All Men Are Jerks! Is It The Case Or Hyperbole?
All men are jerks.”
What do women mean by this? We hear each other say it often enough. Specially when one is consoling the other, this is quite a common phrase. He broke your heart? All men are jerks. He won’t promote you because you didn’t respond to his sexual advances?
All men are jerks. He stares at your breasts when you walk past his desk? All men are jerks. He pinched your ass in a crowded concert ground? All men are jerks.
We tell ourselves that it is not the individual, but the gender which is at fault here. For no apparent reason, we have been conditioned to excuse men for their misdemeanours, and simply blame it on biology.
“They are men.”
“Men are like that.”
“That is how men always are.”
We excuse their misbehaviour so much so that there is an actual advertisement out there which proudly boasts the tagline “Men will be men”, and we adore their funny sexist adds! Because men will be men. What can you do about it?
The burden of change and caution rests on the shoulders of women, not men. It is our responsibility to be safe from the ‘men who are just being men’. While the phrase “all men are jerks” sounds extremely harmless, it is actually a very subtle but efficient form of victim blaming. It indirectly tells the victims that their emotions are pointless because they should have known better than to trust a man to be right.
Moreover, the phrase,”all men are jerks”, is a sure shot way to generalise the entire race and teach young girls that they should never expect any sort of decency in men.
When these girls grow up and face sexism and harassment at their workplaces or in their marriages, they don’t feel the need to rebel or retaliate, or even so much as report. They have been taught not to expect any better. So they put up with evil, because they were told that evil is what they must expect from that gender.
It is perhaps the most effective, and a genius, way of excusing a man’s actions and socially conditioning a woman to do the same. It is quite like the way we excuse children for misbehaving.
“He is just a child.”
This makes us look at the child’s offence in the light of the fact that the child is not mature and developed enough to realise that what it does is wrong. Similarly, we teach ourselves that men are innately morons and there is nothing that can be done about it.
I wonder if THIS is what has kept the women of this world from coming together and staging an uprising against the gender discrimination they face! I wonder if their fire has been put out by fellow women who chose to believe that ‘all men are jerks’, and left it at that.
Nevertheless, I don’t believe in excusing the sexual predators and psychotic male strangers and the toxic boyfriends or husbands.
I believe that the man who slighted me is an individual, and I believe that he is a jerk. I believe that any man that knows not how to behave with me like I am his fellow human being, is a jerk.
I believe that misbehaviour cannot be blamed on biology. I blame it on the person himself. You’re a jerk if you’re being a jerk to me! And you do NOT get to hide behind your gender!
