A Parable of Apples

Before I end up on another feminist rant (I just found a Christian article about rape culture that will make it here soon), I want to take a moment to speak to a problem with feminist rants that a friend brought to my attention.  Hopefully, this is not a problem for men in my life, but it's important, so I am going to tell a story.   I may have told this story before, but this time, it's an allegory.

Last fall, I went apple picking with a group of grad students.  One of the kids with us reminded me of a character in a book I was reading, which was really awkward because I kept wanting to call him Sonny, which was not his name, and then I'd have to explain to him, "Oh, it's just that you remind me of a fictional character," making a great first impression. 

Sonny (not his real name) was from New York and didn't like apples.  (I promise, these two facts are related.)  He came for the pumpkin patch and the hay ride.  However, as we wandered through the apple orchard, he caught some enthusiasm from the rest of us and tried an apple.  And exclaimed, "I didn't know apples could taste like this!"  Having only ever eaten mushy, flavorless store-apples, he didn't know what an apple really was.  But when he found a real one, he liked it.

There is a danger in feminist rants to identify men with the mushy, flavorless store-apples and see the orchard-picked variety as the outliers, who are an exception to what men really are.  To define men and generalize masculinity by the negative choices that lead to the problems we see.  This approach leads us to devalue the honorable masculinity with which some men live their lives.  

No matter which is more common in our lives, the fact is that orchard apples are more truly apples than mushy, flavorless store-apples.  Men who live noble masculinity live it more truly than those who live the stunted version of masculinity (if it even can be called such) that leads to things like rape culture.  We as women need to make sure that as often as we attack the latter, we affirm the former and let the men we love know that they show us what it means to be a man.