I think that most woman think I'm a misogynist, I just think I have a shit sense of humour, but I have to say that I have been made increasingly aware of just how wide spread and blatant misogyny is still in this day prevalent.
I opened this up by calling myself a misogynist and then made light of it, so I am in fact part of the problem, but I want to be more aware of this and stop acting this way.
I grew up in a household that one could say was meagre, though we never were hungry, my parents were absentee landlords in our moral education. My mother worn out by 4 boys, and yes that included my father, never gave us any idea of how to treat a woman, and in a patriarchal Italian family, she never really stood a chance. My farther came from the school of knuckle draggers that believed the only way anyone learnt anything was beating it into them, especially after a few beer glasses of cheap box wine.
By the time I was 17 and kissed the first girl, I can honestly say that I did not have a clue as to what she wanted, needed, liked or expected from me. To be honest I can hardly remember the experience but I learned nothing about her, so my education in feminism is severely stunted, and that is no excuse because in 30 odd years I haven't really understood much more, suffice to say that I am starting to at last listen and hear.
My girl works around men all the time, and I am constantly about to loose my shit, when she tells me what men have said and alluded at. These men are not some perceived scum or hoodlums crawling out the sewer, these men are the the guy on the treadmill next to you in the gym, the guy at the next table in a restaurant, these are your fathers, brothers and sons.
What I want to know is gentlemen, do you speak to your mother like that?
Do you grab your sisters ass and tell them they have a great ass?
Do you sit in the locker room discussing how hot your daughter is on the treadmill?
But that gym instructor you all talked about fucking is someones daughter, someones sister and possibly someones mother, I bet if she was your daughter and you walked in on men talking about her like that, you would tear there heads off, yet you do the same, or even worse stand quietly by while others do so, feeling like one of the good guys, while being completely complicit in the degradation of the other sex.
These are our partners, they are our equals and they share our lives, yet we treat them as less than us, I know what I am saying here is probably nothing new and I have touched only the very tip of the iceberg, but we need to do better, I need to do better, be better.
I opened this up by calling myself a misogynist and then made light of it, so I am in fact part of the problem, but I want to be more aware of this and stop acting this way.
I grew up in a household that one could say was meagre, though we never were hungry, my parents were absentee landlords in our moral education. My mother worn out by 4 boys, and yes that included my father, never gave us any idea of how to treat a woman, and in a patriarchal Italian family, she never really stood a chance. My farther came from the school of knuckle draggers that believed the only way anyone learnt anything was beating it into them, especially after a few beer glasses of cheap box wine.
By the time I was 17 and kissed the first girl, I can honestly say that I did not have a clue as to what she wanted, needed, liked or expected from me. To be honest I can hardly remember the experience but I learned nothing about her, so my education in feminism is severely stunted, and that is no excuse because in 30 odd years I haven't really understood much more, suffice to say that I am starting to at last listen and hear.
My girl works around men all the time, and I am constantly about to loose my shit, when she tells me what men have said and alluded at. These men are not some perceived scum or hoodlums crawling out the sewer, these men are the the guy on the treadmill next to you in the gym, the guy at the next table in a restaurant, these are your fathers, brothers and sons.
What I want to know is gentlemen, do you speak to your mother like that?
Do you grab your sisters ass and tell them they have a great ass?
Do you sit in the locker room discussing how hot your daughter is on the treadmill?
But that gym instructor you all talked about fucking is someones daughter, someones sister and possibly someones mother, I bet if she was your daughter and you walked in on men talking about her like that, you would tear there heads off, yet you do the same, or even worse stand quietly by while others do so, feeling like one of the good guys, while being completely complicit in the degradation of the other sex.
These are our partners, they are our equals and they share our lives, yet we treat them as less than us, I know what I am saying here is probably nothing new and I have touched only the very tip of the iceberg, but we need to do better, I need to do better, be better.
I all ways wondered what goes on in the heads of men who act so. Just can´t figure it out..
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