tell the men to be kinder. it is not a woman's job to recognize the good in all men and promote growth in them.
Except…by telling men to be kinder, that’s literally making it our job. That’s what OP doesn’t get, and that’s what I don’t think you get either:
Someone who has been conditioned since birth to think and behave a certain way does not know what is inherently wrong in that behavior.
Which means someone has to tell them. And right now, that someone is us. We can get pissy and stomp around and say IT’S YOUR JOB TO CHANGE, GO FIX YOURSELF. Except, if they’ve been told since birth that there’s nothing wrong with their behavior, how is it fair to say they should just know what things they’re doing that’s wrong.
And that’s what I mean by it’s all our jobs. There is nothing wrong with finding the good in a man and pointing to it and go, that. Do more of that. That’s the good part and you should do that and maybe if you do that, and you learn how to be MORE like that, you’ll gain more knowledge about what makes a person better, and then you can turn around and tell your friends, and then their friends, and then their friends.
We don’t expect small children to just get manners. We have to give them the tools and the training and the repetition for it to become second nature. And as any smart person knows, second nature is that much harder to change when you’ve spent decades behaving that way. So expecting men to break their conditioning overnight is naive at best, dangerous at worst. We, as a society in whole, have to work together to make everyone the best version of themselves they can be.
Jesus Christ, I had no idea this was such a fucking hard concept to grasp.