Framing men as the ‘villains’ gets women no closer to better romantic relationships
Article here. Excerpt:
'The villain is always a man. It is usually a man in a relationship with a woman, although sometimes it is a man dating a man. Nevertheless: man = villain. The victim is his romantic interest. They recount his behaviour, with the benefit of hindsight, and detail upsetting incidents, usually ones where they felt slighted in some way. These are typically imparted in the register now employed to describe a harm, which combines sombre, stark delivery with therapeutic jargon. The harm is not anything as easily categorisable as outright abuse, or sexual assault. It is a hurt, perhaps one of many, that have added up to create an ultimately “bad relationship”.
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The flip side of this, of course, are the sweeping generalities we see presented in popular media, regarding the way men are and how they act in romantic relationships. Men, we are told, are out to intentionally suppress, humiliate and belittle those they are involved with because: patriarchy. There is little interrogation of how these patterns of behaviour operate, or why they might exist in the first place.
Instead, they are presented as fixed and irredeemable elements of masculinity, which is synonymous with patriarchy. All hurt inflicted by a man is abuse on some level, these narratives imply, and all men will hurt you; ergo all men are abusive by nature.'
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