Of Wild Horses and Liars

In the last millennium, when I was in high school, a friend’s girlfriend lived down a long rural road past a horse farm. Driving her home late at night on the unlit road, a horse came out of nowhere, over a fence directly into the path of his car. The force of the impact pushed the beast right over the hood and through the windshield. The accident was traumatic, the couple hospitalized, the car totaled, the horse dead. A year later, in his new car, he was driving her home and it happened again. A horse escaped from the barn, jumped a fence directly into the road. New car totaled. The driver both times was conducting himself in a completely appropriate and law abiding manner. The general response to the situation was “OMG, what bad luck!”.

Several young women of my acquaintance have recently encountered philandering consorts.  From my perspective, the situation is similar. The young women are going about their lives in a completely appropriate manner. They encountered a suitable young man, in the course of the relationship their hopes were crashed. In the course of discussing these situations with others, I discovered there seemed to be a tendency to look for inciting factors on the part of the young women.

Aside from property damage versus personal injury, another difference is no one blamed the driver for his bad luck. Clearly if a horse jumps the fence into a car, the driver has no control over the situation. Even if it happens twice on the same road, the driver is not at fault; the driver had no control over the horse’s actions. When men tell women lies and jump the fence into another bed, our society tends to blame the victim. “She must have done something to cause the philandering” or at the very least “she must have bad taste in men”. Reversing the gender roles, a young man would be afforded sympathy and the lying consort labeled a tramp.

Everyone has the right and reasonable expectation for trust. The onus is on the deceiver and the not the deceived, irrelevant of gender.