Self Protection Vs Political Correctness!

I’ve always believed that boys/men should respect girls/women and that girls should be brought up to EXPECT men to treat them with respect. Women being treated with respect is not a privilege, it’s a right!

Please check out the video below. In the Kenyan capital of Nairobi where rape is rife, a programme was introduced teaching girls to defend themselves and teaching “positive masculinity” to boys. Within 6 sessions, boys attitudes change from thinking that women deserved to be raped in certain circumstances to not accepting it at all.

Rape has been reduced in areas where this is taught by 50% and boys successfully intervened when witnessing an assault 74% of the time.

The results speak for themselves and are a huge improvement. Yes it still needs to be improved more, but it’s a good start and proof that teaching boys to respect girls brings clear and tangible results.

I bring this up as I have recently been part of what I consider to be a bizarre conversation on Facebook. I spoke out in favour of men respecting women and I was told by a young lady that this was, “casual sexism” and that, “Society still hides sexism under this blanket of politeness”!

Several other young ladies supported this view. I left the conversation at that point as their was no reasoning with them and I wasn’t going to waste my time.

However, I think this level politically correct “feminism” (?) does not help the cause of women, rather it undermines it. The case was made in that Facebook thread that everybody should be treated equally, man or women. I do agree that everybody should be treated with respect regardless of gender, age, race etc.

However, I do still think that there should be an extra layer of respect from men to women. This is because women have an extra layer of vulnerability that men don’t generally have. That is of course sexual assault/rape. Rape is a particularly nasty form of violence that can leave emotional damage for a whole lifetime, long after the physical injuries have healed up. Yes it can happen to a man too, but it is much much rarer. It is obviously far more likely to be a man attacking a woman.

As per the video above, this is drastically reduced when boys/men are taught to respect women and taught that it is a positive masculine thing to do. Anybody who is serious about self protection knows that avoiding an encounter in the first place is much better than dealing with it after it’s started! And starting with educating potential attackers so that they don’t attack in the first place is a very good way to avoid an encounter!

The lady who was complaining at my casual sexism even said that, “To me that means that you still see us a the weaker sex”.

Doh!

Well yes! It’s a medical fact that women are weaker than men. We can all quote some exceptions, but overall it’s obvious. That’s not to say that women are inferior as women have other things that they do better than most men. But to try to deny that men are stronger in the name of some kind of political correctness is absurd and potentially leaves women more vulnerable.

Feminism should serve women’s interests and I am in favour of it and I’ll support it. I have done!

It wasn’t that long ago that a man could not be prosecuted for raping his wife. I remember as a youngster the debates over rape victims being questioned in court about their (irrelevant) sexual history and what they were wearing at the time. The defence lawyer would try to make a case that she was asking for it or deserved it. I’d like to think that we’ve moved on a lot from those days and “no” means “no”, regardless of what she was wearing or how many people she’d been with before. Yes I know there are still travesty’s of justice, but I think it’s fair to say that overall, in most modernised countries, women are generally a lot safer and better treated then at any time other time in history. This has come about by teaching men to respect women.

So please ladies, don’t let petty political correctness from keyboard feminist who have absolutely no clue at all about the realities of self protection take things to a point that may leave you (or your daughters) more vulnerable. Expect men to respect you (and your daughters) and please, enjoy the extra courtesy that a true gentleman may extend to you. It does play a small part in making your world a safer place.