Eeeek! It's a Man!
From Menletter November 2011 By Tim Baehr I couldn't believe what Mike
(not his real name) had just told us in our men's group. His wife didn't want
him to change their infant daughter's diapers. In particular, she didn't want
Mike touching his daughter's privates. She was afraid something inappropriate
would happen. This was many years ago, and it
would be easy to dismiss the episode as part of what was happening in a
family that was dysfunctional in several other ways. Jump forward a couple of decades
or so, and we have several more modern examples, reported by Lenore Skenazy. In her first essay, printed in
the St. Petersburg Times*, Skenazy recounts the experience of Mirko
Fischer, a businessman who was flying of British Airways. He was in the
window seat of a three-seat row. His pregnant wife was in the middle seat. A
twelve-year-old boy, traveling alone, was in the aisle seat. Fischer's wife asked her husband
to switch seats with her so she could lean against the window. Fischer
complied. Then things got weird. A cabin attendant came by and
asked Fischer to move. Fischer refused. The cabin attendant became insistent,
and Fischer moved. He later sued British Airways for sex discrimination (and
humiliation): The airline's policy was that no man was allowed to sit next to
an unrelated child, even if that child's parents were sitting in the next
row. All men were to be considered potential predators. Fischer won his case,
and British Airways is now segregating unaccompanied children into a separate
section of the airplane. The second essay**
recounts a bunch more stories. In the first, Timothy Murray, the Lieutenant
Governor of Massachusetts pulled a couple of kids out of a smoking minivan
just before one of the van's tires exploded into flames. The driver,
grandmother of the kids, jumped out and tried to punch Murray in the face.
According to Murray, she told him she thought he was trying to kidnap the
kids. Skenazy calls this "Worst-First"
thinking: "almost any man who has anything to do with a child can find
himself suspected of being a creep." The next story is weirder, and
bends back full-circle on the episode at my friend Mike's house. A male
daycare worker in Iowa is forbidden to change diapers. In fact, he has to
leave the room when another of the (female) workers changes a diaper. Some stories would be funny if
they weren't part of this overall "Worst-First" phenomenon. In Skenazy's third story, a man in a store, carrying a pile
of girls' panties, was followed by a woman loudly berating him and calling
him a pervert. Turns out he was a clerk doing some restocking. Two more stories, and then we're
done. In one, the British Musicians' Union told its members not to touch a
child's fingers, even to help place the tiny digits on the keys. And finally,
at a public pool in Sydney, Australia, boys may not change in the same locker
room as the men. The men themselves had demanded this, for fear of being
accused falsely. Where does this leave us? Like
the men at the pool in Sydney, and like a lot of other men who find
themselves in the presence of children, we hold back. We avoid. We make sure
that we are safe from hasty or false accusations. Sometimes that concern for our
safety has tragic consequences. Skenazy tells of a
man who saw a toddler wandering along a road, lost. He didn't want to get
into trouble. A little girl in an adult male's car? There would be more than
a little explaining to do. So he passed her by. The little girl wandered to a
pond and drowned. Some of us men, maybe all of us,
may face similar dilemmas, whether we are trying to save a life or are trying
simply to be helpful. And until our society regains a bit of its sanity and
composure, we'll have to decide case-by-case, balancing our safety against
the safety of children. May we choose wisely. M * http://tinyurl.com/eek1-male ©Copyright 2011 by Tim Baehr |