Monday, November 27, 2017

Excuse: Men Just Can't Control Themselves

One way to keep the top not accountable is to assume that the control tactics they use are inate, and can not be helped. Such is the approach of Stephen Marche in the New York Times article, "The Unexamined Brutality of the Male Libido."

Of course he ignores the power that men have on top of the hierarchy that has allowed them to control women for centuries.

Marche: "How are we supposed to create an equal world when male mechanisms of desire are inherently brutal?" 

Oh are we supposed to agree that the poor men just can't be held accountable on top of the hierarchy, because they can't help their behavior, it is born to males?

Marche: "Acknowledging the brutality of male libido is not, of course, some kind of excuse. Sigmund Freud recognized the id, and knew it as “a chaos, a caldron full of seething excitations.” But the point of Freud was not that boys will be boys. Rather the opposite: The idea of the Oedipus complex contained an implicit case for the requirements of strenuous repression: If you let boys be boys, they will murder their fathers and sleep with their mothers."

Marche: "What if there is no possible reconciliation between the bright clean ideals of gender equality and the mechanisms of human desire?"  

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/11/25/opinion/sunday/harassment-men-libido-masculinity.html?emc=eta1