"Omg dude look at that girl!"
"... Dat ass, man. Dat ass. I'd do her."
"Dude you don't even know...."
I work a job that pairs me with men, and I witness this conversation from time to time. The younger the men, the more often it happens, regardless of whether or not the men are married.
What bugs me isn't the married aspect; I've seen married guys and girls talk this way enough to know that it's almost always just that - talk.
What bugs me is the assumptions behind the conversation. "I'd do her." Based on what? Clearly not her personality, or her attitude, or even her smile. Often the convo happens based solely on the view from behind, with an incomplete picture of what the girl looks like.
Acquiescence to sex based on just a few attractive body parts. That bugs me. It bugs me because of the implication, a mindset that I have witnessed time and again in man after man, to an alarmingly high percentage.
'She is worthy of mating simply by virtue of being attractive; I am not worthy of mating and must convince her to like and want me."
And it pisses me off - not merely because that mindset is completely unattractive (though it is horrendously so), but because it is so indicative of masculinity today.
Not a toxic masculinity, like so many feminists are convinced of, but a degraded masculinity. A masculinity destroyed by multiple factors in our society, starting at birth and continuing into adulthood.
A baby boy is borne. Immediately, half of the nerves in his penis are cut off in a procedure known as "circumcision," a process in the past justified by now disproven medical ideas or with the intention of stopping masturbation. Today the reasons are tradition, religion, and "I think a boy looks better cut."
That male child grows up, governed mostly by his mother in a world where half of marriages are broken by divorce and in which single motherhood is lauded, to the bewilderment of every sociologist.
For the boy, there is no "Wait til your father gets home!" His mother, the nurturer, is also his father.
Even if his parents are still together, the boy spends most of his time with his mother while the father works, or at daycare under the supervision of women while both of his parents work.
The boy goes to school, and again is both taught and under the authority of mostly female teachers, where he must sit still in a state of passivity and accept teaching while stifling any urges to run and explore. He meets other girls, and learns quickly this simple rule: "you can't hit girls. Never ever hit a girl, even when they hit you."
Never mind that boys and girls are of near equal strength up until puberty. Boys can't hit girls. And if girls hit a boy? Well.... Boys can't hit girls.
Finally the boy hits puberty. Fascinating new urges hit his body and he experiences new feelings and responses to the female sex. But he is unsure what to do. Women have always been the authority over him, and his urges to take responsibility for his own life are stifled five or more years of school and female authority.
If you were to ask him why he has trouble talking to girls he might shyly look to the side and stammer, "I dunno." His father never taught him how to be a man. The time when boys had become men for the past ten thousand years has come and gone, and he is still treated as a child by the authorities over him, most of whom are still women. He feels unhappy and unfulfilled at a deep level, and has no idea why.
If he's lucky, he won't have been put on rydalin or any one of many drugs assigned almost exclusively to any boys who are more active than the female teachers would prefer.
And this is only in the first eighteen years of his life.
Finally the boy makes it to college, his first real breath of freedom and individual responsibility - whereupon the first lesson he's taught in orientation is that men are rapists, and need to be educated on what consent is (As if the only difference between a rapist and consent is that the rapist was just terribly uninformed). He's told that if other men rape, he's responsible for that. If he suggests at all any smart things a girl could do to avoid rape, he is accused of rape apology and victim blaming.
He attend classes which are again dominated by female teachers, and forced to sit in a passive manner in the same boring fashion he's experienced for the past twelve years.
He gets told that men are oppressive monsters while women are underprivileged, even as he notices a larger percentage of females in college, and a larger percentage of female graduates, and - not unironically - a larger percentage of female-only scholarships and grants.
The young man watches as a fellow classmate is accused of rape, a rape he is sure never happened, and witnesses his classmate's reputation is destroyed, along with his grades and his ability to attend the college anymore, based solely on an unfounded accusation. He researches online, and discovers story after story of men who have been out in jail for years based on accusation alone.
He further researches, and discovers the higher male suicide rates and higher male job injuries that belong to his demographic. He attends a class on feminism, where his opinion is regularly shit down because he is a "cis white male," which he discovers isn't sexiest or racist, because he is in power (despite being in a classroom filled with females and led by a female teacher in a college where he is a statistical minority).
When he dares to ask what "institutions" men have power in, he receives little to no explanation.
When he goes on Twitter to ask feminists about feminism, he finds himself blocked over and over again as he questions their assertions.
If he manages to graduate college, the young man enters a world in which his job requires sensitivity training, in case he didn't know that groping random women was wrong.
He hears about a male friend who was abused by his wife but couldn't find a shelter, and was laughed at by the police. All the shelters seem to be for women, and the political action is about helping women.
If he goes to jail, any sentence he receives will be an average of twice as long as a woman for the same crime.
If he marries, any divorce is 70% likely to be initiated by his wife, and his marriage has a decent chance of failing. Despite the fact that women are more likely to cheat than men in committed relationships, he is the more likely to pay alimony.
He wonders why men even get married at this point. And when he questions why he has such struggles talking to and gaining the interest of women, he is told that it's because of "toxic masculinity."
And if he dares to talk to men who have learned any number of basic social skills to attract women, he is deemed a misogynist and part of the problem.
He spends a lifetime only watching women he desires, too afraid to treat them as normal people. So he goes to the Internet and finds porn, where he fantasizes and picks women for their attractiveness alone. He cannot fathom rejecting a beautiful woman because of an unpleasant personality - not because he's so shallow as to not care, but because he views himself to be so inferior as to not have a choice.
And that's a damn shame. I see these men everywhere.
Oogling at women and talking about girls being "out of their league..."
Walking behind their wives at the mall, with short uncomfortable steps and eyes fixed on the ground.
Going to bars to get "liquid courage" because they don't have a social life that introduces them to people naturally.
We have a crisis with men today - and it has nothing to do with "toxic masculinity."
These men don't have any masculinity at all. How can they, when they're not allowed to become men in the first place?
