Does anybody have any respect for men?
Laws, traditions, norms, cultural patterns, attitudes, institutions, procedures, and social structures may need to be reformed, repealed, updated, abolished, etc. But those are NOT THE SAME THING as men.
Yet, it is men that people focus on. It is ALMOST ENTIRELY men that people focus on. It doesn't matter if people are feminist, anti-feminist, liberal, progressive, conservative, theistic, atheistic, college educated, high school dropouts, young, old, male, female, heterosexual, homosexual, Western or non-Western, in their minds men are a problem.
Apparently it has never occurred to anybody that there is ABSOLUTELY NOTHING WRONG WITH MEN. I have never in my long swim in the stream of human thought on sex and gender encountered anybody who thinks that men are okay the way that they are. Instead it is always some variation of how men need to change, be reformed, get therapy, grow up, etc. The different sides in the struggle simply disagree over the details. Some say that men need positive role models. Some say that men need to have all power stripped away from them. Or many variations in between. But all are in agreement: men are the problem.
This complete lack of respect for men is breathtaking.
I hope that I make myself clear here: I am a man and THERE IS ABSOLUTELY NOTHING WRONG WITH ME.
Men are human. Humans are not perfect. Being human, men will do bad things, make mistakes, be foolish/unwise, stumble, fall, struggle, fail, etc., etc. That's the way that all 8 billion humans on this planet are.
If there are people who understand that men are normal human beings they appear to be such a small minority that they essentially do not exist.
Men occupy positions in space and time. Location is everything. The positions that men have occupied have come with a disproportionate amount of arbitrary things like power, autonomy and privilege. But those things are not the same thing as men themselves any more than cold weather is the same thing as people in Minnesota. To conflate a person with the arbitrary things that he finds himself in and the baggage that comes with them is absurd.
To single out one set of people to conflate with their social and physical environment and act like every other type of person is a sanitized, unadulterated being standing in complete contrast to their social and physical environment is breathtakingly absurd.
The average man has little or no control over where he was born, what environment he grew up in, what opportunities he is given, etc., etc. Again, location is everything. Location in space. Location in time. Location in social structures. Location in social roles. Every minute spent looking inside oneself for non-existent demons to exorcise is a minute not spent trying to better navigate external social and physical space.
We celebrate women better navigating their environment, from avoiding marriage to breaking glass ceilings, and everything in between.
Men, on the other hand, are basically treated as if they need to be placed in a high-speed centrifuge and have everything forced out of them. Boys, meanwhile, are said to need to be programmed to keep the contaminants from ever entering them in the first place.
It is clear: we have no respect for men as responsible human beings who are living with the cards that have been dealt to them. It never occurs to anybody to reshuffle the cards, change the rules of the game, abandon the game, etc. Apparently we think that men are THE problem and the only hope for everybody at the table is for men to somehow be transformed into something completely different.
Basically, this means that women are immune. Reverse that centrifuge and put everything that was forced out of men into women's bodies, and through something like quantum entanglement swap men's and women's locations in spacetime, and only good will result.
Every minute spent trying to correct men's interiority or control boys' interiority is a minute not spent addressing the social and physical space through which we operate. We have so little respect for men apparently that we think that only magic can cure anything associated with them. Completely transform men from the inside and then everything connected to them on the outside--hiearchies, domination, brutality, violence, etc.--will disappear!
Where do people come up with this stuff?!