My mother once told me that ALL men use their penises as weapons. I was 8. What a great way to introduce me to the idea of healthy sexual relationships.
No, no all men are awful. Men are, like women, individuals and so different. Some are great some are awful and most are ordinary and ordinarily flawed.
That’s not to say that our society isn’t still wildly skewed towards men. But so too is our society set up to benefit the richest amongst us and to value big business above lives and the environment.
But beyond the wider workings of society, I find this grouping and labelling of people, that is increasing nowadays, pushing individuals into boxes, terrifying. This idea that all of any race, sex, creed or country are bad or good, is madness. Surely we should be able to view the actions, for instance, of a country’s government as awful without demonising that country and its people as a whole. We should be able to point out, for example, that the Israeli government are committing genocide without also saying that all Israelis are inherently bad (and certainly not take that wider to all jews) and equally we should be able to point out that what Hammas has done is awful while also acknowledging that the Palestinian people do not deserve to be wiped off the face of the planet!
Just because Trump and his government are doing terrible things does not make all Americans terrible. Just as not all Russians want what Putin does. And equally not all members of some community are wonderful just because that community is a minority and under attack. It’s about greys and nuance.
I’m sorry that you’ve had some awful experiences of men. But it’s not all men. It’s some. Absolutely there is a cultural and societal issue. But that’s wider than the individuals.
And we need them don’t we? Really. I always remember hearing Jane Goodall speak about how she and her team managed to turn around the poaching and environmental crisis in Tanzania. Their first feeling was to hate the poachers and want nothing to do with them. But then they realised that the only way to change things was to work with them, to understand them and too to use their enormous knowledge of the area and the animals. They engaged with them and soon many of the poachers became rangers guarding and looking after those chimpanzees they had previously hunted and helping to engage with the wider community to understand these wonderful creatures and find ways to protect the animals, increase the forests and at the same time make the lives of the people living there better.
Putting up walls and creating monsters and ‘othering’ never helps.