Mittwoch, Mai 21, 2014

Natasha Devon: Warum sehen nur Frauen überall Sexismus?

The other day a male friend met me for dinner looking pale about the gills and generally discombobulated. It transpired that, during his Tube journey, he'd been what can only be described as 'set upon' by a group of inebriated women who were on a hen night. As they shrieked an ear-splitting version of Beyonce's 'Who Run the World (Girls!)', two of them proceeded to sit on his lap, pinning him to his seat, while a third performed an involuntary (on his part) lap-dance. Luckily, they disembarked a few stops later (still screeching and flinging their arms around random male passers-by) otherwise my friend would have been trapped in his seat all the way to zone six. He couldn't make himself heard over the impromptu karaoke and didn't feel he could push them off for fear of appearing aggressive. So, he simply laughed along uncomfortably, praying the entire humiliating episode would, at some stage, come to a conclusion.

Now, answer me honestly - as you read the above (totally true) anecdote, did it even occur to you to consider that the womens' actions were motivated by sexism? Did you assume that they were wild, unreasonable misanthropists, hell bent on humiliating my friend because they view all men as nothing more than an object to be used for their pleasure? I suspect not. I suspect you thought they were probably just drunk and behaving like utter morons (as we all have, on occasion).

We're not typically programmed to interpret the things that happen to men in a gendered way. To name a few examples, suicide is the biggest killer of young men under 21 in the UK and nearly 90 percent of British vagrants are male, yet I've never heard either mental health funding or homelessness referred to as an issue of sex-bias, as they undoubtedly would be if these statistics applied to women.


Hier geht es weiter.

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