Nothing makes me more upset than seeing women sell themselves short. Within the past few years, the bar has been set disgustingly low in the ways that men are treating women. What I mean by that is, the younger generation of girls are making it abundantly clear that it doesn't take much for a guy to impress them. And their expectations for the way that men treat them are so low that sometimes they praise men for doing extremely mundane things.
Most of this takes place on social media. Think about all the times you've been scrolling through Twitter and you see a tweet that says something like "guys who hold the door open for you >>>" followed by one too many heart-eye emojis.
Oh, yes. People really do tweet things like this. They glorify men who do really simple things that any decent human should be held accountable to do. Things like this:
What?!?! What boys are you hanging out with that refuse to hold a door open for you, let alone hold a conversation? Shouldn't this just be a given?
Really? That is the reason you still have faith in humanity?
Or maybe they're just nice people? Stop praising this!
Yeah, the bar for men is really set so low that I could literally trip over it.
And we could sit here and chalk all of this up to a few people who don't know what politeness is. But a quick search on Twitter of the keywords "boys who hold the door for you" will show you that far too many girls have this mindset. But why?
Why is the bar set so low? Why have we been lowering it even further in recent years?
While I don't have the best answers for those questions, I can tell you why it's a problem. If boys, especially young boys, grow up around the mindset that they will be rewarded for showing women kindness and being polite, they are going to grow into some seriously entitled jerks. Women don't owe men anything for respecting them, and they certainly shouldn't expect to be praised for doing so.
We're not throwing you a party when you act like a decent human being.
It's an even bigger problem for young girls who are growing up in an environment where they are taught to lower their standards. We should be RAISING the bar and we should be able to RAISE our standards for men. We should not raise girls to accept the bare minimum, and instead, we should raise them to expect equal respect from everyone they encounter, if not more in romantic relationships, where low expectations can be hazardous.
Thankfully, one girl on Twitter actually gets it:
Girls should be allowed to want boys to treat them kindly without the fear of being called "high-maintenance." Girls should be allowed to want more out of a romantic relationship than the bare minimum of simple respect. Let's get it together here, ladies. We're better than that.