaths of modern society have an expectation that males faced with various hardships will “Take It Like A Man.” Part of that concept insinuates that if a male does not placidly accept various forms of negative, degrading, even abusive behaviors, he is somehow… lesser. This is doubly true when the aggressor is “just” a woman.
It is perplexing that our society chooses to maintain this collaborative hallucination despite its consequences. Our men live under such tremendous emotional stress loads that they die by suicide at a rate of over three times that of their female counterparts, but counter-logically those same statistics show men are less likely to seek help.* As to the idea that being female equals being harmless, the numerous women imprisoned for offenses such as assault and murder denote that women can be plentifully harmful. Yet this preposterous concept of the invulnerable male persists: men stoically avoid admitting when they are hurt; that void of accountability gives women carte blanche to do it more; repeat ad nauseum.
To end this unhealthy status quo, we must do two things as a society: we must stop belittling women by thinking of them as ineffectual, and stop devaluing men by thinking of them as dumpsters. Practice respect—and, yes, that MUST include enough self-respect to speak up for yourself.
*American Foundation for Suicide Prevention, March 2018.
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The post You Don’t Have to Take it Like a Man appeared first on The Good Men Project.
