If You Are a Man

I asked Angela once why she and many other women like SUV’s so much. Her response puzzled me. “I feel safer higher up.” Safer from what? “You know, in case someone approaches the driver door, like in a carjacking.” This was my “aha” moment, certainly way too slow in coming, about the differences in the way men and women steward their physical safety in the world. I do not tend to worry much about muggers or assailants except when I am in a dangerous area. Women, on the other hand, often live with a near constant sense of physical vulnerability. Or should.

Last year I wrote an essay about the case of Natalee Holloway in Aruba (“Reality”; 6/12/06). Her disappearance and subsequent (assumed but not proved) murder by one or more young men who befriended her at a bar on her high school senior trip hit me hard. Here’s a fine young lady who uses poor judgment in (apparently) getting drunk and then going for a ride with two strangers or near-strangers close to her age. She should be scolded by her parents and friends for this foolish behavior; she should not be raped and murdered because of it.

I wonder sometimes at what appears to be almost a primal rage among men towards women. I don’t mean among all men, certainly. Here is what I mean: Why are there so many instances in which men perpetrate violence against women and not against other men? Because they can? We don’t seem to hear about nearly as many men who go for a joy ride with other men and end up dead. It appears that in cases like Natalee’s the men (or man) rapes the woman, then decides to “dispose” of the evidence. Let’s call this “brutal cowardice.”

And now comes news of another oh-so-familiar tragedy, this one in our area, indeed involving a member the First Colony Church of Christ, one of our sister congregations in southwest Houston. Ashton Glover goes “mudding” in a pick-up truck with some high school friends on Friday night, leaves with two other boys she apparently recognizes from her high school, and turns up dead a few days later, hastily buried in a shallow grave. By the time you read this we may know more. But nothing we learn will make this any less horrible.

What’s my point, you ask? How about this: If you are a man, and I mean a Man (not just a male), ask yourself this question: Am I for women or against women? Notwithstanding the fact that I would never physically harm a woman, do I denigrate them in word or gesture? Do I make crude or demeaning comments about them to other men relating to me being the “stronger” sex? Listen, women joking about men’s maddening proclivities, and men doing the same about women’s, is harmless humor. That’s not what I’m talking about. I’m talking about words, gestures or actions that convey contempt. It may be that our small instances of contempt never gather critical mass in OUR lives, but they can contribute to a societal critical mass that manifests itself in the cowardly brutality towards women that we see far too often.

Yes, I write this as the father of two daughters. But I also write as a man who respects and honors women. I believe this makes me more of a man, not less.