Why is Cruelty the Standard?

Is cruelty a standard? It’s wild how low the bar for men has been set. A man who doesn’t cheat, who pays his bills, who doesn’t scream at his wife, suddenly gets praised as if he’s a saint. Loyalty and basic responsibility are treated like rare jewels. Meanwhile, women are expected to juggle everything – beauty, home, children, emotional labor – and it’s never enough.

We’ve normalized male mediocrity. We call it “strength” when a man does the bare minimum of decency. (Or even when he manages to feed himself by himself- but that’s a different topic). We call him “a good one” just because he’s’ not openly cruel. But why is cruelty the standard we measure from?

A good man is not simply one who refrains from harm. A good man is someone who loves with presence, who respects without conditions, who treats women as equal souls rather than service providers. If that sounds radical, maybe the problem isn’t men being rare – it’s society refusing to raise it’s standards.

The truth is simple: women don’t need men to be perfect. They just need men to be an average woman.