Catering to a Man’s Ego

I was asked to be a participant in a group chat the other evening. The participants included four women and one man. They were talking about, and all in agreement with, how there are certain instances when a woman has to cater to a man’s ego. In fact, they said that if a woman didn’t cater to a man’s ego, that made her a bad woman. When I spoke up in dissention, they got offended, saying that I wasn’t being supportive of Black men and insisting that men were fragile and needed their egos stroked in order to function properly. Catering to a man’s ego and being supportive are two different things.

Catering to a man’s ego is to allow him to continue to hold on to dysfunctional beliefs and practices in order to make him feel good. Being supportive is helping him grow, mature, and being there to be a shoulder to cry on in his hour of need. Being loving is showing affection and nurturing him because you care about him, his happiness, and his well-being as a person. To cater to a man’s ego is to feed his insecurities, to foster dysfunction in your relationship, and to perpetuate unhealthy ideologies.

The example was given that if a man lost his job, that before they go out to dinner the woman should give him the money to hold in order to allow him to pay for the meal in public. How absurd. If a man loses his job, and he can’t deal with a woman paying for dinner, then he’s emotionally immature. Moreover, in order for a woman to be supportive and loving, rather than catering to his male ego, she would be better off helping him work on his resume, emailing him job opportunities that match his needs, or taking that money and having his suit dry cleaned or doing administrative work to help him start his own business.

We live in a society where the male ego has gone rampant and unchecked. It needs to be reigned in. It needs to be harnessed and controlled in order to move the emotional maturity of Black men ahead. We, as Black women, MUST stop catering to a man’s ego. Black men are egotistical, expecting women to cower at their whim, jump through hoops in order to satisfy their needs, and blaming Black women for all sorts of things without taking responsibility for their own wrongdoings and misperceptions. The fact that we, as a society, equate a woman’s worth with her ability to appease a man’s ego speaks volumes about how diseased we are.