Misogyny and Love

When I was working for a Lebanese food place, I had a co-worker, a young man from the Middle East, who worked hard and was for the most part a kind person. He admitted to me that he was often verbally abusive to his girlfriend; so I told him that such behavior made it harder for her to love him.

If you are bad to someone who loves you, then what message does it send to the world? The message it sends is that people should not love you and that they should treat you like trash. I do not think that this is something that many people understand. They treat people who love them like dirt; nobody else gives a damn. It teaches people that they should treat the person like rubbish, as that is how he treats the people who love him.

This was not an evil person; this was a confused person. He, like many others in Middle East, had his head pumped full of misogynistic idiocy, which in places such as the Middle East trickles down to everyone, including the better-natured men who under other circumstances would never be abusive. I've known any number of good-natured men who were influenced to be misogynistic and nasty to their women. They were not themselves evil; they were wrongfully influenced.

If anything effective is to be done against domestic violence, there will be a need to confront these kinds of influences wherever they are.

And then the good-natured people will be doing the right thing by the women in their lives, and the ill-natured people will have to change their ways.