Can you spot the demeaning?

This article about what makes a man just proves few today actually know.

I read it with great interest because there is a need for men to mentor men in what it means to be masculine. Fathers ideally would be doing this for their sons. However, I recall being at a conference about human sexuality where the speaker asked who had a good, strong, solid relationship with their father and I would say less than ten percent of people put up their hands. So something has gone wrong.

In any event, I think we’ve hit a spot now where we demean men and women equally (hurray?), men have poor or no role models and then we layer on uber-sexualized advertising, pop culture, etc. and it all becomes very problematic.

So this guy can say this without a hint of irony:

I love to have sex, but I don’t put notches on my belt because that’s weird and objectifying. I don’t rape because that’s weird and objectifying. I still consider myself a player, if you can call me something like that, because I still have lots of sex. I just don’t do it in ways that are demeaning to women.”

It’s time for Captain Obvious to step in here. If you call yourself a player the very concept  is demeaning to not just women, but perhaps more importantly, yourself. Any man who has lots of sex with many different women is demeaning himself and those women. The same is true for women engaging in the same behaviour.

I’ve been reading some modern feminists lately and mostly I find them to be more than slightly unhinged. BUT there are moments where they describe feeling objectified or offended by sexual comments in public and I relate. It’s as though they are seeking the same standard of decency as I am, whilst expressing that in a weirdly offended and angry way.

Ladies and gentlemen: Expect renewed calls for a Prude Revolution from yours truly. Yes that’s right, we need to take back the word. Embrace it (in the words of an old Saturday Night Live sketch “say it, feel it, mean it, be it!” (said with sass). Everyone is having lots of sex everywhere and all I can see is rising despair, objectification of men and women, violence against women, and rising rates of abuse. Faced with this, I will be proudly prudish and hope to create the space for others to feel the same.

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