I am not a man. I have never been a young boy in America, and in this life time I never will be. I therefore do not speak from direct personal experience, but from observed phenomena and conjecture.
With that being said, I will now have a self assured make out session with my pet theory.
In previous posts, I noted the number of men committing rapes recently. These are typically college age men, in their late teens and early twenties. (I do not speak for all rapes, rapists, or forms of sexual abuse. These are merely the rapists I am concerned with, for the purposes of this post.) It is a disturbing trend, particularly in a generation that has supposedly been taught to respect women and girls as equals.
However, there is something far more disturbing. I am 16 years old. I have male friends of all ages - from 20 to 13. In these men and boys, I have noticed a direct correlation between respect for women, and age. The younger the boys, the less the respect. It can be argued, perhaps, that a 13 yr old treating females a certain way, is due to immaturity and will soon be grown out of.
If we're talking about frogs in desks and pig-tail pulling, that's true -- but I'm not. I'm talking about sexual objectification, name calling, physical abuse, and the playing of video "games" such as Rapeplay (why does that even EXIST???). Further, I have observed a number of the same boys for the last four years. Those same thirteen year old boys I noticed being disturbingly disrespectful in middle school, are now seventeen years old. Their behaviour hasn't changed.
To illustrate this point, I direct your attention to the recently popular (but thankfully, receding) "Bitch, make me a sammich" so-called joke. It's a one liner, it's a put-down, it closes a conversation - and it's a blatant, one-up-ya power play directed exclusively at females. Any woman who protests this line, is immediately attacked by male AND female members of a group, as being "unable to take a joke".
Of course, this is life. Right? Perhaps unpleasant, but decidedly typical, especially in teenage circles. Well, I disagree.
I've been bullied. Not in a little kids, rough and tumble way, but in a brutal, pointed, changing-schools-to-get-away kind of way. For most of school, I was decidedly unpopular. I was the twelve year old who analyzed her classmates looking for trends in gender dynamics -- how many friends do you think I had? So, I'm used to being shot down. Used to being laughed at, ignored, teased, and one-upped in conversation again and again and again. I don't say this to beg for a pity party, but to point out: THAT is the run-of-the-mill brutality of adolescence. I've seen it, I know what it is.
"Make me a sammich" is not that. So why? Why is it different? It's different because it's not the victimization of one person, or the elevation of one person. The thousands of variants on "I'm pretty, you're ugly", for example, are individualized. They put one specific person (the bully) above one other specific person (the bullied). Your hair, your braces, your slutishness, your fat ass. Each case is an issue between two people.
The sammich line goes farther, and deeper. In a group of adolescents, Jason may use it to silence Tasha - but the "joke" isn't about Tasha. It doesn't put Jason above Tasha, it puts the males of the group above the females, for no other reason than the fact that "we are males, and you are females". It is, in other words, sexism in it's most pure and blatant form.
It is easy to take this fact and go down a typical road - sexism is bad, they need to stop being sexist, there is danger here, etc.
But I think a closer look at this is required. It is not, after all, implying that women are sexual objects, or naturally submissive, or incapable of contributing to the work force. It is instead bringing back an idea that is ancient to my generation: that women belong in the home. I realize that to those even 20 years older than us, it may not seem that outdated... but to my generation, it's midevil.
So, why bring it back? Because it's a "cold" issue, ie one that you can bring back without being so politically incorrect that the opinion of the group turns against you. It's nothing more than a canvas on which to paint the larger message of: Men stand above women. It's not just a power play, it's a declaration of dominance, control, power.
And yanno what? You can say that's been happening forever, but the truth is, it hasn't. Have men (and women, for that matter) been playing out that notion for centuries? You bet. But the verbal, universally used declaration of men-are-better-than-women hasn't been verbalized on this scale in the past several decades. I'm not talking about a joke that some people happen to use, here. I'm talking about a line that everyone used -- in it's peak just a few months ago, it was as widely used as "That's what she said" or "Your mom" in their respective days.
I've rambled slightly, so to sum up the above quickly: Boys and young men are increasingly asserting their social and physical power over women, even as their economic, social, and educational advantages decrease and even reverse. This begins in words, but it's a pretty quick step over to physical abuse, and then to rape.
I don't think it's very difficult to make the next logical step: Boys and men are being threatened by the rise of women, the success of feminism, and the gradual but undeniable deconstruction of a patriarchal governing system.
Why? Because they're lost, and feminism has shifted the focus so much on to women, that no one is standing by to help the boys as they try and find their place in a suddenly "broken" world.
More on that in my next post. In the mean time, you REALLY want to read this: http://www.independent.co.uk/opinion/commentators/the-new-girl-power-why-were-living-in-a-young-womans-world-2074042.html
No comments:
Post a Comment