Balancing Act, 24

Okay, Gentle Reader, the gloves are off. First of all, no more comments on this blog, from anyone, please. The privilege has once again been abused and if I see any more comments on this forum, they will be promptly deleted unread. One friendship has just been jeopardized because of this. Now, secondly, I would like to respond to a less than reasonable comment from this morning's post. I was accused, I believe of "slut-shaming" a term that has no meaning and no resonance with me. Being, or behaving like, a slut, regardless of one's gender, is in itself shameful and beneath the human dignity of all parties involved. As humans we are more, much more than our bodies or sexuality, and this too often gets forgotten by some people. Someone also objected about the terminology used to describe my opinion of those two obnoxious Mexican girls I encountered on Friday. Fair enough. Had I not felt so offended and embarrassed by the way they were talking about the penis dimensions of some poor guy I didn't know, then maybe I would be a bit gentler. Or, let's put things in reverse. Had those been two men talking on about some poor woman's vagina, and I referred to them on this page as jerks, pigs or lowlife scum for objectifying a woman behind her back, then I don't think that any of you would bat an eye. In fact, you would all be likely cheering from the peanut gallery. Admit it! And you know something else, Gentle Reader? I never give a pass to men for behaving disgracefully towards women. If I see someone harassing a woman in public, I call them out on it, whether it's four jerks in a four-wheel drive as happened some years ago in Yaletown, when I put my own safety at risk to tell those idiots to stop bothering a young woman, or, just a couple of weeks ago, some other knuckle dragger who was leering carnivorously at a young woman on Howe Street. I looked at him, said "Oink," and that's all it took to get him off her case. So, suddenly it's perfectly fine for women to objectify men? I don't think so. Equal time for equal acts of selfish ignorance. Perhaps I didn't have to refer to those girls as whores, using three words in Spanish when only one would have done, but I, as a man, felt personally violated by their behaviour and I was still venting, and as already mentioned, had I been a woman writing this about dirty pig men, no one would have been offended. May I also remind you that I am a survivor of sexual abuse, sexual and indecent assault and sexual objectification, and I don't care who is doing it to whom, I will come in like a rabid lynx on anyone I catch treating others this way. It seems to me that this whole culture of offence and victimization that has overtaken us has turned an awful lot of you into politically correct thought police. Well, guess what? As I mentioned already, it is not about gender, but about power. Unfortunately, too much power is still being wielded by men, which turns them into oppressors, especially of women. Point taken. But when you have men who are disempowered, the dynamic changes and they are no longer victimizers, but vulnerable, fragile victims. That's right, duckies, even binary cis males (and I am not a binary cis male). Similarly, women in power can and often do become every bit as exploitative and oppressive and cruel as men. Gender has nothing to do with it. It is power dynamics, and power dehumanizes those who have it and they in turn try to use their power to dehumanize the weak and marginalized. We have to start looking at power differently and to reconstruct our way of thinking and interacting to a form that includes instead of excluding and that fosters community instead of hierarchy. We are all equally fragile and equally damaged. It is time to put away those broad brushes that get used to paint everyone into the same category depending on what kind of sexual body parts they were born with, to stop demonizing everyone for their gender, and to start treating people as persons, as individuals, with care, compassion and respect. Perhaps I was being too hard on those Mexican girls, but it is very difficult for my eyes to get moist about privileged young women or men of their ilk. Maybe if I knew them a bit as individuals, but they weren't going to let me get anywhere near them even if I wasn't a threat to them. The door swings both ways, and perhaps even up and down as well, Gentle Reader.