And it’s not just the tech culture. I recently watched a documentary called “The Mask You Live In” which was extremely thought-provoking and sobering stuff. It did a fantastic job in explaining how today’s state of hyper-masculinity arose and now seems to perpetuate itself into every subsequent generation of boys/men.
We look at the media, entertainment, music, and movies and see all kinds of signals. Stereotypical images of men in power courting powerless “damsels in distress” (shows/movies with lawyers are particularly, ahem, guilty of this). We hear that one of the “hallmarks” of being a true man is the amount of women you seduced as a conquest. In music videos, we see the guys surrounded by scantily-clothed women that are seemingly at the mercy of whatever sexually-suggestive things these chaps want them to do (in the name of entertainment?). And on and on it goes. You can easily think of more examples yourself.
Hear and see this stuff enough times without anybody warning you otherwise, and it’s no wonder that we see this rear its ugly head in adulthood (in the form of sexual harassment and who knows what else).
Unfortunately, I think this sexual harassment problem in tech is merely one of the many, many consequences of the disastrous ways in which we as a society raise our boys. Human beings are the products of the society they grow up in. Therefore, I am profoundly sad to see nobody asking the questions of “how the #!%@ are we as a society raising our boys that they end up doing this kind of stuff? Should we not be doing something to fix this at the root, during childhood?”
Sorry for the rant!
(Again, I highly recommend watching The Mask You Live In. It’s on Netflix. It’s not perfect, but it‘s more than worth the watch.)
