Before I start, I realise that this subject is likely to be controversial and that women reading this will instantly become defensive and talk about the fact that men are irresponsible and unaccountable for their actions and to that I say I agree with you completely.
I don’t believe that taking accountability is a gendered trait and everybody has times when they will try to deflect away responsibility for their own actions, including the author. It’s a natural defensive mechanism and it is a learning exercise, a process, to hold yourself more accountable for the things that you do and their impact on yourself and others.
What I wish to describe in this piece is not about individual behaviour. It’s about how we collectively have different expectations for men and women when it comes to taking responsibility for ones own actions. It is by no means universal and I can think of legitimate situations where women are held to a higher level of accountability than men are but this article is not about those situations, it’s about situations where female bad behaviour is justified or tolerated when in the same situations male bad behaviour would be vilified, hence the accountability gap.
It is not always the case that women are responsible for this gap either. It’s often men’s natural desire to please women and compete with other men for the affection and respect of women that drives the different standards. When it comes to men’s issues and women’s issues, it’s very often our own sex that cause the problems we perceive to be the fault of the opposite sex.
Additionally, there are often logical underpinning for why these differences in the first place. The aim is not to blame, the aim is to understand what these differences are and why they occur so we can observe them in our own lives.
Enough babble, time for some concrete examples of what I’m actually talking about.
Violent Behaviour
Boys are often taught from an early age never to hit girls, girls are not given the same message. In fact, our culture encourages us to see violence by women towards men as not only acceptable but amusing. How many times do we watch films or TV and see a woman slapping a man, alongside canned laughter? When violence against girls is depicted, the undertone is very much that this is a bad thing.
One study found that half of heterosexual partnered abuse was mutual violence, and that in 70% of nonreciprocal cases the initiator of the violence was female. Many countries have domestic violence legislation that specifically addresses violence against women and girls but dismisses female violence. Ironically, one of the impacts of this is that lesbian violence is often ignored.
When a woman does commit a violent crime, we are much more likely to excuse the behaviour. A woman whom kills her partners is often portrayed as a victim who snapped whereas a man in the same situation is deemed a monster.
Some groups have even called for the abolition of new female prisons altogether in favour of community punishments. Judges consistently pass lower sentences or suspended sentences for violent crimes when committed by women, even when the woman has a long history of previous violent offences.
You may argue that men commit the majority of violent crime, and this is true, but it does not explain the difference in treatment of offenders. The justifications applied to female assailants often apply equally to male offenders, things like childhood trauma and abuse, but we do not consider these factors in a fair and evenhanded way.
In fact, factors used in mitigation for female criminals such as caring for children are often treated as aggravating factors for fathers. The needs of children to have their mother present is taken into account even when the child has been taken into care as a result of the mothers neglect or abuse but a the importance of having a father around is often ignored, or used as a justification to set a harsher sentence as a deterrent.
Absent Parents
What do we call a father that chooses not to participate in or contribute to his children’s lives? A deadbeat father. What do we call a mother who chooses to abdicate her responsibility for a child through safe haven legislation or having her unwanted children adopted?
There have been cases where a male child has been coerced into sexual activity with an adult female and still been expected to pay child support to his statutory rapist. Men are expected to assume the responsibility for a child even if the conception of that child was the result of foul play, tampering with contraception, for example.
A woman has a lot more options. She may access emergency contraception after coitus, she may have access to abortion, she can abandon the child at a public building under Safe Haven legislation in many countries, she can put the child up for adoption, even without the consent of the would be father. Of course, none of these choices are easy but the point is, there are different options available to a woman that are not available to a man.
I’m not suggesting that women should not have access to some of these options, although if it is fair that a father should be expected to financially support a child he helped create, is it not also fair that a mother whom abandons her child should also pay financial support to the state in the case where the child needs to go into foster care or children’s homes? Or should men have equivalent rights to give up paternal responsibility for an unwanted child?
Not all absent fathers are absent through choice and not all mothers have the best intentions for their children. Whilst there are cases where mothers are made to pay child support to the father and there are also cases whereby a father completely abdicates his responsibility for a child he had willingly and refuses to contribute, the system and societies attitude to mothers and fathers in general is heavily skewed towards apportioning blame to fathers and sympathy to mothers that fit the same dysfunctional mould.
Cheating and Infidelity
From years of observation on social media, there seems to be a consensus amongst women that if a woman is unfaithful to her partner, it is due to some unmet need that her partner is failing to provide.
I find this problematic on many levels. Firstly there is the idea that your partner is responsible for your own happiness. Life is not a fairytale. Bad things happen and it is an unrealistic expectation that one should be happy all the time and even more unrealistic to put the responsibility for your own happiness onto another person. Both sexes are equally guilty of doing this.
We have phrases in common parlance such as “Happy wife, happy life” that re-enforce this idea that it is a husbands responsibility to make his wife happy and it is a poisoned chalice that many men take fully to heart.
Any relationship of length will go through peaks and troughs, just as life itself does. Relationships take work, effort and good communication skills. If a relationship is failing then the first step should be to look inwardly to see what it is that you are doing that could be contributing to that rather than to seek distraction or external validation.
In my opinion, infidelity is a sign of cowardice. If something is broken, try and fix it. If it can’t be fixed after genuine attempts then part ways but you should never resort to the easy option of cheating. I apply that same standard equally to both men and women but a large cluster of people apply different rules for cheating women and cheating men, and this includes those working in relationship counselling.
There is a perception that men who cheat are just doing so for sex and that women are doing so for emotional reasons. In reality the justifications used by both sexes are often the same, the difference is in how we are more likely to empathise with one sex than the other.
If a man cheats, the expectation is that he is the problem and needs to change in order to fix the relationship. If a woman cheats, the expectation is that the man is the problem and needs to change in order to fix the relationship.
These are just some examples
This pattern is repeated in many different spheres of life and to the unitiated, it is difficult to recognise but as a thought experiment, have a think about how many calls to action you see where men are expected to solve a problem as a group on behalf of women as a group and how often any attempt to consider responsibility and agency on the part of women is rebuffed. These calls to action exist precisely because of men’s desire to provide and protect for women. It’s an effective strategy.
The goal is always to assume malevolent behaviour on men as a class, the modern version of original sin, and penance for such perceived offense is never for women to take ownership of their own lives but for men to compete with each other to prove that they are different to other men whom in all reality had the exact same desire to please women at their own expense.
It’s a game that cannot be won. The only way to win is to stop playing it and treat both men and women as equally accountable for their actions, stop excusing or minimising bad female behaviour, be it violent offences, child abandonment or infidelity because actually, owning your own actions is empowering. A victim mentality always leaves you at the mercy of a gust of wind or the flow of the tide.
You can’t control everything. You can’t control the world or how other people behave but you can control yourself and how you react to adversity. Both men and women need to hear that message, but whilst we cling on to preconditioned ideas about there being a “fairer” sex, we’re not going to be able to do that. People are people. We all have flaws and the more we can learn from our mistakes, the better the future will be for all of us!
Rant Over 