I worry about the world trying to create a mindset of women being older, wiser, etc than men. How much do we, as women, acknowledge the ability of men beyond physical strength?
Their patience.
Their self-sacrifice.
Their ability to give us space to thrive, while in foundational support of us in the background.
It seems as though we have put ourselves in a position of competition against men. I see this when we say that women suffer more than men, women play a greater purpose in a child's life than men, women sacrifice more than men, women can build better-functioning homes on their own than men while uprooting ourselves out of our nature and into the nature of men.
We fail to accommodate the full spectrum of man. The soft man, the feminine man, the man who gets a manicure, the man who says I love you first or says it to another man, the agreeable man. We ask for emotional stability and intelligence yet we do not give space for the man to give his vulnerability without us taking advantage, using it against him, shaming him, viewing him as less of a man, and on and on do we play the villain. And I don't think that women and society want to recognize how much we hurt our men when we make predators out of every man when we weigh our men based on the actions of bad men. Yes, it is now necessary for us to first see danger when seeing men because bad men have used the behaviors and natures of good men to harm, but we have to put that shield and taser down once a man has proven to be good, to be caring, and to wanting to be a man for you.
I found that good men blame themselves for the oppression of women and take it upon themselves to rectify the mistakes of bad men. While this is noble, humble, and indicative of a good man, their efforts sometimes don't matter because the bad men are not rectifying their mistakes and making efforts toward change. However, I would like to say that I appreciate the presence and efforts of good men.
The Black man and woman have seen trials that are mostly individual to us. Our men had to leave home during oppression to provide and/or fight for the family, but they stayed away when it was no longer necessary. Our men died in wars of the oppressor, and those who physically came back bred broken homes and families. Consequences of our trials continue to mutate and thrive in other ways that may seem completely unrelated. A rapist is inherently disabled and broken, in my opinion, because a person who has healed and is good, or even just somewhat stable, does not find pleasure or pursues action in depriving someone else of their consent and freedom. And that, to me, is an example of how our past still haunts us as a people because it is not only men who rape. It is mostly men because they have more physical strength than the average woman and so can enforce violence successfully.
We ache from the pains of the past and react based on the anxiety of the future which causes blindness and the inability to experience the present.
How did we get to the point of somehow quantifying our respective roles and values?
How does anyone decide who is better, who is wiser, who is older outside of being alive in this reality, and who suffers more?
Whose beliefs or preferences are we using here?
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