While running errands today, I came across an increasingly popular sight. Balls. No, not the bouncing kind. Fake testicles hanging on the tow hitch of a pickup truck. These were golden and accompanied by an oversized sticker in the rear window of the apple red pickup that read, “My aching nuts.” Less than an hour later, another pickup idled at a stop light in front of me. In this vehicle’s back window was another sticker that read, “Nice pussy.”Calgon, please take me away! Now I am not easily offended and hardly consider myself a feminist. As an only girl, I’ve been surrounded by machismo my entire life. But this crap is offensive and misogynistic to say the least.
Which reminds me of my friend Michael Winship’s April 4 column, “Roll Away the Stone of Ignorance,” in which he recalls a recent United Airlines flight on which passengers were reseated because of group of Hasidic men refused to share a row with a female passenger. The attendants asked for cooperation despite the fact that it “probably violates about a dozen interstate commerce and sex discrimination statutes.”In “a world that continues to let religious strife, division and ignorance gnaw away at our basic shared humanity and, yes, faith,” wrote Winship, these kinds of incidents should indeed cause us pause. But it is also the everyday things we see and hear, such as the golden balls and their accompanying hyper-masculine missive – easily dismissed as simply moronic, insensitive or vulgar – that also contribute to a growing culture of misogyny and intimidation.
This intimidation is also happening increasingly in the most egalitarian of all places on Earth, the Internet. Jessica Valenti, in the April 6 issue of UK’s The Guardian, recently wrote that, “While no one could deny that men experience abuse online, the sheer vitriol directed at women has become impossible to ignore.” Such abuses as “extreme instances of stalking, death threats and hate speech are now prevelant,” she writes. Often these hateful epithets involve graphic suggestions of rape and sodomy and “on some online forums anonymity combined with misogyny can make for an almost gang-rape mentality.”
According to Valenti, who herself was subject of an online snear campaign referred to as “boobgate” after being photographed with President Bill Clinton, quoted a recent study showing that “when the gender of an online username appears female, they are 25 times more likely to experience harassment,” to illustrate the pervasiveness of this problem.But an increase in gender insensitivity is not limited to the anonymity of the Web by any means. Take for instance, the ever-caustic and controversial radio host, Don Imus, who is at this very moment being summarily skewered for calling the Rutgers women’s basketball team “nappy-headed hos.” But even Revs. Sharpton and Jackson et al seem to be mostly upset with the racial connotation of Imus’s comment (nappy) and not the reference to the players’ supposed sexual proclivities (hos).
“Stupid men clap the ghorals in irons. They close ranks, create religion, create morality, create laws, erect palisades and shut out the mountains. None will go where they cannot. The high grounds are lost forever,” wrote Indian novelist Tarun J. Tejpal in “The Alchemy of Desire.”These days there seem to be too many stupid men (and some women too). Where have all the smart men gone? Come on. It’s time to stand up and defend the women you love.
1 Comment
August 1, 2007 at 10:15 pm
Right, well you know we women are equal now. Or at least that’s what the Dutch keep telling me. Meanwhile some are flabbergasted that I can use a power tool, think women can’t drive and that we get UTI’s from wearing short skirts.
We got a long way to go baby!