Including You!

The Cost of Misogyny

We have talked about gender and sex, relating to sexuality.   We have visited the realm of gender fluidity. Our journey took us to toxic masculinity and how that is fed through avenues like conservative religious practices, extreme feminists, sports, politics, and social interactions.

We have discussed the ability for each of us to use a more critical mind to unpack and unwind the messages we all have heard, if not blindly followed.

It does not take a public display to change a mind. The change comes inside the mind of those who discern the information provided here and acknowledge that it does include you.

Once you can say this topic includes yourself, you can then decide to filter your views and begin to reframe those views.

Hate is a powerful tool. It carries energy. The energy and passion is not wrong. It is misplaced. Emotional deregulation and lashing out with toxic messages is their passion weaponized to hurt others.

They are using past trauma and/or current emotions to justify your actions. It is a hurt person hurting other people. This has been the long running standard of hate.

Every time hate is used it comes at the expense of another human. Emotions are the least of it.

Women have internalised a stunted image of our own desires. While our bodies are different, supposedly immutable differences in our inner lives are really imposed by stereotype. And this stereotype serves to “castrate” women, replacing a fully engaged and emancipated “female energy” with a weak and artificial “femininity”.

Playboy was for decades an embodiment for egalitarian, libertine (and commercialized) sexual empowerment.   Documents have been compiled with allegations of abuse and even beastiality, by dozens of the Playmates Hugh Hefner brought to life in his mansion.

It turns out that the brave new world of free agency and personal responsibility can mesh uncomfortably with real-world imbalances, whether of power, money or beauty.

“involuntarily celibate” or “incel” men, this uneven erotic liberation has spurred a boiling rage, much of which is directed against women. Over on the other side, too, it’s the other team’s fault: every woman exploited in a #MeToo situation, or running afoul of some other sexual asymmetry, points the finger at “patriarchy” (ie men) for her distress.

But the common factor in both cases is toxic masculinity. Denying someone victimization of sexual abuse by downplaying or denying the incident only compounds trauma.

It suffocates a voice needing to heard. Being heard is not harming anyone. Allegations should be handled with sincerity and seriousness. Objectiveness is the key. Support can be given without being an instigator or perpetrator.

We want people to be able to speak up and have their voice heard. Reporting it and allowing it to be investigated each the me it is reported will lead to a decrease in acceptance in the community.

We have used the justice system to also uphold a status quo. There are mentions of belief in the justice system. Not every guilty individual is deemed guilty while many innocent are found guilty.

The logic goes that the charges were dropped, reduced, dismissed or pled out on. When this happens the technical truth changes. The story now can change because the court made a ruling. This narrative does not change the actual event that occurred and often society goes with the changed narrative instead of the truth.

Press, media and online networking has allowed for outlets to shift the tone and provide spin on top of the narrative already being misconstrued from the actual event. That is another voice robbed.

Why shouldn’t a man treat women as human spittoons, should they make themselves available in this capacity?

On the other side of the proverbial feminine fence, we find the same mindset in the women who share “first date evaluation” spreadsheets with their friends; or in the bleak assertion that all men cheat, so you might as well hold out for a rich cheater; Or the claim that men’s loneliness is men’s fault, for male loneliness is caused only by “a surplus of high value women and a surplus of low value men”.

The worldview celebrates radical autonomy and sexual permissiveness, while dismissing observable normative differences between the sexes as ‘stereotypes’ and blaming any negative side-effects of this approach on patriarchal revanchism.

Beneath this officially sanctioned surface, meanwhile, lurks an increasingly embittered male resentment, that reacts with gleeful schadenfreude whenever a woman acknowledges that there can be tradeoffs between female “empowerment” and motherhood.

Males light up at the coercive perspective of being able to control and own a women once she engaged in coitus or copulation, especially once a child enters the picture. Then the woman become more akin to property as does the child. This prevents escape.

Neither end of the gender continuum is willing to see the field of courtship as anything more than a low-trust, radically individualist, structurally impermanent dating market – a grim perspective both reinforced and accelerated by the dating apps that now dominate courtship. And under that cloud of suspicion and impermanence, it’s easy to see how the prospect of an 18-year commitment to a dependent child (and hopefully also to his or her other parent) might well seem wildly implausible, or just unattainable.

Where autonomy conquers solidarity, children are psychologically inconceivable. But it’s precisely when we get to children that the persistent asymmetry between the sexes becomes most difficult to deny, as poignantly illustrated prior chapter, Unpacking. Caregiving becomes a free chore not valued work for women with children. This is a huge cost due to gender imbalance.

Sexual “liberation” was never meant for women; it was always meant to free men from responsibility for their actions. Women are physically more vulnerable than men, which makes sex a very different experience for them.

It is always fraught with risk: women could get pregnant, or we could be physically and emotionally harmed in ways we aren’t able to stop.
Sex between men and women is not an even playing field and we should stop pretending that it is.

Violence against women and girls is one of the most pervasive human rights violations occurring in the world. It happens in every country, not only in situations of conflict or crisis, but in contexts others call peaceful, and in both public and private spaces.

Figures around the world demonstrate the gravity of this scourge:

35% of women have experienced physical and/or sexual violence in their lifetime.

Globally, 47% of murders of women are committed by an intimate partner or family member, compared to less than 6% of murders of men.

Women represent 55% of victims of forced labour and 98% of the victims of sexual exploitation.

Globally, an estimated 200 million women and girls have undergone Female Genitilia Manipulation in 30 countries and 700 million were married as children (250 million before the age of 15).

Annual costs of intimate partner violence were calculated at $5.8 billion in the United States of America according to UNWomen.org (2022).

On average a woman loses 10-25% of their wages in a months time when they miss work for domestic disputes.

Research indicates that the cost of violence against women could amount to around 2 per cent of the global gross domestic product (GDP). This is equivalent to $1.5 trillion, approximately, the size of the economy of Canada.

Further, research findings reveal that domestic and intimate partner violence cause more deaths and entail much higher economic costs than homicides or civil wars.

The negative impact on women’s participation in education, employment and civic life undermines poverty reduction. It results in lost employment and productivity, and it drains resources from social services, the justice system, health-care agencies and employers.

When will enough be enough? What is the cost that comes to mind that will be enough for all of us to take pause and make change?