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In reply to the discussion: "We raise girls to cater to the fragile egos of men." [View all]Tansy_Gold
(17,933 posts). . .also goes to men.
Men are shown women as victims, women as objects, women as possessions, women as bodies. What lesson do they learn from that?
A woman is killed by her estranged husband outside a shelter. We say he is deranged, that he is an aberration, and so we do not have to take any societal responsibility. We do not have to look at the messages he's been sent all his life that HIS woman is HIS property.
Margaret Atwood perhaps said it best: Men are afraid women will laugh at them; women are afraid men will kill them.
Afraid of being laughed at? Hello? Can an ego get any more fragile than that? Donald Sterling, an ugly old billionaire with a hottie mistress of color gets all bent out of shape because she's putting pictures of herself with a black man on her Facebook page? How fragile is his ego? And if his is that fragile, with all his money and his power and his own little plantation where he so generously feeds and clothes and houses the slaves he virtually owns, what does it say about the fragility created in so many other male egos?
Not all, no not all. But how many? Or how few?
Don't even get me started on guns. Or executions.
I watched Magic Johnson on TV the other night, and I wept. I was hurt for him, because I knew what it felt like to be dismissed and humiliated for something over which I had no control. Wealthy, famous, powerful in his own right, he was still just another you-know-what in the eyes of the rich white man. And Charles Barkley said it too, and a few weeks ago, before Sterling, Neil DeGrasse Tyson said it.
They know it happens to women, in and out of sports. And maybe they do what they can to level the playing field. But it's not level yet. And because it's not level, ALL men benefit, even without trying, from the continued subjection, oppression, humiliation, devaluation of women.
Most men will not go into a job and wonder if they are being paid less because of their gender; most women will just automatically assume they probably are or at least could be. Most men will not worry that their looks or age will affect their hireability; most women know those may be the only factors that matter. Because of the prevailing culture, men take so many of these things for granted that they never think about them, they never consider that anyone else could have a different perspective or a different experience. That's institutionalized sexism exactly the way Donald Sterling's behavior is institutionalized racism. The bigotry, the privilege, it all becomes part of the fabric of the culture, invisible to all who don't actually make a point to look for and see it and acknowledge it when they find it rather than just tucking it back in its hiding place and hoping no one else notices.
Some of us notice.
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