When I was growing up, everyone firmly believed that males and females were incompatible. It started as a general aversion and a terror of cooties, then evolved into cautious flirtation coupled with a raging insistence that boys and girls cannot be friends. Magazine articles and locker room talk all confirmed it… boys and girls who liked each other were bound to hook up, and could certainly never remain friends after breaking up.
Once our hormones got under control, we all realized that men and women could definitely like each other in a nonsexual way. And then the real reason we couldn’t be friends came to light — and it wasn’t because men were from Mars and women from Venus.
It’s because men spent their whole lives being socialized into thinking that what women say doesn’t matter. While there are exceptions, many men simply don’t care what women have to say. And without that mutual respect, true friendships can’t thrive.
Recently, there have been #MeToo-inspired reports of male supervisors saying that they can’t mentor women. Let’s not pretend that these men mentored women before… no man had the utmost respect for women and then got concerned about false allegations. They always felt that women were not worth their attention and used #MeToo as an excuse to stop paying them mind.
