Women’s role in society has come under the microscope lately
with established, successful women like Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg pushing
women to “lean in.” Ultimately, as CBS News paraphrased of Sandberg, women “worry
too much about being liked and turn down opportunities in anticipation of
having a family.” But when I came across the opinion of Matt Forney, who in
his case against female self-esteem, believes that women don’t deserve
self-esteem, I could barely speak.
I’m not sure something as blasphemous as that post even
deserves recognition as legitimate, but sadly there is a select group of
misogynistic men who find women to verify these egomaniac personalities. This opinion needs to be thoroughly dismantled for the good of women...and men.
1. Nobody “deserves” self-esteem. It is an inherent human right.
I’m not sure where Forney earned the right to claim the authority to
delegate the right to self-esteem, but everybody has the right to self-esteem. How one decides to exercise that right is of their own volition.
People on either extreme end of the spectrum (arrogance or cowardice) are often
ridiculed but everyone has the right to find their own place in that spectrum.
MattLogicTM applied to another situation sounds something like this: “blacks
have done nothing to deserve self-esteem in a country driven by hardworking White America. After all, the only thing that African-Americans did was perform slave labor for their noble, worthy masters."
Hopefully he’ll snap back into the 21st century
sometime soon. And maybe he’ll head back to the dictionary and realize that
respect and self-esteem are significantly different terms. It’s clear, Matt, that you
don’t respect women—as evidenced by this first point where you refer to women
as “girls” in the title and then refer to the opposite gender as “men” only ten
words later. But that doesn't mean they can't still have self-esteem.
Despite roadblocks, women have proven to be quite capable in previously
male-dominated fields, too. Experts say that by 2017 we will see female doctors outnumber males. In the past 40 years, the number of men entering
medicine has doubled. Women in medicine has increased 10-fold. Newsflash: life would not “go
on as usual” without women in the workforce.
2. Physiological
differences do not make women inherently insecure.
Fact: men have a lot more testosterone than women. (Maybe it
comes to a surprise to MattLogicTM but testosterone is actually a
precursor to the “female hormone” estrogen, so they are quite intimately related.) As a result, men are physiologically
built with more absolute and relative muscle mass. And since you’re so
into “natural state” of women, Matt, let’s continue the science discussion. Evolution
is centered around the concept of natural selection, so what makes more sense for the survival of a
human population: a female who sacrifices the ability to bring a child to term
for physical strength equal to men, or a female body that naturally has more
adipose tissue for energy storage and usage for feeding two bodies during
pregnancy?
Physiological differences in reproductive capacities say
nothing about the psychological capabilities of women. They say nothing about
the psychological security/insecurity of women. (Now whether you project there
to be a correlation between the two is a different story…)
Humans have changed Earth in a way that no other species has ever done. So the connection between physiology and current sociology are poorly correlated at best in a species that, in many ways, defies the "laws of nature." Sorry, we
are not a pack of wolves looking for an alpha-male in a freezing winter. We have
houses, heaters, and a capacity to alter the environment in “unnatural” ways.
Just yesterday, Google paid homage to a woman whose intellectual capacity exponentially far exceeds
your (or my) own, Matt.
You are attracted
by vulnerability. You believe that
female insecurity “unlock[s] our inner masculine instincts.” What you don’t realize
is that you can still be the center of a girl’s world without needing these
extreme characteristics. What you are looking for is less than what we even
expect of children. You want a doll—and not the kind you’re thinking of, but rather the
kind that has packaged stuffing inside her.
3. Women want to have
self-esteem. The problem is men have taken it away from them.
Change is not pretty. Men with your mentality have
persecuted women for hundreds of years. So when a few bold women come forward
(like the Rosa Parks and Susan B. Anthonys of the world) to provoke change it
isn’t easy and it sure will not come in one fell swoop. It takes time just like
the equal rights movements to follow. There are still cultures today that are
patriarchal—maybe that’s where MattLogicTM is derived from?—but that
does not validate anything more than the fact that historically men have
confused muscle mass with mental capabilities. And a few girl bands today does not accurately represent the entirety of women.
A fourteen-year-old child was shot by Taliban militants as a
result of activism to encourage girls to go to school in Pakistan. That girl,
Malala Yousafzai, was nominated for the 2013 Nobel Peace Prize. This bears repeating: full-grown, adult men with guns thought they were tough and wanted
to assert their masculinity by nearly killing a girl.
Maybe that girl doesn’t earn the “respect” of MattLogicTM
but it did impress a committee that is executes the will of the
chemisty, engineer, and innovator, Alfred Nobel (who, by the way, is a male—shocker,
right?).
Your opinion denigrates women…but also men. I don’t ever
want to be associated with a delusional opinion that you try to pass as fact.
Women have every equal right of opportunity that men have.
That includes self-esteem.
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