@blessedandfavoured
What a thoughtful reply! Epics welcome! I find these threads to be so interesting. And especially so when people are willing to attempt articulating difficult and abstract topics.
There were only few points I wanted to clarify:
Re promiscuity: I do believe
most people are promiscuous out of subconscious self-destruction, or some adjacent poor coping behavior to trauma. However, Ive met enough truly sexually liberated people to believe this number of “healthy” promiscuous people is much higher than women want to believe but
FAR lower than men want to believe (because seeing a broken woman in a broken place and himself as the carrion, opportunistic jackal that he actually is goes so far beyond “cognitive dissonance” we don’t actually have a word for what such men commonly do). Men want women to be as depraved as they are (to the degree and in the number) because it humanizes depravity.
Short of legislation, I’m not sure how we could even begin to walk promiscuous permissiveness back. And I’m not for legislating freedom of choice, even terrible ones.
Re lopsided gender socialization:
I think there is a lot of legitimacy to the natural behavioral effects of hormones that make it “easier” to socialize men and women differently. The “docile” programming has never benefited women as much as men and now we’re in an age where the thin veil of protection cast by patriarchy over docile women is gone (a “protection” which definitely came with the strings of controlling a woman’s every aspect of being, vastly relegating her personhood to the tiny realms of domestic slave (to her family & husband) or religious slave (to the male dominated religious hierarchy), so I understand the price of patriarchy’s protection being too high).
I think the goal of Women’s Lib & Feminism was for women to have access to the opportunity of being seen as human beings who have intrinsic value beyond servitude and baby incubators. But I honestly don’t feel we’ve gotten any closer to that goal as a gender. We kinda went from being “prized” property to “despised” property.
As for men, I think they have historically policed themselves.
Men interested in building grand legacies paved the way for other men to admire and emulate (protecting their daughters and wives, legislating protections for their daughters and wives). Generally, healthy, masculine men emulate other healthy masculine men. While there are exceptions, I believe them to be rare. And there are far fewer of such men around, and especially fewer willing to mentor those who wouldn’t reach their highest masculine potential without a mentor.
For me, it’s la-la fairytale to think women (on any kind of large scale) can inspire or force men to be better men. I just don’t see women doing it. It takes another man to be that example. In times past, there were fathers or family members to do so but from my anecdotal experiences, such “healthy male mentors” are in short supply. Even with balanced, healthy mothers to parent boys, it takes a man to carry him over the threshold of manhood, to harness his masculinity in constructive and productive, protective instead of predatory, ways. If most men are sick jackals, most of them cave to the easy and destructive approval of their jackal peer group.
(It’s exactly the same for women, but we only
seem to be degrading more slowly. I’ve known men who wind up raising their daughters, and when he only brings Mammy/Jezebel sorts of women around for his daughter to emulate, it doesn’t matter how high-minded he might think he is or believes he’s teaching his daughter to be, she’s liable to be a conglomeration of the women she has the most contact with. As an aside, the Mammy/Jezebel types are currently the most common in the female population if you ask me.)
So while I totally agree that we SHOULD NOT socialize men to be predators and women to be prey, that is the reality of what we’ve been doing as a society, for a couple decades.
I want to clarify that I believe focusing solutions on women to be the most productive because women are the hosts to the next generation.
We can’t CHOOSE or CONSENT to being victimized, but we CAN choose the sort of men who will influence our children. We CAN choose to not have children if we don’t have a man or network of men for our children to emulate. It’s my humble opinion that women choose the next generation. Men don’t. For all their raping and violence upon women, it’s a statistically negligible % of them abducting a woman to carry his child and chaining her to the stove to raise said child. Our reproductive choices have reinforced our social choices. And our social choices lately have been terrible (an extension of our terrible reproductive ones).
Idk if people “expect” men to hurt women (or accept it). I think we just acknowledge the world we’re living in. The average man doesn’t see the average woman as
human. We are objects, tools, until proven otherwise. And the longer he can relegate us to objectification, the better for him to extend his predation. This is why it’s so common for “good” men and “nice” men and “family” men to be so horrific towards women. They are only selectively so to PERHAPS their relatives and significant others, because THOSE women have “proven otherwise.” It’s the result of the vacuum of
actually good/decent men instead of ones who can effectively mime goodness and decency in the light of day. My uncles and grandfathers would tell me countless stories about how common it was for “good” men to protect women who were perfect strangers from other men. Nowadays, most women can’t even expect such protection from their own blood relatives, and an unknown man is much likelier to record your victimization while laughing and posting it to social media. Yet, those men’s
female relatives and significant others come to that pathetic MAN’s defense when he is publicly roasted and derided. And his similarly pathetic male friends (along with other loser dudes who see themselves in him). Trash men’s horrifying behavior is co-signed by men and women alike and drowns out the comparatively tiny minority of people willing to publicly condemn him.
THAT particular phenomenon is a perfect example of the vacuum of healthy masculinity as well as my opinion that women align themselves with terrible social norms, which reflect their reproductive ones, then turn around Pikachu-shocked-face that we live in the world we do.
“
Do you [not you specifically, just the general you] think that's what your sons will do when they grown up? Are you expecting your sons to rape women the first chance they get? The mind boggles.”
What a quote! I pray my son is not a rapist or criminal of any kind. I know what kind of man I would choose to be his father and I know what kind of effort I would put into ensuring he has role models I approve of. (And I don’t know that this will necessarily be enough if his peers’ parents have not put in a similar effort.) To be perfectly honest, I don’t believe MOST women put any kind of effort at all into such considerations. That’s evident from their surprise that their sons largely turn out just as bad or worse than their fathers. Most people (men and women alike) are not comfortable enough articulating their
own boundaries and sexuality, let alone coaching their children through defining theirs! But I am quite comfortable and competent articulating difficult abstractions and am committed to being an active participant to shape my children’s healthy adulthood. If I did not expend such effort or consider such effort, yes I expect I would think even a man who was the fruit of my womb would naturally devolve to the monstrosity his social group allows.
That’s also evident from the world we live in. Way too many people naively believing religion is the cure all that erases depravity and female exploitation. (As an aside, I recently watched a documentary about the horrible abuse rampantly suffered by Amish women, in communities without the “traps” of TV, music, or video games— abuse at the hands of their
fathers and brothers 
. Men who from all outward appearance would seem like “good, nice, God fearing, respectful” types— yet are still as depraved as the men around them allow them to be.)
When it’s all said and done, personal responsibility is the ultimate underline. And we’re in total agreement that criminals commit their crimes and they have literally no one to blame but themselves.
I’m tired of the violence too, Sis! And I’m especially tired of women aligning themselves against their own interests in the shallow service of male validation.
:
at the end.
