My (and Our) Male mea culpa of gender privilege abuse

My and Our Male mea culpa of gender privilege abuse

Though there are some of us who’d whine and complain; and many, not as mentally and ethically disciplined, who have the thoughts that women have a cultural advantage. But we know that isn’t so, even before the times of accepting the rectitude of aspects of politically (aka, culturally) correct decorum. We’ve known it in our pre-pubescence as we noted the roles of multiple options and opportunity to which we could be chosen or to which we could aspire as males; they weren’t there for females, whose alternative beyond being seen as over-aggressive of pushy-aka, Bitchy-was to be an in an auxiliary or ancillary role to a male.

The world had been constructed to be the oyster gem for males, with or without not being at the top of the pecking order of male privilege. We knew of the wink-and-nod excesses that awaited us, who’d be willing to forsake any moral, let alone ethical limits on our behavior. We had our version of the jihadist ‘72 virgins’ in the here-and-now at that level. (Wasn’t that, subconsciously, a motivation for those who loved the competency and proficiency of excelling at any sport, because there would be cultural female quislings, who in finding a way to make-it in their life would be complicit at that quid pro quo level of privilege?

Though an impractical and fanciful aspiration for many males, we knew that both the cultural, social, and secular environments had been structured so that we could have our micro-version of authoritarian leverage over women, if the circumstances were compromising enough to compel a women to accommodate her integrity and virtue so she could have the position of association or status with a male of position. Even ‘Love’ and romance were part and parcel of the social set-up. Beyond the truly serendipitous and organic scenarios of affection and passion being the result of what was equally esteemed of the virtuous character held between two people of the opposite sex, romance was based on objectified, commercialized, both culturally and socially indoctrinated ethos of expectation which made a social caste system in which the women were at a disadvantage.

The abuses of the famous and notorious are as much the extreme derivations of the micro-aggressions carried on as par for the social and cultural situation that has been the legacy of the power disparity between men and women for generations. Only the rhetorical and intellectual championing by fearless women, followed by anecdotal to now social idolization of women of physical prowess has made clear the reassessment by males of women as pieces of accoutrements in the home and the workplace.

For we men who intimately knew of our utilization of our leveraged social positions with our female contemporaries and who crossed or brazenly flirted with the line of ethical-let alone moral- rectitude with the  females in our social and cultural universe are the unindicted co-conspirators of the more notorious in the news headlines of the present.

In a sense, beyond adherence to some more formalized standards of personal rectitude, so to avoid the political retributions of being apprehended or outed for some irrectitude, we men know that what is needed is more than some restraint on our privileged-to-excess male-id, but our own self-abuse of being complicit in a system of mores to institutional ethos which seeks to exploit the leverage disparities of positions of status and power in this economic order. In the end, has it not been all about on an intimate personal and public-social level “to have or to have not”; those external false standards of accomplishment that makes us

the ‘Male Rats’ we have been?

Complicit-Misogynist