Relationships
Prejudice at Play: Blaming Women for Divorce
Over the past few weeks, I happened to strike a conversation about marriage and divorce with a contact of mine, and his thoughts struck me as outright prejudiced. The guy felt that whenever there is a case of divorce, it is all the fault of the wife. When I asked how come, he went on to recount a slew of causes he believed were at work in cases of divorce and the ball of blame in each of these falling in the woman’s court. According to him:
- Women are not honest with men, including their husbands, and use them as only a source of income.
- Women are very cunning and sell themselves in name of marriage, living as parasites on men, who have to work hard to keep the women happy. But women are happy in only messing things up for husbands.
- In cases of divorce, women always use the same lie—of an abusive husband – as an excuse while the reality is almost always that the woman is having a secret affair with another man.
When I questioned how come he presumes men as entirely innocent since they too can really be abusive and at fault for destroying a marriage, this guy was determined to cling to his prejudiced view. He spoke in defense of men as: “They are innocent and no match for the cunning nature of women. They are burdened with work and need emotional support and this weakness makes them depend on women for sexual and emotional relief. And the women make full use of this weakness to exploit men.”
So when I asked him whether he didn’t think of his position as outright prejudiced, he advised me not to be fooled by the “victim image” of women in media and that he knows women well as he has closely studied them.
In my view, this guy was a victim of blind, gross generalization about women. Both genders can be abusive and cheating etc. But labeling the entire gender as a cunning parasite sounded just too much. In cases of divorce, I think it will be hard to accurately determine which side did how much damage to the marriage. Maybe in some cases, women are to blame dominantly but sparing husbands as totally innocent makes no sense; especially when looking at countless documented cases of married men caught cheating, lying, and abusing women. Throwing all the blame on one gender, categorically, is not only extremely prejudiced, it is utterly senseless.
