Mothers, Daughters, Sisters, or Meat
All views of women are not equal
Recently I read about a ruling in France on a case of mass rape. I have many feelings but I think I’ll save them for the end.
Also, completely unrelated, I went on a horse carriage ride with my 3 year old daughter while in Mexico. To me it was kind of the antithesis of this atrocity; just a simple moment of a dad with his daughter riding up and town a paseo in a one horse carriage.
Lastly I’ve been very into Scott Galloway’s interpretation of what he believes is both the decline of males and their lack of living up to their role as “men”.
All these things together made me think of the relationships I’ve had with women, and how important they are to defining who I am (or am not) as a man. Confucius has a set of five relationships which are unfortunately male focused, but I think their male -> female equivalents might be:
- Fathers to Mothers
- Brothers to Sisters
- Fathers to Daughters
- Boys to Meat
The last is outside of Confucius’s relationships, but I think it will make sense in a bit. Let’s go over the more positive relationships first.
Fathers to Mothers
When a man decides to be in a long term committed relationship with a woman, ideally he is explicitly agreeing to being a father. This relationship is the foundation of trust and success in a child’s life.
I come from a divorced family. And my dad is a narcissist so I don’t blame my mom for it at all. But my mom pretty quickly remarried, and my step dad, while imperfect, took on the burden of my mentally ill brother.
I’m married to a woman who’s parents have been married for 50 years, and while they’ve had their hardships, they’ve forged a life together. And they’ve managed to do a lot to move themselves up economically.
The relationship I have with my wife is one where we figure things out together, we sort out our behavior and try to improve, we try again. It is a relationship where we don’t always agree and we don’t always get along, but we have faith and trust in one another, and remember that we’re better together than separate.
The father and mother relationship is the “original” relationship, the Adam and Eve from which the other relationships branch off. Its existence or lack thereof helps define the stability of a family.
The archetype of a Father to a Mother is Provider.
The Provider gives resources and protection to make life possible, as well as emotional and psychological support.
Fathers to Daughters
My daughter is the toughest task I’ve been given. She doesn’t come with an instruction manual, but instead a bunch of books and resources that describe an “abstract” child but not “my child.” And I can’t just hold out a copy of Babyhood like a holy talisman to protect myself from having to deal with her.
From what little of fatherhood I’ve experienced, it’s a series of tough moments where you have to put away your anger and “be a man”, i.e., suck it up and model the behavior you’d want your kid to respond with.
There are moments where you feel overwhelming love for your kid, and moments where you’re about to go nuts. Basically:
🎢🎢🎢
But the tops of those rollercoaster rides are when your kid has strong trust in you, when you feel like you’ve stepped into your role as a parent. like riding in a bumpy carriage she’s never been in before, and falling asleep with her head on your lap. The top of the roller coaster is a feeling of love.
The archetype of the Father to Daughter relationship is a Hero.
Dad’s model the behavior they want their kids to have, what men they should look for in the world, and also protect their kids from the unknown and uncertainty.
Brothers to Sisters
Stepping away from the role of fatherhood, we find another platonic relationship, but this time to our peers. This can be women we are biologically related to, like our sisters, or women that we are friends with.
Probably the group to best encapsulate what this means is the Black community in the USA, which has used the term “Brother” and “Sister” to mean “fellow human” and not someone who you’re necessarily related to.
While the father occupies the role of hero/protector, the brother is the one who is more on the ground; going to the same school, knows what’s going on, and is more in touch with what his sister needs.
Brothers can also be knuckleheads (as of course, are dad’s), but a good brother has his heart in the right place, and knows that when push comes to shove, he needs to stand up and fight for his sister. I haven’t always been the best brother to my two younger siblings, but I like to think that I’ve always been on their side, and at least made their lives a bit more interesting. (I watched all of Dragon Ball Z with my middle sibling, that was quite the effort haha.)
The archetype of the Brother to Sister is a Comrade.
Your brother is there on the battlefield of life with you, like your biological brother making sure you get through school OK, or a friend at work who helps you out.
Boys to Meat
The last category I think is a bit wider than the other three, but I think encapsulates pretty well the remainder of relationships men have to women.
If men aren’t on the side of women (i.e., they don’t want to support them, nurture them, or fight for them), then they are at least bystanders to women being hurt, or the oppressors of women. This is the patriarchy, all men suck, etc.
What I think gets lost in this narrative is that men who treat women like this really just see them as one thing: meat.
Compare a way that men like the above who use women’s bodies for their own ends to the way that a man eats a piece of meat. The same parts of the brain are working (the lizard parts) when we devour a piece of juicy meat or eyeball a woman.
These are the parts of ourselves pushed by an insatiable hunger, one that if fed only makes you hungrier, and only creates more victims.
The archetype of a Boy to Meat is a Predator. All “men” who fit into this category are “boys,” incapable of doing anything with a woman other than using her for his pleasure. They do not provide, protect, or fight for women, except as to protect a possession.
From Boys to Men
I do believe most men start this way, viewing women from a flat lens of “can I have one.” At least as a teenage boy I had strong feelings towards my peers but no real understanding of how to act on them.
Most of what I figured out was by doing things wrong for a long time, like turning inward and only satisfying my own needs. But that ultimately just made me more unhappy and alone.
Those desires need to be leashed; brought out when appropriate and yoked to the much more difficult task of being what a woman needs me to be, not what I want from them.
One phrase that always irks me is “boys will be boys.” The difference between a man and a boy is more than one thing, but I think boys embody the archetype of Predator, whereas men embody the Provider, Hero and Comrade archetypes.
And I do believe that some boys will never be men. There’s at least 50 of them in France that we know of because Gisèle Pelicot was willing to speak up in court.
Summary
If you’re not willing to grow up, the human race does not need you. Rapist and sexual assaulters can get off the ride at any time.
If you see women only as meat, you need to shape up or ship out.
A man invests in the women around them by being their protector, hero and comrade, a boy consumes them as a predator.
Women are the end of what it means to be a man, not their means.
