As I blogged about back in April, Scott Galloway, the current guru on how to fix men’s and boys’ problems, sums up the solution as “protect, provide, procreate.” Which is an improvement over, say, misogynists such as Andrew Tate or Roosh (their interest in protecting women is zero) but as I say at the link, “if men are to provide, protect and procreate to feel like a Real Man, then a woman’s role is to be protected, provided for and pop out the babies.”
By implication that puts some of the burden of Real Manhood on women: they must let the man protect them, let the man provide for them and provide him with children. Which fits with Galloway’s argument that men need women as human guardrails to keep them from crashing off the road of life (as noted at the link, not a new view). Both arguments suggest the burden of solving men’s problems fall at least partly on women. For many people who make this argument, women are obligated to accept second-class status for the good of men, which was the topic of my first Undead Sexist Cliche. Not necessarily a horrible second-class status, just compromise a little on full equality. Men need women to do it.
This story about high school boys making and sharing deepfakes of female students (not a unique case) make me wonder if a better mantra is “see women as people like you.” To paraphrase Immanuel Kant, women are not means to an end, they are ends in themselves (the same is true of men, intersex and nonbinary people, of course). That applies even if the end is your orgasm or your masculine pride. The teens in that story didn’t see it that way. Digitally stripping their classmates naked, hey, it’s funny! As one of the interviewees said, the guys may do it for “social status, entertainment, money, sexual gratification, attention.” Plus of course, cruelty and deliberate humiliation of the girls.
This is horrible for the girls, obviously — well, not obviously, the school didn’t take the case half seriously enough. It’s also bad for the boys. Corrupting for the boys. For every five boys who delighted in humiliating the girls and high-five the AI creator for putting the girl in their place, there’s probably one who didn’t think about the girl at all. And another who doesn’t think this is cool at all but when his buddy shows the photos and gets the high fives, Mr. It’s Not Cool high fives him too. Because anything else would mark him as uncool and his buddies would think less of him — what, you don’t want to see Helen St. James naked? What kind of wimp are you?
As C.S. Lewis put it “you will be drawn in, if you are drawn in, not by desire for gain or ease, but simply because at that moment, when the cup was so near your lips, you cannot bear to be thrust back again into the cold outer world. It would be so terrible to see the other man’s face—that genial, confidential, delightfully sophisticated face—turn suddenly cold and contemptuous, to know that you had been tried for the Inner Ring and rejected.” Once a kid crosses that line, they’ll probably cross it again; it’s harder not to, because they’ve already established what they’re willing to accept to be in with the in-crowd. Over time, it won’t be a pretense; the mask they wear will become their face.
Teaching men (and boys) not to think of women as sex toys, that women don’t exist just as means to men’s ends, seems like a better path forward than “protect, provide, procreate.” Not that this trio are bad things but they’re also not the only path to being a man, let alone a good man. Teaching men (and boys) to see women don’t deserve to be slut-shamed or humiliated, and that rape is wrong even if the guy wants sex this very minute and the bitch said no!!! and that being turned down for a date is a woman’s right, and does not cheapen the guy’s manhood or his honor — those would go a lot further to creating good men that Galloway’s formula. If we eliminated rape, the world would be a much better place. Even cutting the number of rapes in half would be a huge improvement. Literally that means thousands fewer cases of rape every day.
How do we get to that point? Well, there you’ve got me. A prophet, as Walter Breuggemann puts it, must both see the hollowness of the World That Is and visualize the long path to the World We Can Make. I can only manage the first part. At this point, though, society isn’t really trying. As that article about the high school deepfakes says, the school made little initial effort to stop this form of cyberbullying. Society makes little effort to punish or prosecute rapists. Being a sexist or misogynist jerk is never an obstacle to your career, as Brett Kavanaugh and Pete Hegseth have shown. Misogynists and harassers back up others of their kind because they don’t see any problem. And there’s a critical mass of them out there.
That’s a lot of resistance to overcome, but if we don’t work at it, it won’t change. To paraphrase G.K. Chesteron, gender equality hasn’t been tried and found wanting, it’s been wanting and never tried.
