How do you steal a man?

There are a lot of examples from pop culture of some homewrecker woman 'stealing' another woman's man, and it's never sat comfortably with me.

I know it's 'just' a song or 'just' a movie, and I know no songwriter or screenwriter really thinks a man is so easily stolen like a DVD player under the arm of a crack addict as s/he runs out of a house in the dead of night.

But we're prepared to acknowledge how decades (a century in fact) of portraying gay people as the squealing, sissy comic relief in movies has been to the treatment they've received throughout most of modern history. So I think it's only fair we admit how the all-pervasive idea that a woman can 'steal' another woman's man might also be generating or adding to a dangerous culture we're already battling with.

As the last few years have proven to us, stereotypes persist and no matter how harmless the intent, they matter to the way we as a society perceive a certain gender or group.

One of the biggest parts of the cultural conversation today is around women having their own agency and power to make decisions, no different than we've always expected of men.

Why don't we take pains to afford men the same agency, and say so in our gender discourse? There's a (very valid) complaint that female characters have long gone without real depth or dimension in popular entertainment – every female character a variation of the Madonna/Whore dichotomy – and we're starting to see the end of it, or at least a lot more awareness of it in the MeToo era. Maybe we need to acknowledge the same thing for men and their power to not be 'stolen'.

Because there's another potentially damaging side to this, and it's related to the way women are punished for the same sexual behaviour men are rewarded and revered for. If a woman 'steals' some other woman's man we consider her the villain and the homewrecker rather than him for allowing himself to be so easily 'stolen'.

Is it another symptom of rape culture where we automatically consider men to be barely-autonomous fucking machines who have no control over their drives, whether it's the way we blame the other woman if he strays or the rape victim he drugs because of the length of her skirt?

Maybe instead of asking Joelene not to conspire to steal her boyfriend, Dolly Parton should have been singing to him, imploring him to remember what they have together and not to throw it all away because he can't help thinking with his dick for 10 minutes?