If Your Man Knew What to Say, Here’s What He Might Say If He Knew You Feared His Potential For Violence...

Excerpted from Warren Farrell's Women Can't Hear What Men Don't Say.

(Permission to reprint granted by Warren Farrell.)
See www.warrenfarrell.com and www.warrenfarrell.info.

 

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Why the silence? Think of all the ways we teach boys to become men by enduring pain: Football, rugby, ice hockey, boxing, boot camp, rodeos, car racing. Men learn to call pain “glory”; women learn to call the police.

Why did virtually every culture reward its men for enduring violence? So it would have a cadre of people available to protect it in war. The people considered the most in need of protection were women and children. The sex considered most disposable was men – or males....

The more a man is trained to “be a man,” the more he is trained to protect women and children, not hurt women and children. He is trained to volunteer to die before even a stranger is hurt – especially a woman or child. Thus most firefighters are volunteers, and almost all the volunteers are men.

Part of the pressure men put on each other to carry out this mandate is ridiculing a man who complains when he is hurt. We often think that when a man insults another man by calling him a “girl,” the insult reflects a contempt for women. No. It reflects a contempt for any man who is unwilling to make himself strong enough to protect someone as precious as a woman. It is an insult to any man unwilling to endure the pain it takes to save a woman’s life – including the pain of losing his own life. If you are a woman, imagine someone calling you a “baby” because you cried rather than trying to save your daughter’s life at the risk of your own – you would know the term “baby” was meant not to insult babies, but to insult you for being unwilling to protect someone as precious as a baby. The ridicule is pressure to consider ourselves less important than someone even more precious: A baby is more precious than a mother; a woman is more precious than a man.

Those feminists who say that masculinity is about men believing they can batter women display the deepest ignorance possible about men and masculinity. Battering a woman is the male role broken down. In a Stage I survival-based culture, it is the male role to protect women by taking control of survival needs. Which is why, for example, 19th century British and American law required a husband to go to debtors’ prison even if it was his wife who spent them into debt.11 With responsibility came the ability to enforce. The male role was to his family what the role of the military is to a nation: Both are assigned the role of protector; but the power it takes to protect, when broken down, can be abusive. But the abuse is not the role, it is the role broken down. He was not treating her as property, he was taking responsibility for keeping the property intact for the entire family’s protection. If he should fail, he’s off to jail. That’s why I call it the responsibility to discipline, as opposed to male privilege.

In virtually every culture, then, manhood rests on men learning to protect women, not hurt women.