I came to the conclusion recently that I am offended by men. I was watching a show recently and there was a woman, who I might add was a hired hit-person and very capable of handling herself, who was threatened in a bar. There were two men there, one who was the asshole threatening her and one “who came to help the damsel in distress.” The woman turned to the “hero” and said, “I don’t need help.” He looked offended. But I saw the act of him rushing in to help her as an act of aggression. But why did I see it that way? It wasn’t that he did anything wrong. He merely stood up and tried to calm the situation. But in the world as a whole, I have seen a great number of straight men act as if any woman they see as something they own, period. Whether they do or not, they have this air about them that seems to scream, “all women are property.” It’s evident in tv shows and movies, in songs, in literature. And if a woman stands up for herself then she is a “dyke” or a “ball-buster.” Some men cannot accept that there are women out there who do not need them. They don’t desire to need them. They do well by themselves or they do well being self sufficient even while in relationships. But because of that mentality of ownership, some men tend to be aggressive in their behavior around women.
Then my beautiful and wise wife asked me a question that stumped me. “Would you have been offended if it was another woman who stood up to defend her?” I didn’t have an immediate answer. I was only aware of my initial response, offended, but I didn’t stop to think how I would feel if it had been another woman. Now, if it had been a woman who stepped in to interfere with two men about to fight, the men would have been offended, saying, “I don’t need a woman to fight my battles.”
There is so much ambiguity in our world regarding the attitudes and attributes about the sexes and we cultivate the stereotypes and drill into our minds through tv and movies that men really ARE that aggressive and they are to be feared. Just in the past few weeks, there was a guy who wrote a book basically on how to sexually assault women. That in itself is frightening. What frightened me the most was how much backing he got. That is our society, that is our world.
I want to change my attitude about men, I want my idea of them to not be altered or kept in stasis based on what I went through as a child where I was passed from one man to the next who got off on raping a little girl. I lived through for twelve years until I started to gain weight. My obesity keeps men at bay. I never want to lose weight because I want men to leave me alone. And I know, the moment I do lose weight, I will know the aggression of men again. But that isn’t true either. I have no way of knowing that. I haven’t been thin in 30 years, so how do I know how men will treat me? It’s that mind set I want to change.
