Don’t believe women who tell you that in their country men don’t respect women.
When you hear a woman speaking badly about the men from her own country, be careful — you are often only hearing one side of the story.
Imagine you are in your country and meet a woman from Colombia. She tells you that Colombian men are selfish, abusive, and disrespectful toward women. If you have never set foot in Colombia, how can you verify if what she says is true? You can’t. You have no way to know whether her experience is common, rare, exaggerated, or completely invented. Your lack of firsthand knowledge puts you at a disadvantage. She may very well take advantage of your ignorance, especially if she sees that you are a foreigner, perhaps an American citizen unfamiliar with Colombian culture. By painting Colombian men as villains, she might earn your sympathy, or manipulate you into thinking she deserves special treatment.
This manipulation is not limited to Colombian women. Any woman from any nationality, stepping into a foreign country, might portray the men from her homeland as monsters — violent, oppressive, barbaric. She may tell you horror stories about men raping women, beating their wives, or locking them away from freedom. But before you believe any of it, stop and ask yourself: “Where is the proof?”
We should not assume things we have never seen with our own eyes. I have never been to Senegal or Niger; I cannot say how African men treat their wives. I have never been to Iran; I cannot tell you how Iranian men behave in their marriages. I have never traveled to China either, so I have no authority to describe Chinese husbands.
The same critical thinking applies to perceptions about Muslim men. Muslim women themselves raise the next generation of Muslim men within Islamic culture. They are the first teachers of their sons. If Muslim women were serious about changing male behavior, they would teach their boys about feminism and gender equality from the beginning — but they do not. Instead, they pass down the same values that define their culture. It would be naïve to blindly trust mainstream media narratives that frame Muslim women solely as helpless victims of Muslim men, without examining the deeper cultural dynamics at play.
In short, when you hear sweeping accusations against an entire group of men, whether about Muslims, Colombians, Africans, Chinese, or anyone else, remember: unless you have seen it yourself, you are at the mercy of someone else’s version of the truth — and that version may be anything but objective.