In search of real men

The Jakarta Post ,  Jakarta   |  Wed, 05/16/2007 7:52 AM  |  Opinion

The man of a girl's dreams -- a handsome hunk, courageous and preferably with a sizable wallet. Maybe this is more or less true across the globe, whether the tangible asset reflecting the man's worth is cattle or a cruise ship. And so the male sets out in the world to prove his mettle, while seeking to adopt the right cues to attract the opposite sex.

What the opposite sex often finds astoundingly stupid, which would be funny if it weren't so tragic, is the failure of some men to understand one basic idea: That if one of the universal values attached to the supposedly stronger sex is valor, then it is hard to fathom how one could not see that the minute a man raises his hand to strike a ""weaker"" opponent he becomes small, very small, in the eyes of others, particularly women.

Recent reports of domestic violence revealed a silent disease. One case involved a police officer. A Bekasi, West Java woman, accompanied by her attorney from the Legal Aid Institute -- Association of Indonesia Women for Justice (LBH-APIK), filed a report with the police last month against her officer husband for battery. The police ignored her report due to the absence of witnesses, and named her a suspect instead for attacking her husband.

A few weeks earlier a police officer in Surabaya shot his wife out of a suspicion that she had an affair with her ex-boyfriend.

LBH-APIK recorded 83 cases of domestic violence against women in the first four months of the year. There are more cases, perhaps hundreds, that have gone unreported.

Women here -- victims and horrified observers -- might not say outright how such men manage to show their utterly cowardly selves in attempts to look macho and almighty. One reason may be how we were brought up: a confusing double standard about what men and women do and not do, what they are and are not.

So while males are supposed to be heroic, responsible for their families and therefore dominant, many men, and women, find reinforcement of cultural beliefs in interpretations of religious scripts that the man is entitled to hit his spouse.

It is tempting for sure to blame all the recent cases on economic hardship and attribute them to the current administration, as a number of reports suggest. But cultural views go a long way; domestic violence is found in rich and poor homes, with women in well-to-do-families perhaps carrying the extra burden of keeping to themselves the dark side of their prestigious names.

A notable piece of progress in this country is that hitting your spouse, child or maid has at last been legally recognized as a crime. The law on domestic violence sends the powerful message that family affairs are not as domestic as we used to think; relatives and neighbors are encouraged instead to act and report to authorities signs of abuse in the household.

The law reinforces what many people here still refuse to acknowledge; that universal conventions of human rights have ruled out exceptions for cultural values when such practices tread on humanity.

This means that for all the talk of tolerance and respect for cultural and religious diversity, there is only condemnation for those who insist that violence within the walls of one's home is nobody's business because it's justified by ancestral or holy teachings. It's a crime, and nothing else.

The numbers on domestic violence announced by the police or the national human rights body, whether considered high or low, only reflect known cases reported by victims or other parties. At least each report of the numbers, or a victim's story, may embolden a previously terrified heart, and lead to more.

Not all the stories of tearful celebrities claiming to be battered wives have been proven true; but a good thing about our ""infotainment"" shows is that the audience hangs on to every detail, and in the process becomes educated as to what constitutes domestic violence -- a previously alien, ""western"" term in activists' circles.

The holier-than-thou clerics wanted such TV shows banned because, they said, people were airing dirty laundry such as wife battery.

The respectful public may have refrained from telling them that such broadcasts were actually rather useful, in enabling women, and men, to be more astute in distinguishing the hunk from the bully, in their search for the real man.

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