Men Are Pigs

I know a woman who said out loud, though somewhat sheepishly when she realized she could be heard, “Men are pigs”. I was hearing the end of a conversation and didn’t know the context, but I was taken aback because the woman is married to a responsible, accomplished man who loves her and spends much of his energies caring for her. 

I assume the remark was directed at men’s poor management of their greater sexual drive. Sometimes men’s sexual fixation shows up as faithlessness, sometimes as wasted money, sometimes as boorishness, sometimes violence. But this weakness in men is not really about their desire for sex; it is their deep-seated, often unconscious belief in the connection between sex and love. They think they are loved even by the prostitutes they pay for. This is stupidity, certainly, but there is something profoundly right about this delusion since what they believe ought to be true. 

The error of women is that they see sex as a means for manipulating men. They enjoy their power over men, but the consequence of sexual manipulation is a growing cynicism. Women learn to despise sex because they feel guilty about how they misuse it. And they despise men for how easily they can be manipulated. Then they get angry when they experience through the ravages of time their loss of manipulative power. 

What no one says out loud today, possibly because the public narrative says otherwise, is that women commit evil acts, every bit as much as men. This is not reflected in the jails, certainly, but that is because women are more practical than men. Men, being more bold, push through boundaries. Women, being more practical, move boundaries around, or find ways to skirt them.

Healthy men understand that sex needs to be a part of a responsible relationship. Healthy women recognize that sex is personal and that it promotes close relationships. And men are not pigs, really. They are boars. Women are pigs. Winston Churchill said that what he liked about pigs is that they treat humans as equals.

Pigs have a lot of insight, but we don’t have to be the equals of pigs. We can do better. We can start by walking away from the gender wars, and embracing the fact that men and women make up the one human race.