One my friends has been wondering why some men treat women so badly, including battery, rape and murder and seem to feel that their actions are totally justified and natural.
There’s no simple answer, I suspect, but I think one part of it is hinted at by this:
Young children think about gender in the same way they think about species of animals. They believe, for example, that a boy’s preference for football is innate, as is a girl’s preference for dolls, just as cats’ behavior is innately different from dogs’…
…The study’s findings confirm prior research, which has shown that adults and children alike think different species have deep biological differences, for example, that innate differences cause dogs to behave differently from cats. This study also found that it’s not until children are at least 10 that they treat gender and species concepts as distinct from one another, as adults do. At that age, they also understand that environment plays a role in gender-related behaviors.
I think a lot of people never really get over this. In the same way that for most of history and indeed today in many places stranger is the equivalent of alien or enemy, to many men (and women, but with less devestating effects) the other gender isn’t even really human. As such, just as with strangers in traditional societies, whatever is done to them is moral, because they aren’t even of the same species. There is no real sense of connection, of empathy shared on commonality.
The only way to break through this is usually to say “what if it were your daughter/mother/sister, but men often put those women into a special category and don’t generalize.
I should add that female contempt for men, is often palpable, and I’ve heard many women use the word man in a way that indicates they consider the entire gender beneath contempt, and men innately weak (which is amusing, because many men think the same of woman.) Of course, very few women use that contempt as an excuse for battering, raping and killing men.
Ten Bears
Naw, it’s about men surrendering unconditional “love” to a “male” god.
tc
“to many men (and women, but with less devestating effects) the other gender isn’t even really human”
Aren’t you overlooking the fact that nearly all men are raised primarily (especially in their early years) by women? I would submit those women who treat their sons as either superior or inferior, or just being fundamentally different from them and their sisters create the monsters much more actively than the fathers or the patriarchal society. They have different expectations of them, sometimes unhealthy, unrealistic or cruel, and they even discipline them differently (often more harshly, and often betraying them to discipline from the father, “wait till you father gets home”). How to explain the fact that some of the worst women haters and abusers are raised by single mothers. The PC explanation is it’s the absent father’s fault, but I think it has much more to do with a dysfunctional mother-son relationship.
PLovering
“Intelligence … is the faculty of making artificial objects, especially tools to make tools.” (Henri Bergson)
I walk through the kitchen and note that every tool, pot, pan, and oven were invented and made by man. (Hervey Allen)
If women controlled the world, we’d still be living in grass huts. (Paglia)
And then there is the matter of IQ.
5 of 6 people with a 145 IQ are men. (www.iwf.org/news/show/19002.html)
Both genders are trapped in a dysfunctional society.
adrena
tc – Indeed, women have become expert at enacting and enforcing the “male” script as it has been bred in their bones.