We have a serious misogyny problem. While sports and entertainment are frequently the lens through which this presents itself, if a woman insists she has the sole right to decide who gets to touch, kiss, or have sex with her and when, men just don’t get it or don’t want to.
We have a serious problem about whose body is available for using. Women and children are fair game in the effort to protect the athletes, clergy, or whatever institution is involved. It is the person who has been violated that is attacked. One raped VMI cadet reported she was told not to ruin a guy’s career. He was a good guy, after all. Apparently, a “good guy” can rape and still be a “good guy” and go on to be an officer who ignores or commits sexual assault. Bishops, Cardinals, and popes can ignore the pain of the violated, protect the violators, and go on to be bishops, cardinals, and popes or “saints.”
There is no end to the litany of excuses for male aggressive behavior. While working with a group of men whom the courts had remanded for sessions to address domestic violence, many of the men seemed utterly confused. What were they supposed to do when faced with resistance or felt disrespected by their partner or child? They felt the need to be the one in control, apparently by any means necessary. Murdered women are, by far, killed by domestic partners than by a stranger.
“Did she deserve it?” “was she a tease?” “what was she wearing?”, “what did she expect when she went to his place?” The fault, the blame is not in the man’s belief that a woman is his for the taking. It’s on the woman for existing, for going about her life with the mistaken belief that she can go about her life.
Currently, there have been articles and studies and articles about studies concerning masculinity and that men don’t know what their role is and what it means to be a man. Incels rage against women because, in their minds, they have a right to use a women’s body for sexual gratification, and the women they meet disagree. A Spanish football exec kisses a player on the mouth and insists it was mutual. An actor finally gets convicted of rape after years, and we hear that he’s now a good father and husband, as if that changes the fact that he’s also a rapist or excuses it in some way.
What was she thinking walking alone at night? Why was she drinking? It’s always her mistake for putting herself in a position where a man can deny her humanity, her personhood, her right to her body, and ultimately, her right to live. Women’s violated bodies are found on the side of the road, in dumpsters, tossed in the woods or on the beach, or just left in their homes. Our problem is misogyny. Masculinity’s problem is that women are speaking out. Women, having been deemed by the Supreme Court as less fully citizens with at least one area where they are unequal to men, are waking up to the reality that while never truly considered to be equal to men, not even in the eyes of God, not in the Constitution, not in the laws of many states, even that lowly status is under attack.
The problem is misogyny.
