Disconnected
Date: 01-10-2025
Can men and women ever really connect?
We live very different lives and experiences. Can men understand ours? Do they even really want to?
Is this about empathy (or lack thereof)?
Is this built into the gender roles?
Is this biological? just plain human nature?
Is this about the power imbalance? The ones in power have to either keep their eyes closed to the suffering or actively participate to mantain the status quo, right? It seems that even men with empathy do not seem to be able to make themselves uncomfortable long enough to want to listen to our voices or care enough to hold other men accountable. The ones in power have to invalidate you to keep their previlige, right?
Or maybe it is a mix of all these factors?
Why does it matter?
Plenty of men and women are friends. Plenty of heterosexual couples continue to find some way of living together and making families, whether they can find any actual companionship in each other or not. So, why would this bother anyone?
This underlying disconnect seems built into the very fabric of our current reality. Not just human history. Have you noticed?
Can we co-share reponsibilities? Although women are working and earning more than ever before, men continue to do significantly less care-giving and housework and spend more time on leisure activities, even in families where women are the main bread winners US-based 2023 report! Moreover, married men reportedly get higher earnings compared to married women, unmarried men and unmarried women US-based 2019 report!
Can girls have normal healthy childhoods? 650 million women alive today (one in five women) experienced sexual violence of some form BEFORE they turned 18 Unicef 2023 report! And one in three women alive today have experienced some form of physical and/or sexual violence at least once in their lives.
Can we co-exist at home? 51,100 out of 85000 women that were intentionally killed by men in 2023 were killed by their male partners. That is 140 women a day! 1 woman every 10 minutes UN 2023 report!
Can we co-exist online? Roughly 51% of the women worldwide have experienced some form of online harassment and abuse UN Women 2024 report!
Most AI researchers I meet on a daily basis are men. If more women were in the room, I think a lot of the AI research progress and currently-available AI products would have looked very different. For example, if men were thinking for both of us, generative AI products which are now being used to create fake porn of female colleagues/class fellows would have gone through more scrutiny. On the other hand, AI robot girlfriends where men can custom-select the size, shape and color of each body part of this dystopian caricature of the female body are gaining popularity.
Women’s health continues to be an afterthought in the medical community. If men were thinking for both of us, there would have been more understanding of our health problems and debates around abortion would not have been politicized. For example, it may seem that everything around pregnancy gets a lot of attention and services in most countries. However, most mothers, after they give birth, report extremely grim experiences regarding the care given to them by both their medical doctors and their male partners.
If men were thinking for both of us, sexual assault and rape would not be effectively legal worldwide. For example, only 5% of these crimes are annually reported in Canada and only a fraction of these reported crimes are persecuted. See my post on this for references.
If men were thinking for both of us, men in so many cultures and religions around the world would not be okay to treat women as their honor, property, personal toy and as some useful life-accessory.
From how showing violence against women is so normal in movies…to how even the idea of an independent woman is defined through the lens of men….the examples of how this disconnect shapes our world go on and on….
So…if men only gain in every way by keeping the power imbalance, can they ever sincerely join the women in fixing it?