Men Are Pigs! But not MY boys....

Confession:
When I was young and dating, whenever a relationship with a man went sour,  I was not immune to the common scorned female mantras, such as "men are stupid, men are pigs, men are... (insert any string of negative commentary).  I suppose it made us girls feel better to highlight a perceived flaw in a man that hurt or annoyed us, and then generalize.  I never actually believed that ALL men were stupid or impulsive or lazy or whatever... But I didn't think much about making grande generalizations.  I mean, we've all done it, right?

Well I have children now, and two of them are boys, very close to becoming young men.
 Men who will date, probably more than once, and chances are that they will annoy, hurt or inadvertently insult a woman, or two, or more, in their lives.  But they aren't stupid.  They aren't mean, careless, clueless, and they aren't pigs.  Looking at my boys, I realize how unfair and cruel it is for women to verbalize sweeping generalizations.   Just as cruel when men do it, yes, but I'm talking about my own learning curve here so lets focus on my character flaws for now.  

I was once particularly disgusted by the behavior of a boy toward my daughter and while we were talking about the incident, I caught myself saying, in earshot of my boys, that  "men are stupid".  And my older son piped up "Hey!"  and although I treated it with flip indifference and said "Oh I don't mean YOU!"  I did realize that that is just absolutely wrong for me to condemn an entire gender based on the unfortunate actions of one individual.  My boys are awesome and I need to demonstrate that in my verbiage. If I am mad at one particular man, then HE is the a**hole.  Not "men".   Furthermore, I realized that my response was an attempt to trivialize my son's protest - which was about ME not him.  I was instinctively trying to excuse my statement, which is an ego thing - which is something we girls often gripe about, as if egocentricity is exclusive to males.  Am I over-thinking it?  Maybe, but isn't that what we women do? Hmm?

My beautiful boys

Point is that I'm learning as I go here, and I realize that if I consistently say negative things about the behavior of men, and my sons begin to behave in negative ways, then it's on me.
Basically, if we tell our teen boys that men are pigs, and then they acts like pigs, we shouldn't be surprised.

My boys are kind, warm, smart, respectful, talented and fun.  And they need to know that their Mom has a high opinion of them.   When one man gets on my nerves, it's one man, not men; not any different than one woman getting on my nerves.





Lesson here? 
I'm a word person and I put a great deal of stock in using language properly to communicate accurately.   So that means I must learn and alter my own language, when it's inappropriate, as well.


What do you think?  Could you use some language adjustments around your kids?

Let me know...