There's a great piece over on The Guardian today by Rebecca Front called "No excuse for man-bashing". In it, she says that resorting to lazy gender stereotypes does no one any favours, "if we demand respect from men, we must also give respect to them".
She gives a couple of examples of recent male bashing she's witnessed coming from the mouths of women, and reading them brought to mind my own personal bugbear: women who complain that their boyfriend/partner/husband/fuck buddy is a "typical bloody man".
Plenty of otherwise sane friends of mine have been known to mutter about how "typical" their man is and it's long perplexed me. Here are my main issues with a statement like that:
1. I really don't know that many "typical men". Is he honestly "typical" or are you just lumping him into a lazy stereotype in order to feel more justified in slagging off someone you're supposed to care about?
2. Why are you with a "typical man"? If he's portraying all the stereotypical traits of his gender what on earth do you want to be with him for? What does it say about you that you want to be with someone like that? I would be keeping quiet about that if I were you.
3. If you think it's OK to write someone's whole character off as nothing more than a replication of negative male gender traits, are you OK if he calls you a "typical bloody woman" to his mates?
The same goes for women who say "you know what men are like, they're useless at X". Seriously? Are they? Where are you finding these men? I've got a whole stack of male friends that I've collected in all sorts of places, all of whom fail to match up to society's idea of what makes a man.
And if women continue to date men who are nothing more than "typical" they're just going to keep on perpetuating those negative traits. If we want to live in a world where men are allowed to be a little bit more complex than football-watching, beer-swilling, tit-gazing, ball-scratching, birthday-forgetting, toe-picking fart machines, we're going to have to stop dating (or rearing) those sorts of men.
Katie is Shiny Media's editorial director. Her boyfriend has never forgotten her birthday (in fact he's the one who remembers crap like that like a "typical female"), but he does pick his toes.
But then so does she...
