During a panel at last week’s Women in the World Summit, actor and #MeToo activist Terry Crews talked about the “cult” of toxic masculinity, and how men often fail to perceive women as “all the way human.”
“Masculinity can be a cult,” Crews explained. “And when I say ‘cult,’ it’s no different than David Koresh. It’s no different than Jim Jones.” He went on:
This is what happens with men and women. […] As a woman, they talk, but a guy is not looking at you as even all the way human. This is what you have to understand — there is a humanity issue here,” he continued. “[Women are] like, ‘Why don’t you hear me? Why don’t you see my feelings?’ And [men are] like, ‘But you’re not all the way human. You’re here for me, you’re here for my deal.’ It’s real.
Crews also admitted his own complicity in this system.
“I am guilty,” he said. “I believed, simply because I was a man, that I was more valuable than my wife and the other women in my life.”
To illustrate his point, he talked about going to strip clubs with his teammates when he was playing football:
You go to the strip club, and here’s the woman, and the whole thing. And once she starts talking about that she has kids or she starts talking about anything in her life, it’s like, ‘Stop, stop, stop.’ Because [she’s] becoming a human before my eyes. I don’t want you to be a human. I want you to be an object. I want you to be something pretty to look at. But as you talk, you’re making things too real for me.
The clip of Crews’s statement has been recirculating this week, and as upsetting as his words are, there’s something refreshing about them, about their honesty. That many men see women as subhuman probably won’t come as a surprise to most women (or most men), but it’s a truth that is rarely stated so plainly. And, as Crews and so many of the #MeToo activists know, it’s only by confronting these ugly truths head-on that we can begin to move forward.
Watch the full clip of Crews’s statement below.
pgyx on April 21st, 2018 at 15:59 UTC »
Here is a test for implicit bias from that Harvard University place, it includes ones on gender (click on social attitudes, read/agree/proceed, click on the test)
Link to the site
nikils on April 21st, 2018 at 15:43 UTC »
I worked in a pharmacy for years. One thing i noticed was the very obvious differences in how the pharmacists (one in particular) spoke to women vs men. I finally called out the worst offender. He had a habit of answering the phone on speaker mode. If it was a female caller, he would always sigh, start shaking his head, and usually walk around clearly paying minimal attention. I pointed this out to the others, who all watched him do it every time, but only to female callers.
He was hella pissed that we started keeping track. On a whiteboard.
futurewarlord on April 21st, 2018 at 14:11 UTC »
What Terry's detractors are really missing is that most of our biases are implicit, not conscious. Of course most men will not say that they see women as less than human, and men who think that way do not consciously do so. But they still speak and act in ways that dehumanize us.