Random Thought
I was out with the family today and we decided to stop for lunch at a fast food restaurant. While we where there, there was an elderly couple that was pretty chatty with us. At one point the couple decides to go so the man gets up and starts helping the woman up. She starts to get up from her seat in the booth and starts huffing and complaining as if it was really hard for her to perform these movements. She looks at us and says, “I fell recently and cracked some ribs.” We all oohed at her and apologized to her for her bad fortune. The man-who was standing behind her-summoned to us jokingly that he had hit her, as if saying that’s why she was hurt. The motion was something like what a punch to the ribs would look like and I began wondering: when did joking about beating the woman you’re with become okay?
I didn’t think his gesture was funny at all and the fact that he had to hide this from her led me to think that he felt the same way, but I feel that it’s these kinds of jokes that makes it seem as if it’s okay to do these kinds of things to a woman. I was with my 10 year old step{son} and I had to wonder if the fact that this man was joking about this act made him think that it was okay to beat on a woman; that it’s all fun and games. These are not the types of things that should be taught to the younger generations of boys because we don’t want to neutralize them as to how this truly is a problem and it leads to a cycle of violence that they don’t need to be a part of so I feel that making these kinds of jokes, even innocently, can be very harmful for the men in the future and it just shouldn’t be done.
