Society focuses on how women are treated poorly and are held up to unattainable standards of beauty.  We are expected to be thin, have no hair except on our head, and basically be superwoman.  Our roles are ingrained in us from infancy, raise a perfect family, have a fulfilling career, and have enough time and energy to be a perfect wife. The pressure to live up to these expectations are real for many, if not all women.  I think with all the focus on women, however, men get left behind.

I was in class flipping through a popular men’s magazine.  With almost every page, there were pics of men with chiseled, hair free abs, defined pecs, and bulging biceps.  Immediately I thought to myself, WTF, those feminist women are bitches.  You can’t tell me after seeing these images, there is no pressure on men to live up to an almost unattainable standard of masculinity.  You would have to be a lunatic.

This epiphany started a snowball effect in my way of thinking.  As a single mother to six boys with no real positive male role models in their lives, I’ve always been frustrated by the way men are increasingly portrayed in the media.  Men are routinely characterized as bumbling idiots who can’t do anything right without the help of a woman.  This is particularly bothersome to me when my young boys watch cartoons with fathers depicted as morons.  Fairly Odd Parents and Jimmy Neutron are 2 cartoons that are perfect examples of this.

I wish there were more commercials/tv shows like the one above.  The father is engaged in his children’s lives, interacts positively with his family, and still has fun.  Why can’t we show this as an example for our sons to follow?  Women complain that there are no good men in the world….maybe if we gave our young boys examples of responsible, put together men, they would grow up to be the same.  Sociologist Robert K Merton described this as a self fulfilling prophecy. “The self-fulfilling prophecy is, in the beginning, a false definition of the situation evoking a new behavior which makes the original false conception come true. This specious validity of the self-fulfilling prophecy perpetuates a reign of error. For the prophet will cite the actual course of events as proof that he was right from the very beginning.”   

Discrimination and societal demands are not specific to only women, men also have pressures put upon them from society. And I’m afraid that if we keep up the men against women crap, nothings going to get better.  There is always going to be some inequality between the sexes, you’ll never get away from it.  We need to drop the pity party and pride and come together to ensure we raise a generation of compassionate men and women.