Humiliating your man: Funny, but not a great idea

This showed up a lot on my newsfeed the other day. It’s an Instagram picture that Kristin Cavallari, former “Laguna Beach” and “The Hills” reality-TV star, took of a text from her husband, Jay Cutler, the quarterback for the Chicago Bears.

She landed after a flight and got these texts (with Cutler’s photo):

Her own text back was, “What the f–k?”

Her Instagram post explains, “Contrary to what many people think, we don’t have a thousand nannies. So with that being said, when I got home from LA 2 days ago this is what I landed to.

Pretty hilarious. Ladies, u want your man to appreciate u? Leave them alone with the kids to see what we deal with!”

You’ll forgive ordinary Americans, even those of us with nannies, for not being impressed by the Cavallaris’ enormous feat of playing a part in raising their own children. But that aside, all I can think is: her poor husband!

Less because of her obnoxious reply, more because she just embarrassed him on a global social media platform.

Sure, we’ve all gotten some variation of the SOS message from our husbands. But why is it OK to embarrass them about it?

Flip this scenario around and imagine if a husband posted a picture of a desperate text from his sleep-deprived, hormonal, postpartum wife.

It would immediately be deemed a cruel violation of her privacy. So why is it “HILARIOUS,” as a Fox Chicago station put it in a Facebook post, when it’s a man?

It’s somehow become culturally acceptable for wives to mock their husbands, and this is bad.

Men don’t like to be mocked. Neither do women, but I rarely see a husband mock his wife, especially when it comes to being a mother. It’s a sort of sacrosanct territory that a man knows better than to stomp on.

And yet I see women mock their husbands all the time. And I don’t mean tease. I mean derisively mock and shame, to their face and behind their back.

As Francis Childs put it in a column for the Daily Mail UK, “Get any group of women together and you can be sure they’ll talk about their husbands — and it will rarely be complimentary.”

It’s become so commonplace to run down our spouses that Sally Bercow, publicity-mad wife of the speaker of the Commons, felt totally at ease painting her husband John as a henpecked domestic drudge on national television.”

I’m not the first and I certainly won’t be the last person to say that there is a “fatherhood crisis” in America. A third of American children are now growing up without their dad in the home.

And while there are promising signs that those fathers that do stay with their children are becoming more involved in their lives or at least want to be, this is still an area that needs improvement in American society.

But I can tell you one way that women can ensure that men won’t help more with their kids: Mocking them when they falter. Posting their “please help” moment of desperation for all to see.

As Childs put it, “In sharing tales about men’s incompetence, women are coming dangerously close to normalizing a corrosive and lasting disrespect for fathers that can only have devastating consequences.” Those consequences will most certainly undermine moms, by the way.

Women who want the fathers of their children to be involved dads should take another look at the Golden Rule. Mothers of America, do unto your husbands as you would have them do unto you.

Do not do unto your husbands what Kristin Cavallari did unto hers.

Strong women should want strong men. Strong men make strong fathers, who in turn grow better at dealing with the strains of childrearing. And so we women must build up our men, not tear them down.

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