Blatant Double Standards

Sometimes, it doesn’t take much to set me off. Today’s flare-up was sparked by Joanna's post over at Fey Accompli. She’s making some otherwise unexceptional point that I’ve heard way too many times before. Beauty is feminine power, blah, blah, blah. What irritated me was two of the casual throwaway lines she uses to make her points:

most men are pretty simple. they’re good at one or two things, and they like a nice pair of breasts. that’s about it.

we feed men and babies at our breasts. they are helpless without us.

I’m really goddamned tired of this worn-out bullshit. I’m really tired of the idea that it’s somehow acceptable to deride and mock men as a gender. What’s the functional difference between Joanna’s comments and these two?

Women are only good for one thing, and if they can cook, that’s a bonus.

Women are useless except as decoration.

Both are comments I have heard from other men when women aren’t around. The only difference is that it is socially acceptable for Joanna to make her comments. Women will sit there and make admiring sympathetic noises while guys get that blank face we all get when people start insulting us. Joanna is being as blatantly misandrist as it’s possible to be. I’m sure she’ll make the claim that she’s either joking or just being honest. Both of these are copouts to cover the fact that she’s being a obnoxious twit.

I’m really tired of this crap because it’s everywhere. Look at just about every sitcom going. Men are portrayed in a fashion that would cause an uproar if it were any other identifiable subgroup. I get to hear it in my personal life as well. How many times does some married woman refer to her husband in dismissive tones? It happens around me constantly. If the guy says anything back, for some reason that’s considered rude. I don’t get it. Maybe at some point it was a funny joke, but the joke’s gotten old.

One of Joanna’s statements also runs directly counter to my personal experience. Most men are only good at one or two things? How about most women? What the hell are they good at doing? In my experience, they’re not good at much of anything. Most people in this day and age have a real limited skill set, be they male or female. However, when you start getting into useful skills, the wider and deeper skill sets all belong to men.

I wouldn’t get so fired up about this, but I see some effects that bother me. Male academic performance has been stagnating or dropping relative to female performance for some time now. The male suicide rate is about 4 times as high as the female rate. Do you think that a constant barrage of negativity and disparagement just might have some connection? Other people will rant more about the perceived culture war on men, but I’m just tired of the double standards. If it’s unacceptable for me to say or imply that most women are useless bitches, why is it okay to make similar statements about men?

Oh, yeah. One last thing. Capitalization is your friend. It really can be used for something other than emphasis, like denoting the start of a new sentence. Joanna might want to give it a try sometime.