EqualityWashing

“Despite confirmation by the last American census, Western cultures MUST pretend that nothing is amiss between males and females.” – SpinBusters -- The Man Shortage

Something I see a lot, I’ll call “Equality Washing.”

This happens when something applies to some specific group of people, but is cast and talked about as if it were a broad phenomenon, applying to a much larger group, perhaps even everybody.

So for example, in a war, we may say, “40,000 people died,” when in fact 40,000 men died.

Pay attention to who is being addressed by an identity (“women and children,”) and who is being addressed by generic (men called “people,”) and how that shapes people’s thoughts.

I’m not entirely clear on why or how it works just yet, but it seems to have to do with:

• obscuring damage – making it it so that people don’t know that someone is damaged, for whatever reason
• reducing obligation – obscuring damage to a class of people, so that if something is “owed” to them, nobody will think about it
• keeping focused – if something can stoke something controversial, we treat things as abstractly as possible
• “keeping it equal” – if you have a movement based on equality, or if you believe that inequalities are mainly social constructs, then you can try and make things equal by reporting them as equal
  • ex: “nobody needs sex, male or female”

Examples:

• men are called “people” or “individuals” when they’re damaged, killed, etc.,.
• reuniting addresses itself to “men and women,” but it’s pretty clear that it’s basically all about retraining men, especially when you get to the anti-porn part of the site
  • the site authors must have realized that if they talk about retraining men, it won’t work, so they carefully mask it as if it’s about “all people,” so men do not think in terms of being discriminated against or controlled
• whenever SexlessMarriage is talked about, pains are always taken to mention that “women are the high-desire partners, too,” which is true, some times, but leaves the impression that men and women are equally sexually discontent in their marriages, which is absolutely false – men are far more sexually unhappy – society just doesn’t want to talk about it

This is really harmful stuff, and contributes to the invisibility of male suffering.

Visible Example

Here’s a really visible example:

Family Dynamics Institute: When Spouses Have Differing Levels of Sexual Desire

“Obviously, some people have differing levels of desire. Sometimes a woman’s desire is somewhat lower than her husband’s. We’ve also found men whose desire is less than their wives…”

This is “Equality Washing.”

Then, several paragraphs later, it reads:

“In all honesty, the frustration seems to be most common in men. Their wives are too tired, busy, or disinterested to fulfill their sexual needs…”

So what’s that all about?

Why does it preface it with, “In all honesty, …” Why do we have to be treated to an insider perspective, with “in all honesty,” acknowledging that there is a charade otherwise..?

Side note– I often times trust church groups more in evaluations of human sexuality. Why? Because they are directly engaged with real live human beings’ problems in an intimate way, both individually and collectively, and because they tend not to be predisposed against men, like mainstream society. (Marriage counselors are good as well, but I suspect they don’t have as wide a view as (say) a church pastor, who sees not only just all kinds of problems, but all kinds of healths, as well!)

You won’t get an “In all honesty, …” from the mainstream media.

See Also:

• Is it harder to raise boys or girls? – Taking this article at face value, (“if that’s all true,”) then it seems pretty clear to me that the difficulties with raising boys are far greater and more consequential than the difficulties with raising girls.

EqualityWashingSexualDesire

One of the major areas for equality washing is sexual desire. “Women are just as libidinous as men.”

I know for a fact that there are some super-high libido women out there: I have had the profound fortune of knowing 2 of them closely.

But it seems to me that most every marriage counselors recognize that it is mainly men who are sexually hungry.

Here’s a marriage counselor noting just that:

• His Needs, Her Needs – you can see it in the Table of Contents: “The First Thing He Can’t Do Without: Sexual Fulfillment.”; see also Chapter 1 (sample chapter) – he says, “Every person is unique. While men on the average pick a particular five emotional needs as their most important and women on the average pick another five, any individual can and does pick any combination of the basic ten.”

See Also

GenderAndSexuality