Double Standard
A Short Story About Me Being a Little Jerk
The conversation between me and my husband I took place in the car, on the way home from something or other. Don’t ask me how we got on the subject of shirtless old men mowing the lawn, because I don’t remember.
“I remember how there used to be this guy in our neighborhood,” I was saying, “who would mow the lawn with his shirt off. He had this huge, sagging beer belly, but he seemed like he was so proud of his bod that he just wanted to share it with the world.”
We laughed. The anecdote prompted other anecdotes.
“It seems like it’s always the fat, old guys who wear speedos to the beach, too. You never see guys who are actually fit wearing them.”
We laughed again.
I opened my mouth to continue, then abruptly shut it.
I shut it because my brain had just presented me with a picture of what my face would look like if my husband had made remarks like that about women. What if he had spoken derisively about women who don’t have super-model bodies daring to show up to the beach in a bikini? What if he had jeered at women he thought were too old or too fat to be considered attractive for showing more of their body than he was interested in seeing?
I realized that what I had just said was incredibly unkind. But I was giving myself a pass on it because I was a woman, deriding a man. Punching up, as you might say. If the lawn-mowing guy could have magically shown up right then and there, in all his shirtless glory, I would have begged his forgiveness.
There have been numerous campaigns of late to try to boost women’s body security and embrace diverse types of female beauty. There’s nothing inherently wrong with this, but in a climate where I felt like I could get away with saying something like that to my husband (a man), and in which it never even occurred to him to object, I have to wonder about our motives.
“But Rachel,” I hear someone saying “women are more self-conscious about their bodies than men.”
Are they? Are you so sure? Or are men just not allowed or encouraged to object?
I’ve made jokes about a man’s baldness, then watched the irritation (maybe even hurt?) flicker for a moment, then get stamped out and turned into a laugh. I’ve heard men voice frustration about being skinny and not being able to gain weight, no matter how much they eat. I’ve seen men incessantly make jokes about their weight so that no one else can embarrass them by beating them to the punch.
Common courtesy and kindness are for everyone. I’m trying to do better.
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