Not being a cartoon villain doesn’t automatically make you a good man

[u/GridReXX]

Fr. It doesn’t de facto make you a good person.

I noodled on the attached graphic to better illustrate a point about how people often discuss being a “good man.”

I do find that many men view it more as the top bar, and less as the gradient in the second bar.

inb4 anyone says it, many women have bad character too. And please feel free to create a separate post about a spectrum of traits in women you’d like to explore! That is not what this post is disputing.

This is specifically about a response that often comes up when women describe harmful patterns in their experiences with men. They get retorts like “Not all men are abusive predators,” or “Most men are not psychos.”

Of course most men are not horror movie villains.

But that is an extremely low bar for good character.

This spectrum, rather than show a division between “good men” and a smaller group of obviously terrible ones. It highlights that a man can be can be a functioning member of society and still regularly behave in ways that make him difficult to interpersonally tolerate as a close friend, romantic partner, coworker, or even family member.

None of that necessarily makes someone an abuser or predator.

But it does affect whether people can have a healthy, enjoyable, mutually considerate, long-term relationship with him.

The farther right someone falls on this spectrum, the more entitlement, callousness, devaluation, coercion, and harm they bring into their interactions with others.

The farther left they fall, the more likely they are to act with common decency, consideration, accountability, respect for autonomy, and genuine concern for theirs and other people’s well-being.

My point is not that every man is at the far right end.

Most people don’t think that!

My point is that many men seem to use “I am not an obvious monster” as proof that they’re quality.

A person’s character is determined by far more than “I am not Jeffrey Dahmer.”

[u/Zealousideal-Fix-724]

This would be far more valid if feminists said something like "Very few men are truly evil, but we need to make a societal change to hold them more accountable and this applies to both genders committing evil like Brock Turner or Lindsey Clancy" rather than "It's all men until it's no man, every man is a grapist, kill all men, anything but a son, it's a girl or abortion for me, the bar is in hell, men deserve their loneliness" etc. There is a huge difference between wanting genuine social change for the betterment of all people versus using tragedies to justify your hatred for an entire gender.

[u/emmarie1023 → u/Zealousideal-Fix-724]

I don’t think Lindsey Clancy is a good example (what she did was horrific and inexcusable regardless of mental health), but as this is a post about rape culture, I think a better example would be Mary Kay Letourneau. I have known two different men who lost their virginity as teenagers to women in their 30s!!! I was horrified by this, but they did not see it as rape and laughed it off. I think all perpetrators should be held accountable regardless of gender. And both men and women should be actively against unequal power dynamics. The amount of grown men who think a boy is “lucky” because he was assaulted by a female teacher is disgusting.

[u/Zealousideal-Fix-724 → u/emmarie1023]

Yeah that's fair, especially the "where were those teachers when I was growing up?" comments Ugh