This unrealistic attitude is a big problem I have with feminism, we are totally ignoring the elephant in the room here, the fact that this is biologically driven male behaviour and no amount of socialisation is going to change that. Demanding or expecting men to behave is not going to work, not ever. There will always be huge numbers of men who will use their male strength and societal power to satisfy these biological urges. We need to accept this and work on the protection of women from the worst excesses of men by accepting that many of them really are driven by the brain in their trousers and not the one that sits on their shoulders. We need to accept that these urges become so strong that they will do anything to satisfy them, however dreadful that is. So much perversion and violence is driven by these mens rage at not being able to do what they want to any woman they want, whenever they want. Religions stifling repression of sexuality and the repression of women as a sex class in society has a hell of a lot to answer for.
This is a can of worms that we need to open in order to make progress. Instead of doing this, we are going in the opposite direction and this direction is being forced partly by modern intersectional feminisms insistence that the differences between the sexes is a social construct, it’s not, and many of us knew that taking feminism in this direction would have dire consequences for women, as it’s not based in reality and was bound to fail. This is not to excuse the behaviour but to recognise that it is driven by male biology, if we refuse to see that then we continue to expose females to dangers that could be avoided.
Before anyone starts with the “ not all men “ trope, I am well aware of that, but many more of them than we would like to admit. I used to work on the newspaper cuttings table of a well known women’s library, I had to stop as the realisation that this was so common that it warranted only a paragraph, three or four pages in, shook me to the core. The number of offences floored me, not a week went by without reports of rape or child sex offences in many different newspapers from around the UK. I am myself a survivor of child sexual abuse, I had thought that it was rare, it’s not, it’s depressingly very, very common and it’s now being ignored or justified more than ever, with safeguarding being thrown out of the window by many women as well as men. So depressing.