A Letter to Washington Post Columnist Karen Attiah about “Female Bodybuilders and ‘Vile Men’”
Dear Ms. Attiah,
I respectfully ask that you take the time to read this letter about your recent article, Female bodybuilders, big and strong, are still no match for vile men, and to thoughtfully consider what I say here.
Please note that I’m a proud lifelong reader of the Post, who nevertheless has long noticed the paper’s gender bias, most notably its imbalanced coverage of domestic violence.
But my pride in the Post turned to quiet outrage in 2018 after the paper published the following two undeniably gender-biased articles:
Why can’t we hate men? This #MeToo inspired rant was written by a women’s studies professor who had the gall to publicly share her hatred of men to a worldwide audience.¹
Amber Heard: I spoke up against sexual violence — and faced our culture’s wrath. That has to change. This is the op-ed that ultimately proved that Amber Heard abused Johnny Depp and that men can also be victims of domestic violence.
In response, I’ve been sending letters to Post columnists who have written articles that perpetuate the same gender bias as these two articles.
Your article is, unfortunately, another example of this bias.
Please don’t misunderstand. I agree with the overall theme of your article. These female bodybuilders have been mistreated by some of the men of the bodybuilding industry. These few men have horribly misbehaved and have set a poor example that unfortunately reflects poorly on all men.
But your article shines an unfavorable light onto all men. It begins with your article’s title.
Wouldn’t it offend you if I titled an article about female sexual misbehavior, “Men, big and strong, are still no match for vile women”?
Or similarly, if someone wrote a column about African Americans charged with sexual abuse (e.g., Michael Jackson, Bill Cosby, and Russell Simmons), would it be acceptable to title it “Women and children, small and weak, are no match for vile African Americans”?
Would it be acceptable to title an article about any race or ethnic group charged with terrible misbehavior with a title ending with “… no match for vile Jews, Asians, Hispanics, Filipinos, or gays”?
OF COURSE NOT!
How, then, can you possibly feel that it’s all right to write a collective column about “…vile men?”
It’s because feminists have, with the assistance of a gullible media — including the Washington Post — foisted on the public a one-sided, prejudiced depiction of males, where they have for the past 50 years been cast in a dark light, and where men and boys have become the only group of people who can be hated and slandered with complete impunity.
If you doubt the accuracy of this last statement, how do you reconcile the aforementioned 2018 Washington Post “Why can’t we hate men?” article that provided a platform for a deranged feminist professor to openly and shamelessly express a Nazi-like hatred for men in a major American newspaper?
But it’s not just the title of your article that’s offensive. Your article is saturated — no dripping — with misandrist feminist dogma. It seems clear that you, like a QAnon believer, have completely accepted a bizarre, one-sided, hateful, worldview, one that refuses to accept facts or reason.
Here are some excerpts from your article that prove you’ve completely succumbed to feminist ideology:
“If a woman was big and strong enough, I figured, surely she would be safe from men. (The news was full of stories of violence against girls and women; the danger men posed seemed omnipresent.)”
This paragraph is based on feminism’s big lie that DV is only “men beating up women” and assumes that size is the main determinant of which partner is the victim. But Amber Heard proved to the world that a smaller woman can wreak massive harm on a larger man.
A book about the myth of female innocence² concluded that human will, and not physical size drives domestic violence:
“The idea that domestic violence refers exclusively to wife abuse or to violence against women is so deeply ingrained in Western consciousness that it is impossible to grapple with [stories of male victims of DV] without first unraveling some potent conventional wisdom. … At the heart of the matter lies human will. Which partner — by dint of temperament, personality, life history — has the will to harm the other? By now it should be clear that such a will is not the exclusive province of men.”
“the male gaze”
The male gaze is feminism’s view that men looking at women is just one way that men oppress women. This view completely ignores the way that women actually invite male attention — known in the men’s rights community as “gaze harvesting”. Why else do women spend hundreds of billions in fashion, cosmetics, and cosmetic surgery, or who run amateur web sites where ordinary women are uploading their own explicit acts for the world to see? Contrary to feminist theory, most women actually enjoy being looked at.
“Turns out, muscles are still no match for the patriarchy.”
The patriarchy is a hateful piece of feminist propaganda that is mindlessly used by many. Have you ever considered that in the same way the Nazi’s use of a “Jewish conspiracy” aided in perpetuating hate and violence against Europe’s Jews, the use of the term “the patriarchy” aids in perpetuating hate and violence against men?
For proof, please read my online article, ‘The Patriarchy’ is Feminism’s Jewish Conspiracy.
Ms. Attiah, I’m not saying that these few men described in your article don’t deserve censure; I believe that they do. But why, other than feminist-inspired hatred of men, does a national newspaper allow a column with such obvious and self-evident gender-biased content to be published?
Finally, and with all due respect, how can an African American woman, who may herself have been the victim of prejudice and bigotry, not recognize when that bigotry flows from her own writing?
Sincerely,
Stephen Bond
For other letters to Post columnists see my Letters to The Washington Post list:
FOOTNOTES
The “Why Can’t We Hate Men” article was perhaps more accurately described by American Enterprise Institute’s Senior Fellow Emeritus Mark Perry as “…the most hateful, venomous, vitriolic, malicious, misguided, despicable, vindictive, unpersuasive and reprehensible op-ed in the history of the Washington Post, and possibly in the history of modern journalism for a mainstream media publication.”
By Stephen Bond on January 24, 2023.
Exported from Medium on February 28, 2023.