From the article above @OwMyToe
Meagher said this “monster myth” allows men to overlook the root causes of violence perpetrated against women, or even to blame women for being assaulted.
“We see instances of this occur in bars when men become furious and verbally abusive to, or about, women who decline their attention,” he said.
“We see it on the street as groups of men shout comments, grab, grope and intimidate women with friends either ignoring or getting involved in the activity.
We see it in male peer groups where rape jokes and disrespectful attitudes towards women go uncontested. The monster myth creates the illusion that this is simply banter, and sexist horseplay.”
Meagher said that while casual racism is mostly shunned, the “trivialisation” of male violence against women is a “staple, invidious, and rather boring subject of mirth”.
“We can either examine this by setting our standards against the monster-rapist, or by accepting that this behaviour intrinsically contributes to a culture in which rape and violence are allowed to exist,” Meagher said.
Bayley’s actions, Meagher said, were framed by the media as being unconnected to society, with men allowed to comfort themselves that whatever questionable behaviour was committed by their friends, it wasn’t comparable to Bayley.
Meagher said the “monster myth” is a comforting illusion because it allows men to bypass an examination of “ourselves or our male-dominated society”.
“It is also an excuse to implement a set of rules on women on ‘how not to get raped’, which is a strange cocktail of naïveté and cynicism,” he said.
“It is naïve because it views rapists as a monolithic group of thigh-rubbing predators with a checklist rather than the bloke you just passed in the office, pub or gym, cynical because these rules allow us to classify victims.
“We can only move past violence when we recognise how it is enabled, and by attributing it to the mental illness of a singular human being, we ignore its prevalence, its root causes, and the self-examination required to end the cycle,” he said.
“The paradox, of course is that in our current narrow framework of masculinity, self-examination is almost universally discouraged.”