Students were invited to speak frankly and one certainly did when he got up and said that most guys at the school thought of a girl as being “a piece of meat with a hole in it.” This got a good round of laughter, but also clearly hit the mark. It seemed like every other word I heard was “fag.” One day there was a class discussion on the topic of women and relationships. This was in the mid 80’s and it was a seriously homophobic and sexist place. My high school was an all boys Catholic institution run by Jesuit priests. Such desires can be pursued with genuine appreciation, respect, etc., but more often than not they not. Sure, there are men who will declare with great gusto that they love women, but they’re only talking about sexual attraction. So if you are a woman seeking fulfilling relationships with men, whether professional, friendly or romantic (to name only a few of many possibilities), your pool of applicants is mostly made up of people who do not appreciate, respect or value you as another human being of equal worth. This bears immediate repeating: Most men don’t appreciate, respect or value women as human beings. We are just scratching the surface, considering the depth and breadth of sexism in our culture.Īt the basic, person-to-person level, we face a tremendous challenge in the US: Most men simply don’t like women.īy “like” I mean genuinely appreciate, respect and value as another human being of equal worth. It’s only a start but it’s requisite for social progress. The fact that more men are now questioning their own behavior is a good thing. Also contributing to increasing awareness for the past year has been the presence in the Oval Office of a verifiable rake.
Sexual abuse and harassment have been getting some overdue attention lately from the online #MeToo movement and with the IRL exposures of high profile perpetrators in Hollywood and DC.
To understand how any society functions you must understand the relationship between the men and the women.” -Angela Davis