"take it like a man"

I found myself responding recently to a friend who wrote, in essence, that the phrase, "take it like a man" is anti-women at its core - that it is portraying femininity as a bad.  That using it is a means to shame girls into behaving more manly.  I'm doing a lousy job restating her case and making her sound less intelligent that she actually is, so take my paraphrase with a grain of salt.

This is what I wrote in response.

"Perhaps the problem is not with phrases such as “take it like a man” (which surely is spoken to boys far more often than girls) but with using such comparisons in the first place. For many decades, we have been laboring under the false assumption that men and women are identical in all ways except for their genitalia. Instead of elevating the sexes by acknowledging their differences and advantages over the other, we have been lumping them together and promoting an atmosphere of comparison and discord.

"On another note, the use of the woman’s gender as a putdown is distasteful and often vulgar, but its negative effect on young women is but a side note to a larger issue. Those pejoratives arise from men shaming other men into participating in further “masculinity”. The words used do not matter, so long as the insult implies something less “masculine”. That’s why homosexual slurs are often used. But the most damaging effect is on the maturing young man, not on the female bystanders. Such things have always existed in the transitional period, when boys learn how to become men and try to find expression for emotions and hormones they do not understand. These words are also used to promote “masculine” camaraderie. But the evolved and mature man does not use such terms. In a better world, we would teach boys how to become men and bond with other men without shaming them into it. We should all promote this world, but do so more on behalf of our boys than for our girls."

To add to that, I believe our women will benefit from us better raising our boys almost as much as the boys themselves.