As a card carrying man, I tend to defend the male gender against undue criticism and emasculating attacks. Guys often get a raw deal. Manliness is not in vogue in some circles, and, starting in pre-school, every attempt is made to feminize little boys or medicate the maleness out of their behavior. It’s sad, really, and it has now reached the point that an attempt is being made to completely erase the existence of gender. The gender-fluid movement is pushing the idea that gender is an irrelevant social construct, despite thousands of years of evidence to the contrary and, oh yeah… common sense.
If you are a parent who has ever raised boys and girls, nobody will ever convince you that gender differences do not exist. You know from experience that boys and girls are just different creatures. Yes, there is a bit of a continuum in behavior; some girls are what we used to call “Tom-boys” while others are hyper feminine girly-girls. Some boys tend to be more artistic, creative and sensitive than their hyper masculine jock friends. Yet despite these variations, gender exists. Period.
Having established my views on gender, and my support of the males of the world, I am in deep sympathy with females who have to deal with men on a daily basis because (some) men are pigs. I am the father of a strong, capable woman, and the grandfather of two granddaughters and the thought of them having to deal with pigs angers me.
As a social media junkie and early adopter of technology, I am constantly jumping into new ways to connect people and new ways to leverage the power of connectivity to bring people together. The latest social media platform to attract my attention? Periscope. Periscope is a live video streaming app for iOS. It allows users to broadcast a live video/audio stream from their mobile phone that can be viewed by others. Viewers can make text comments that display in a cascading stream on the broadcast, visible to all.
I have randomly sampled streams from all over the world, at all hours of the day and night, since it’s a worldwide app. I have watched school students in Turkey, famous musical performers, news broadcasters, college students and many more streaming — some of it very engaging and informative, and much of it mundane and vacuous. It’s a new, immature platform, so there is still a lot of stupid people broadcasting stupid content. One of the most disturbing things I have observed as a man is this: any time a female is broadcasting, whether a 13-year-old and her friends making silly faces and giggling, a professional journalist showing a behind the scenes newsroom view, or a young artist showing her latest creations, there will be men popping in to the broadcast chat posting disturbing comments. I started seeing, “BOOBS!” and “SHOW BOOBS!” a lot… men asking what color and kind of underwear the female was wearing… even more graphic and sexual suggestions and comments. I assumed it was probably unsupervised 13-year-old boys until I clicked on some of the profiles and looked. Some of the most vile remarks were made by grown men, some of whom listed professional occupations in their profile info.
It makes me ashamed of my gender. (Some) men are pigs.