The Degradation of Women

After reading both of these documents, I was honestly just in shock and disgusted by the male population. The ultra masculine environment discussed in Respect Yourself, Protect Yourself really hits home for me. I have played sports for all my life and this is where I see the degradation of women most often. In environments such as these where it is looked down upon to even stand up for women or express any kind of empathy for them, the wrongdoings committed by men against women are nurtured and glorified. Even within the middle class culture that I have been exposed to, violence and disrespect to women has been all too familiar. When you add in the cyclical problems of places of urban poverty, time after time woman are harmed physically and emotionally because of the norms of the culture and lack of police justice. The problem seems like an endless cycle when men and women both grow up witnessing violence and disrespect to women. As Miller mentioned, after a while you become more desensitized to anything you are exposed to. For some men and women, this is all they know and it is no fault of their own that they are exposed to this environment. I find it hard to tip toe across the line of men being products of their environment and knowing what's right and wrong in these articles and I think Miller addresses that problem well. I think there are some things that every human inherently knows is wrong, such as rape or sexual assault. But for others I believe it can be hard to make a distinction. If a young boy has never seen a woman treated with respect or demand respect, how will they know how to approach or woman or how to treat her respectively. I think there is a nature and nurture aspect to this problem. In regards to playing the blame game when it comes to sexual violence against women, men should take full responsibility for their actions at the end of the day. Yes, woman wearing revealing clothes and making sexual advances do make it harder for men to resist the temptation and put them more at risk, but if men would just exhibit self control and take a step back to analyze the long term implications, it shouldn't matter regardless. I think I may not be focusing on urban inequality as much as Miller did, but I just see this as such a universally prevalent problem that is not exclusive to the urban areas. I am not saying that urban inequalities don't exist in regards to gender violence, because I do believe it does, but some of the same problems exist everywhere else.