Transcription
What's good, y'all? Welcome back to the Onyx Report. Black masculinist news for the day. Like, share, subscribe, join, donate, hit the like button, support the show so I can continue to bring you these independent blackmail thoughts.
So, tonight or this today, we're going to talk about moving gold posts. Why black men are walking away from impossible relationships. Now, as these are short shows, I'm not going to do an exhaustive breakdown, but I'm going to give you two examples on impossible expectations of black men, right, in relationships and what that's meant, what that's doing, uh, and has been doing over time, right?
So, the first one is, uh, basically, uh, it looks like an observation of maybe a TV show. So hopefully, hopefully, there won't be any, you know, copyright issues, but fair use. Let's check this out.
>> We're not going to do is keep playing in my face about it. You can count. You can determine where we were, when those days happened, when it was more than once, this that and the other. They were in most of your investment properties when you were working, when we were spending time, and I was watching you do the that I like to see the things that you just don't like to do. You were building, laying floors, laying carpet, putting up cabinets, all that stuff that I would come and get turned on watching you do that you simply [music] don't want to do. So, here I am trying to get turned on by myself. Ain't that something?
>> Yeah, baby. Well,
>> that's what you want. You want me to get turned on by myself just for you being
>> me
>> pretty? Yeah.
>> [music]
>> If the time and attention we got was me watching you build stuff, it also provided a medium for us to sit and talk for hours.
>> Mhm.
>> I get neither of those anymore.
>> Why did you marry me then?
>> Well, cuz I like that you were building and doing stuff.
>> But I wasn't building and doing stuff when you married me, though.
>> I'm not mad, Maurice. You've grown and you've grown into the attorney softand era. I'm okay with it.
>> You know, I'll admit it has been a [music] while since we've had sex the way we used to. And if I had to put my finger on [music] the reason why we don't, I think I miss [music] the way we used to connect back then. I know that a lot of things have [music] changed. I know that you've grown, but I think I found it to be so sexy when I would watch you work. And it wasn't [music] just the work because I appreciate the work that you do now. The work you do now has put me and my [music] son in a position to where we want for nothing. But when you used to build things and you used to do all these things with your hands, I noticed [music] there was a time that allowed us to sit down and talk [music] and connect for hours, and that is what made me crave you even more. Last thing I want is for you to think that I don't want you. I want you, but I, I miss us. I miss what we used to do together. I miss the time that we used to spend. And again, I'm grateful [music] for the life that we have. But if you want to go back in time, it's going to require you giving me more of your time because that's what made me fall in love with you. That's what made me horny. That's what made me want to jump on you every time I would see you. Because quality time is really important [music] to me. I think if there's a way that we can meet in the middle, I will be able to meet your sexual needs and be the sexual fantasy that I was when you met me because I want you to get [music] what you want, but I also don't want to be left out in the cold either.
>> All right. Yeah. So, if you're not familiar or if you know this is something you're seeing for the first time, I'm not familiar with the TV show this is probably coming from, but the woman on top is trying to demonstrate how feminine communication works better from women to men than masculine communication. Right now, I would argue just in general, yes, I would agree with that. However, I think this is a horrible damn example. So apparently, what's going on here is this woman is frustrated because she's not sexually attracted to her husband anymore. And somehow he's transitioned from blue-collar work to white-collar work, right? Where initially he's doing a lot of building and then goes into law in some kind of way. Now, I don't particularly need this to be, um, an accurate true story because I've seen these cases. As a matter of fact, this one and the next one I'm going to show you, I have the same attitude about. I don't need them to be, you know, accurate in terms of the people we're looking at because the stories behind them is more what I'm focusing on. And I've seen these stories take place, right?
So, this man has transitioned from blue to white collar and his wife has lost attraction. Now, she says it's twofold. It's one, watching him build things with his hands, and then two, it's all the time they spent talking. Now, the reason I think the talking part is, is because he could still talk to her. They could still have situ sit down situations despite that he's doing white-collar work or law or whatever it is. But that's not what she said and that's not what she mentioned first. What she focused on for a good period of time was the physicality of the work he was doing. But the strange twist in it is something he said. He said, "I wasn't why did you marry me?" Because I wasn't doing that when we met. So this look, you know, to me, I took that to mean that the husband is saying, "This is some fabricated. You fabricated this whole issue around me building things and that being the turn-on for you because you married me long before I was ever doing any of those things. And now that I'm, you know, working in this white-collar area and I've got you and your son living quite comfortably, you got problems."
So I have two issues with this: the case itself and then the commentary. All right. So, the case itself, I'm saying to me, it looks like, you know, something she fabricated to start some to get some attention. Uh, when that wasn't necessarily the case, that wasn't the nature of their relationship the whole way through. And then the question you can't help but raise is, okay, so am I supposed to quit law and go back to building shelves to turn you on, or do I just got to build a shelf every other weekend so we can get it in? Or maybe you might need to either mature a bit and contemplate, you know, who your man is and what he's doing to take care of you, or maybe even get some therapy behind it. But to blame him for not building anymore and that somehow being the reason you've lost all sexual attraction, that's a little extreme. That's a little extreme. And I'm going to call, I'm going to call and suggest that maybe the solution isn't changing the nature of his work, but actually digging deeper to find out what exactly your issues are and how they came about. I'm going to, I'm going to recommend that.
Now, as far as the woman giving this commentary, you know, she seems to be suggesting that the nature of feminine communication is, uh, it would change the dynamic unto itself. If she just spoke in a feminine manner, everything would be good. She could still get what she wants if she just changed the nature by which she communicates. And my issue with that is, what if what she wants is ridiculous in the first damn place and unfair to him? If he's found a new way to take care of the family that doesn't rely on his body. Look, I can't tell you how many elder men I grew up around and I watched their bodies break. Plumbers, electricians, men doing hard, heavy work into their 50s and sometimes 60s and watching the tension, the fear, the stress of knowing that they may not be able to provide and continue to take care of their families because their bodies are physically broken. That's one [music] of the things that scared me. You know, it's one of the reasons I went to college. I saw elder men in my family, friends of family, and I watched them. They lived nice. They had nice houses, but I realized their wives, their kids, their entire lifestyles were dependent upon their bodies not breaking. And every single one of them was walking on broken limbs. And I'm speaking metaphorically, not literally, but you know what I mean. The bodies were already broken by the time I was asking questions about this. And the thing I noticed beyond that is nobody seemed to care. As long as they kept going to work, nobody gave a damn if they were walking on working on broken limbs or not. They didn't seem to care.
Now, I had a class, I think this was probably my junior year. I had a class with this white professor. He came in on a wheelchair. Far as I could tell, he looked like he was paralyzed from the neck down. He would come in on his wheelchair, he would talk for an hour, and then he would ride out of the room on his wheelchair, and it blew me away. I was like, "This man can't even lift his finger." And he was at least, um, you know, six figures, double two times over. So, he's about, he's about, I tell you, uh, from what I, I think if I remember correctly, when I asked about it, he was somewhere between 150 and 200 a year, cuz he was like retirement age. So, he had been doing this for a long time. But my point is, it blew me away how I grew up watching black men break their bodies to take care of people that did that seem to be oblivious about the state of their health. And this old white man can roll in on a wheelchair, talk for an hour, and roll out making damn near $200,000 a year. That's what broke me. That's, well, I won't say broke me, but that's what really made me curious about, you know, the academy because what if my body broke? What if I could barely walk or barely do what I'm supposed to do and I have all these lives around me dependent on how well I navigate this pain?
So, going back to this woman, she's suggesting that if you just ask nicely, you can get whatever you want. Just change your tone from masculine to feminine. And I'm saying, well, I do agree that the tone is better, but what if what you want is a problem? Does it make it right that you should get it simply because you asked in a feminine voice? If you're objectifying your husband and telling him that his transition to take better care of you and your son, and they made the point of saying her son, so I'm thinking, you know, stepfather, but if that's the case, then maybe you need to make a greater effort to appreciate what he's doing rather than attack him for not doing things the way you somehow worked it out in your head before. So this is what I mean, or one example of what I mean in terms of the impossible expectations placed on men. You level up, you start working in law, she has this imaginary thing in her head about what should attract, what attracts her and what you should do to keep attracting her. But for you, it's a step back after you've grown, and yet she still wants you to dance to this tune. It doesn't make any sense. And then, of course, this, this woman here talking about how you should basically keep you know, just get whatever you want simply because you want it.
Now, so that's the first one. This is the second. Now I found this on Facebook on the Demi TV page, which is a channel apparently on Google Play. I can't speak to the accuracy of it. I couldn't find a news report, you know, so I'm going to treat it like a skit that has something to offer in terms of the story because I can't verify whether or not this is an actual occurrence, right? But you, you know, on this channel, I don't have a problem with skits and I don't have a problem using them because I'm focusing on the story they represent. So, according to the skit, this is a 52-year-old mother from Bellflower, California, named Malikica Jackson. She's gone viral after being arrested for assaulting her 31-year-old son's girlfriend, saying she stepped in after months of watching her son endure what she described as verbal abuse. According to the story, her son, Deontay Puit, had been in a turbulent relationship with a woman who had allegedly disrespected him repeatedly and even scratched his car during past arguments. Malikica says she tried to stay out of their relationship, believing it wasn't her place, but everything changed when Deontay accidentally butt-dialed her. On the other end of the phone, she says she heard the girlfriend yelling, hurling insults, and what sounded like her trying to hit him, hit him with a bat. That was enough. Malikica immediately left work, drove to their apartment, and confronted the situation herself. She later stated, "I raised my son to never raise his hand to a woman, but I will on his behalf." We're going to come back to that. The confrontation turned physical, and she was ultimately arrested and charged with assault. The girlfriend allegedly suffered a bursted eye socket and a lost front tooth. If found guilty, Jackson would be facing up to 5 to 10 years in prison. Since then, Deontay has taken to social media in defense of his mother, confirming that the relationship is now over and standing firmly behind her actions. Situation has sparked a heated debate online with some praising Malikica for protecting her son and others questioning whether she crossed the line by taking matters into her own hands. Since her son is 31 years old.
So, the subtext there is that he's a he's a sucker. You know, I wouldn't use other language, but you know, I don't want to necessarily get my, you know, whatever. You know what the deal is with YouTube, right? So, again, I'm not saying this is literal. I have no idea. But the story itself, I think, is important because I've actually seen this happen a couple of times. Not frequently, but I've seen it happen a couple of times. And the reason I call this, uh, a goalpost moving, an impossible expectation, is not because of the individual people in the story, but largely what's happened in society since the 1970s, late '60s and '70s, right? The policies that were created around stemming domestic violence. The way they were written was gender-neutral, but the spirit in which they were written was targeted at men because the subtext to it was that feminists who pushed these policies were the ones arguing on behalf of women. Despite that abuse, much of it was bidirectional across race to different degrees, right? And so, as women pushed this, they made expectations, social expectations on a wide macro scale that men should never lay hands on women. And it even got to the point where they were teaching this to boys growing up, that you should never lay hands on women, even in self-defense.
Now, I've seen case after case after case, especially in the last decade, thanks to social media, where men are being attacked, having items thrown at them, having, you know, being, uh, stabbed, you know, so on and so forth, attacked with baseball bats, and not defending themselves, knowing full well, especially for black men, that even when attacked and even when defending oneself, even when it's just holding her in position and not necessarily striking her, that he could still end up being the one to go to. I've seen cases where he's bruised and bloody and she doesn't have a mark on her, but as soon as the police get there, she says he abused her, and he gets locked up. Men are not responding this way out of fear for an individual woman's capacity to to hurt him. They're responding this way because of the repercussions that come from the state if she so much as decides to blame him, whether she's guilty or not. Now, obviously, if we're talking about just old-school school abuse where a man is beating a woman because it's, I don't know, 3:15 on a Tuesday and he feels like it, obviously, that needs to be dealt with legally. That mean he needs to, he needs to be arrested. But there are so many other cases that it doesn't seem like we're talking enough about that downplays the impact this has on everyday men. Because the assumption on female victimization is so strong that there's there's no frame of reference on a on a on a mass [music] scale for women abusing these policies or abusing the public trust about female innocence and female victimization. Even though we've seen cases, multiple cases, celebrities, everyday people, where women have been caught lying, there's still no national conversation about finding new ways to hold women accountable.
So that said, men are very reticent about how to defend themselves because you can be innocent, you can protect yourself and rightly so in self-defense, and still find yourself going to jail for 10 years. And if you've spent years building yourself up, 30 seconds of physical violence is not worth it. Now, I, I'll go further. I've met men who've done jail time. God, now built themselves up and then had to deal with a woman who was willing to throw away his entire life because she was angry in a moment and decided to attack him. And he had to answer the question in his own mind. Am I going to physically do something to this woman, even in self-defense, knowing full well that at her word, I can end up going to prison because of my background. Even if that background had nothing to do with physically assaulting a woman, I've seen men in these situations have to navigate those questions. And the way it works out much of the time is men avoid the physical conflict, which unfortunately some women take as a chest-thumping matter. I've actually seen women ch, you know, thump their chest like, "Yeah, he didn't want to mess with me. I'll mess him up." And I'm looking at her like, the only thing keeping him from throwing you on the ground is not wanting to go to jail. But it's gotten to the point where many women believe that this is strictly about their physical capability. As if this has ever been a fair fight. It's not about that. It's become in too many instances an opportunity for her to flex knowing that she has the law and the courts on her side, and public opinion for that matter.
So in this particular case, as I've seen, not a lot, but I have seen the mother operate on her behalf. But the moving goalpost here is that it's often the mothers of the that are the first ones to teach you from childhood not to ever lay your hands on women. And that's the crux of the problem. Ever is the word they use. Never, ever. Even in self-defense, which leaves men in a vulnerable position, especially when you're dealing with women who like to exploit that aspect of chivalry. And this is more social chivalry because chivalry because it's something we're trained with, socialized into not only by individual mothers but by the larger society and the policies therein.
But overall, between both cases, these are the types of goalpost moving that make [music] it difficult for men to maintain in relationships, right? Whether it's the strangely awkward and shifting expectations of what men need to do to keep her sexually attracted, or if it has to do with defending oneself, knowing full well the repercussions of that. Now, in this instance, his mother jumped in to defend him, but she didn't have to. And most women don't. Most mothers don't. They give you an impossible set of expectations from childhood, expect you to navigate the world, and a percentage of men find themselves in these kinds of situations, and any one of them can send him to prison. He doesn't have to go through this repeatedly. I don't argue that most men who've experienced abuse do. But I have seen men who don't have much experience with abuse go through it once and end up in jail. Not because he did something monstrous, but simply because she said he did. No evidence, no eyewitness, and sometimes the only thing keeping him from going to jail is a well-timed video recording on his phone, knowing full well that had he not had that recording, he'd be, you know, getting cuffs put on him in that moment. We've been seeing more and more cases online of men barely escaping being locked up because they were smart enough and and present enough in the moment to record something that they might have known would be used against them the moment those cops showed up. Had he not had those recording, it takes you back decades on how many men went to prison simply on her word. These are often impossible scenarios that I think exhaust too many men. I think many men are finding reason to not even play the game until the rules change.
But as usual, give me your thoughts. Let me know what you think, what you see, what you've experienced, and talk to me about it in the comment section. All right, holl at y'all later. Peace.