Bruce’s Beat

What got your goat, and what gave me a twinge, too, as I read Mr. Hale’s article is that it did not seem to condemn the criminal conduct as strongly as it did the ignorant boasting about it. It wasn’t the words Mr. Hale spoke. It was what was left unspoken. The title after all was not stop drugging and pimping, but stop snitchin’ on yourself. Even worse, Mr. Hale’s piece failed to shed any useful light on the ubiquity, the centrality and the downright evil of gender-based oppression – the practice of which some of the ignoramuses in his article were snitching on themselves by bragging about – to the way we think and act and live.

But what about condemning the crimes? And what is it that renders so many of these crimes relative invisibility? The answer of course, is that they are committed against women, and men are doing more than our share of the talking, and more than our share of the thinking. When it comes to crimes against women, we exercise the laziness of privilege. We are, after all, men and thus not subject to this sexualized violence and threats of violence ourselves to anything like the extent experienced by women. It is our privilege within the matrix, which the Morpheus character in the movie “The Matrix” called “…the world which is pulled over your eyes to protect you from the truth…” which keeps us from pointing to the rivers of blood and suffering refreshed each hour by the countless victims of the sex trade, for instance. But after all, they are women and children. We are men.