What Have We Done to Our Men?

It was late, and I was indulging in my (slightly) bad habit of savoring some alone time after everyone else was asleep. I wasn't thinking about blog posts, for sure not planning to write one, when a minion quote suddenly jolted me to attention: "Husbands are the best people to share secrets with. They won't tell anyone, because they're not even listening."

It may not have gotten as much of my attention if I hadn't just spent an evening with my husband several nights ago. We were browsing around in a Kitchen Collection store when we got started reading the sayings on some refrigerator magnets. "The views expressed by the males in this house are not necessarily shared by the management." said one, and we smiled a little but then Chris pointed something out that made me think.

"We can say that about a man, and it's funny. But try taking that and switching it around to be about a woman and sticking it on a magnet and that's not going to go over well at all!" I had to admit he was right.

Ever since reading the book Love and Respect and realizing how society has stripped men of the respect that they long for with its feminist movement and cries for equality, I've been more sensitive to this kind of thing. Still, it's easy to think it's all "out there" and kind of shrug it off as not really being that bad.

After reading the minion quote and shaking my head and thinking, "Really? Really. You're going to comment on that and 'like' it and act like it's hilarious? We seriously have a problem", I decided to do a little searching.

I pulled up trusty old google and typed in "quotes about men". What did I find? Twenty out of twenty of the quotes about men made them out to be the dummies. So, I googled "quotes about women". Out of twenty quotes about women, two were demeaning and two others were slightly so. I wasn't quite sure that had been a fair search, so I googled "funny quotes about women". Out of 100 quotes maybe 10 - 15% put women down but here's the really startling thing: a good 50% of those "funny quotes about women" made MEN look like the idiots.

People! What is wrong with this picture? What have we done to our men? What are we doing?

I went to bed after that but my mind was in high gear. I felt sick inside and I wondered how we could have strayed so far from God's plan for the man and woman as He created them?

The truth is, we Christians aren't so very different from the rest of the world in this area. We might be a few steps behind our society but we've accepted a lot more of the feminist attitude than we want to admit. We're pretty careful not to step on the women's toes but we pretty regularly portray the attitude that on the opposite side it's no big deal, the men can handle it!

What's my point? Just this, I guess: As Christians let's open our eyes and beware! Let's be honest and admit that we have this problem more than we think we do. Let's not join the crowd chortling at silly, demeaning quotes. Let's show the world that we respect our men!