Male bashing

I'll be signing off until after the Triduum. In the mean time, here are my usual Thursday and Friday post subjects mashed into one.

Here is something truly appalling:




Notice that men are portrayed as jerks in these ads. That is true for the entire series.

It's the same crap we got back in the 1980s with "What part of no don't you understand?" There is an assumption here that maleness is a problem and that men aren't good for anything unless they train themselves to be not male. The unspoken message is, "You lazy, sloppy slobs are the reason there is under-age girl prostitution. Grow up and learn to cook and do laundry and generally be more like women and the world will be a better place."

Alternatively, you might say we should train ourselves to be the best men we are capable of being but that would require us to acknowledge that masculinity is a good thing.

These ads have nothing to do with any purported attempt to stop sexually exploitation of girls by pimps. If you wanted to do that you'd talk about law enforcement. No, this is making the case that men should be what some women say they should be. Or, more accurately, what some women sometimes want us to be.

And there is nothing nice to be said about the sort of men who go along with this crap. It made me think of something Ann Althouse said about those incredibly weenie "Dear Woman" videos where men "apologize" for violence against women. She said:

But even if you extract the crap music and the new-age quasi-religion, you've got men apologizing for manliness. But they are not apologizing for their own manliness. They are purporting to apologize for other men, whom they are demonizing. Really what you've got are the insufficiently manly men, who think that by insulting other men, they will get the women.

I don't see anything different in the above. It's not about sex slavery but about self promotion by a small group of interested males.

Again, this goes right back to the nonsense from Jennifer Fulwiler I flagged last week

And let me remind you yet again what she wrote:

As a gender, men want sex more than women do, and they are willing to go to great lengths to get it. They’ll change their behavior. They’ll reconsider their ideas. Granted, men aren’t mindless animals who will do anything for sex (well, not most of them, anyway), but the fewer opportunities there are in the culture for intimacy with women, the more willing men are to meet women’s conditions for it. 

Look, I'll be blunt, not only is this not what men should do it isn't what most women want. The funny thing is that I think there is a case that men should pay attention to what women want of them. Most of us do. That's why we ignore crap like the above.

Final thought for now. We hear a lot about what real men are like? What about real women? Are there any standards about things a woman ought to do to count as a real woman? I have a list. Do you?