“Men are abusive.”
“Teach boys not to rape.”
“Men are dogs.”
“All men cheat.”
“Men are the cause of all the wars.”
“Crying is for faggots.”
“A real man would ________.”
“Stop worrying and man up.”
“There are no more good men in the world.”
These are just some of the things boys hear all their lives. And that’s in addition to the fact that we ridicule them for not having enough money, being too sensitive, having certain interests, etc. It’s amazing that we have legitimate campaigns to stop the most trivial things from hurting a girl’s mental development (BanBossy? Really?), yet the damage to boys caused by America’s casual misandry is swept under the rug.
Everybody knows that beauty standards are a big problem for young people. Isn’t it amazing how we complain so much about the models that girls see in magazines, that we don’t see the guys standing next to the models? Boys see these men with the expensive suits and watches, the muscles, and the handsome faces, and want to be just like them. We always hear how girls are so pressured by beauty standards that they starve themselves and have distorted views of their bodies. Has anyone ever told you that boys have the same problems?
Well, if you want to hear more about that side of the story, you’d have to specifically search for it. Otherwise, the vast majority of statistics and support you’ll find will be just for females. Statistically, 10 million males have eating disorders. 30% of teen boys use unhealthy weight control methods, like fasting, smoking, vomiting, and taking laxatives. 18% of teen boys are highly concerned with their weight and physique. Those boys are also at an increased risk of being depressed and more likely to abuse drugs and alcohol.
You won’t hear any of that in a typical PSA on beauty standards or eating disorders. All boys see are the depressing pictures of stick-thin girls, and people blaming them for the girls’ conditions. For that reason, boys themselves often don’t realize they have these illnesses. In fact, most males in general won’t bother to see a doctor for certain life-threatening diseases because they’re conditioned to believe that only females can have it. And even when they do ask for help, even doctors turn them away.
Can you imagine how many boys have died of preventable deaths because of this bias?
A few years ago, I made the brain-damaging mistake of getting addicted to Tumblr. If you think only girls get disrespected and bullied by the opposite gender, I challenge you to spend a few hours a day on Tumblr. I promise it will change your life. The following video shows the kind of garbage that your daughters are posting and your sons are constantly bombarded with on social media.
That’s in addition to the so-called "real man" sayings and female empowerment quotes that would be chauvinistic if the genders were reversed. And that’s in addition to the massive popularity of hashtags like #killallmen, #endfathersday, #wastehistime2016, and #notanothermonster. And that’s in addition to the endless misleading stats and “facts” such as America’s wage gap and the rapist survey, designed to promote fear and excuse hatred. And that’s in addition to exploiting things like the 2014 Isla Vista Killings for the “men are evil, women are innocent” agenda.
When the news broke, most people thought that all of Elliot’s victims were female. Out of the 6 people he killed, 4 were male, and out of the 14 people who were injured, 11 were male. The story wasn’t 2 hours old before America was demonizing its boys. All you heard was “teach boys to respect women,” and “men are dangerous,” and “male entitlement,” and misogyny this, sexism that. Half of Tumblr had a field day making a tragedy that ended people’s lives all about them and using it as an excuse to talk about how bad they hate males. How many people were calling out the high standards that boys are pressured to follow? How many people sought to help depressed boys not get to the state that Elliot was in?
Good luck with that Tumblr challenge because after a few months of all seeing all that, I felt guilty and depressed over things I never even thought about before. If we can ban bossy, we can ban all of that bullshit.
On that note, what do the boys have for support? They certainly don’t have many well-known male role models who challenge the “real man” stigma and tell them it’s okay to not fit the mold. They don’t have an endless supply of positive quotes to uplift them. They don’t have celebrities of the opposite gender calling for that gender to respect them. Yet we make them sit and watch as we constantly feed all that stuff to the girls. Only for those girls to continue to complain about how they don’t have enough, when a simple Google search will tell you that’s BS.
Everybody knows the stereotypical parent who says they’ll kill the guy who hurts their daughter. I’m just curious, how many of them will do the same to the girl who hurts their son? Are you teaching your daughters to be respectful towards boys? What have you taught your son to do if his girlfriend abuses him? What have you taught your son to do if a woman makes a false rape accusation against him, and people try to kill him over it, even after he’s proven innocent?
We’re so quick to talk about what the boys are doing, that we don’t see our girls doing exactly what we tell boys not to do. We’re so quick to demonize boys and angelize girls that some of the people reading this article saw the title and expected to see “Why Men Are Dogs, Chapter 5478523.” Then we wonder why we “need” one-sided crap like Teach Our Boys to Respect Women.
Mainly two types of men are bred from that mentality. Group A being the simps who feel so guilty that they look down on their whole gender and blame themselves for every man who ever hurt a female. And group B, who is so sick of the misandry that they hate women and become what society treats them as.
