Have Kneepads, Will Travel

Nah, it doesn't work like that, y'all

While so many people have openly and rightly lamented the devastating effect the misogynistic MAGA movement is having on girls and young women, we’ve forgotten something critical: our sons have been watching and listening, too.

I’m not sure we’ve stopped to think about what kind of young men we’re creating right now, that we’ve considered the collateral damage of these days on the boys in our collective care. 

• John Pavlovitz

Over the past seven years, America has been subjected to a distasteful brand of virulent misogyny. There’s been a pronounced growth in what has come to be known as “incels (involuntary celibates),” undateable Right-wing males who feel that women owe them sex. It would be laughable if they weren’t so serious about it. These jackasses believe that women are substantially the property of men and, as such, have a duty to supply men with sex whenever the urge strikes.

These aren’t men who grew into adulthood understanding how to treat women as equal partners in a relationship. They’re unable to grasp the concept that women have feelings, desires, and aspirations that are every bit as important as a man’s. Yet incels continue to expect that they’ll find a woman who will subjugate every aspect of their being to the whims and desires of their man.

Newsflash: Women don’t come with signs advertising “HAVE KNEEPADS, WILL TRAVEL.” It doesn’t work like that.

Many of these men have no idea how to act around women and have drifted to communities of “pick-up artists.” The whole idea behind these communities is to develop techniques to convince women to go to bed with them. Unfortunately, these “pick-up artists” don’t respect women. Most actually hate women and view them in terms of conquest, like fighter pilots who mark their kills on the cockpits of their planes.

During the Trump era, MAGAworld has portrayed the persona of selfish, entitled men who take what they want and respect nothing and no one as aspirational.

While so many people have openly and rightly lamented the devastating effect the misogynistic MAGA movement is having on girls and young women, we’ve forgotten something critical: our sons have been watching and listening, too.

I’m not sure we’ve stopped to think about what kind of young men we’re creating right now, that we’ve considered the collateral damage of these days on the boys in our collective care. 

So many of our sons have grown up in an era that has rewarded being hard and tough. Gentleness, kindness, and compassion have been denigrated as soft, feminine, and weak, while physical combat and inflicting bodily damage are lauded as peak masculinity and something to be proud of.

We saw it during the summer of 2020 and on January 6, 2021, when Trump supporters tried to solve problems through violence, not negotiation. It failed miserably on both occasions.

We’re running a genuine risk of seeing much of our younger generation becoming everything we’ve hoped they wouldn’t be:

men with a dangerous sense of entitlement when it comes to the bodies of women.
men for whom violent, hateful, objectifying words about women are viewed as normal.
men who believe that money and power and their penises give them license to do whatever they want with a woman regardless of what she wants.
men who inherit a religion that dehumanizes women.
men for whom the very idea of consent is irrelevant.
men who believe they will get rewarded for their misogyny and sexism and moral filth, because they’ve watched it happen.
men who grow to have no value for gentleness and sensitivity and empathy.

We’re seeing an entire religion (Evangelical Christianity) and political party (the GOP) working together to strip women of fundamental rights. That should terrify good and decent Americans regardless of gender. Possession of a penis shouldn’t be the price of admission to full legal rights in America. This country shouldn’t be the property and playground of White Conservative Christian heterosexual males.

America is running the risk of losing an entire generation of males to toxic masculinity. It’s not difficult to teach boys to respect women and treat them with the dignity they’re due, yet that seems beyond so many parents today. What’s sad is that so many women seem willing to go along with the idea of being treated like chattel.

Consent shouldn’t be optional. It should be the baseline for a relationship based on respect, compassion, caring, sensitivity, and empathy. Men should understand that wanting something doesn’t mean they get to take it if consent isn’t established.

Women must make it clear that they deserve to be heard and respected. The idea that they’re the “fairer” and “weaker” sex is crap. They may be smaller and weaker physically, but that hardly means they can’t and shouldn’t be able to hold their own. At a minimum, women deserve to be treated with dignity and respect, and men who are unable or unwilling to do that have no business trying to be with a woman.

It should be a simple equation- no respect, no nookie. Have you got that, guys? It’s not a difficult concept.