Can We Stop Demonising Men Please?

Over the past couple of years we've seen the media, and especially Social Media, develop a fascination with women's issues. Gender equality and feminism are obviously two issues that we want to be endorsing, but most of the outcries that we're exposed to are neither of these things. Back when I was first writing this blog post there was a sudden influx of activity surrounding this due to the murder of an Australian woman by the name of Stephanie Scott. After seeing utter crap like the post below, I was motivated to make a rant about this new trend of demonising men.  

This isn't really worth discussing directly, it's just a moron making a stupid post on the internet, that's not the problem. It's probably just a case of stereotyping and generalising a gender because of a few bad experiences in her life from people within that gender, The problem that needs to be raised is how it's socially acceptable because it's a woman posting about men. If it was the other way around, a man saying negative thing about women there would be outrage over such a horrendous, and sexist thing to say. If you want a better real world example I'm sure you've heard the saying  "Women are better than men at multi tasking." Whilst it's obviously just a fabricated urban myth, it's a perfectly socially acceptable thing to say. Try saying the same thing from a different gender perspective, "Men are better at focusing on a single task, since women get distracted easily." I can assure you there won't be a very pleasant response. Why isn't it taboo to openly degrade, generalise and slander men when it clearly is for women, race or religion? A lot of it is due to conditioning by the corporate media, 

This is nothing more than hate propaganda.

Let's take a look at this Stephanie Scott example which is currently very relevant. Constantly have we been hearing about the "Bride to be savagely murdered days before her wedding." The amount of media coverage is entirely because of the circumstances and demographic of the victim. The victimisation of young, attractive white women is a constant in the world of corporate media. Why does no one give a shit when something tragic happens to a man (or black woman for that matter) but the moment something happens to a (white) woman all of a sudden it's a massive media and social media uproar? To make a stupid internet point, I went and had a quick look at the ABC News for Murder and Manslaughter, the first page is basically covering everything in the past week.

I found over 10 articles about men being murdered by another men, an article about a woman murdering her own mother, an article about a woman murdering her own son and then finally at the top, this one about a woman being murdered by a man, for some reason this one devastated and caused an outcry. But why did people feel this way? It's because the media manipulated them to do so. They want to hook you on the story because that's how they make their money, it's as simple as that. They can spin off a much stronger and more emotionally engaging hook with headlines about a "Young Australian Woman Bride to be" murdered in her own workplace days before her wedding. It's essentially scare tactics to make a woman feel unsafe, and intimidate her into watching the report to find out the details. The corporate media preys on peoples insecurities to emotionally extort them for advertising revenue. In the same way when you see a news headlines about something potential being harmful for children, it's emotionally obligating parents to watch.

Breaking News: Corporations are evil and only care about your ad revenue.

Why is the death of one woman any more tragic than the death of a man? Why is the death of a woman more tragic than the death of 10 men? The media is trying to build this image of the streets being completely unsafe for women, and social media has rallied behind it. Can we stop being so easily manipulated and start treating people as equal human beings, instead of being suckered in and embracing this dogmatic antagonistic crap which preaches unhealthy attitudes and hate whilst sabotaging the equality that we’re supposed to be aiming for. How about we stop demonising men and start demonising bad people.  

According to FBI Crime records:

“A total of 215,273 homicides were studied, 77% of which involved male victims and 23% female victims. Although the overall risk of homicide for women was substantially lower than that of men (rate ratio [RR] = 0.27), their risk of being killed by a spouse or intimate acquaintance was higher (RR = 1.23). In contrast to men, the killing of a woman by a stranger was rare (RR = 0.18).More than twice as many women were shot and killed by their husband or intimate acquaintance than were murdered by strangers using guns, knives, or any other means.” 

Source:

Apparently, according to FBI statistics and not Rupert Murdoch’s corporate media or ignorant bigots, It's objectively more unsafe to be a man. Either way I'm pretty sure if some crazy person came at me with a knife I'd be 100% just as fucked as you are. Obviously that's some selective statistics, and I'm sure you could poke plenty of holes in them, such as all the unreported cases of domestic and sexual violence. But at the end of the day, I'm not trying to wage some gender war here.

Don't worry, This person carrying a knife at a busy intersection is not a male

The point is, yes there's a lot of bad people out there, but please try to develop some critical thinking and stop demonising men because it's definitely not cool and really isn't helping. We're not being constructive and exploring actual, real issues of inequality. Here's one rather relevant to all this; the representation of women in the media. Why are they only ever portrayed as victims, sexual figures or mothers instead of leaders, thinkers or activists? Why aren't more women concerned about these types of problems instead of seeking social justice in vilifying and spreading hate towards men?

Please don't judge my gender by the actions of a few. You might find us males are actually not all that terrible and malevolent. (Pun intended)