This phrase that I have been hearing constantly tossed around always brings a pang of sadness to my heart, and I never really thought about why that is.
I’d like to say it’s in defence of all the male friends, fathers, the few devoted boyfriends out there- but I cannot say that is, in fact, it leaves me feeling completely pathetic as a woman and could not make me feel less empowered.
I don’t know if this is because I’ve never been through devastating heartbreak or the abandonment of an important male figure in my life.
These three words seem to promise to me that as a young woman all I’ve got to look forward to is a lifetime of waiting around for men to treat me badly, and that inevitably I will always be the one that is abandoned or grown tired of.
It makes the statements that we unquestionably take as gospel seem all the more accurate, like “women can’t separate sex from love” and “more men cheat than women”.
When I look around me I see this echoed in society, that men are always the ones running away from commitment and all women want is stability and love – no, this isn’t always the case.
I see my friends dumping their boyfriends sometimes for reasons as simple as the fact that they grew bored of the relationship, and they want to go and sow their oats and lots of my boys as friends writing love songs and eagerly awaiting their fairy-tale romance that should be nothing short of the plot of The Notebook.
I think when we start to forget the facts that women don’t always want commitment and love, and men aren’t always looking to deceive and abandon we start seeing the truth and neither men are trash, and women pathetic doting victims; who only want to be loved and are constantly deemed unlovable by the men in their lives.
I don’t know, come back to this space in five years and maybe I’ll have that phrase tattooed on my forehead, maybe I’m too young and naïve about love to comment.
But for now I think we should have a think about what we are actually inadvertently saying about ourselves when we claim “Men are trash!”.