In high school I had the kind of thinking like she’s either a “bitch” or a “bimbo.”
My friends and I would go to a bar and get some drinks and maybe a buddy would “drink up” the courage to talk to a girl. If she rejected him we automatically labeled her a bitch. But if she stayed and conversed for a while, and if she started dancing with him, we labeled her a slut.
I honestly did not realize how horrible my thinking was until we started talking about these issues in class.
One of my male students wrote those lines in a paper, and gave me permission to post them.
His paper was full of self-examination and self-revelation, which just goes to show how perfectly nice people can live in boxes that shield them from the harm they do.
But his introspective words also show the possibility of moving outside our boxes.
Most often, society ends up in our heads as our brains unconsciously soak in the world, and its understandings, so that behaviors and attitudes can seem perfectly natural and normal, even when they are perfectly illogical and harming.
But when Mr. Student, here, moved outside the patriarchal box just enough, he could look back and say,
I think guys put women in these negative categories to justify a sense that they are somehow superior to women. And I really don’t like it.
I wonder if these guys put women down partly because they are afraid of them. After all, if his buddy must “drink up the courage” to approach a woman, that seems like fear. (And in a patriarchal world, all the pressure and possibility of rejection is on the guy.)
So the guy is scared and yet has learned that men should feel superior, since in our society men and masculinity are ranked higher than women and femininity. So he and his buddies turn the tables and demean women as sluts and bitches.
If we all recognized our basic equality, maybe we would hurt each other less.
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