talkingwomen

If you spend enough time on the internet you will inevitably see the same tired old arguments being dragged out about the supposed “battle of the sexes”. Some men (and plenty of women) perceive the Feminist movement to be based on either castrating and marginalising men, and/or making women into men.

I regularly see statements like “Feminist do not accept that men and women are different, they want the sexes to be equal and the same, but how can men and women be equal when men ar physically stronger?”

I just think these people have missed the point. The point is you should not judge or exclude an individual woman based on the averages of the female group. So maybe 9 out of 10 women could not lift a refrigerator, this does not mean that if any individual woman wishing to become a removalist should be turned away without having her skills tested. There are elite sports-women and weight-lifters out there who may be able to lift twice as much as the average Joe-Blow - she just wants to be assessed on her merits. Same with passing a physical for the defence-force, or the police, or any physically demanding role.

Another statement you see floating around is “women are too emotional, men are logical”

This of course is designed to imply that women, as a gender, are biologically ill-suited to positions of power or leadership because they are “prone” to irrational decision making. Once again i say, dont base the fate of one woman on the averages of the group. If you conducted a poll of men and women to see who was more likely to cry in a tragic movie it might be the women. But that is just a statistic. I know plenty of women that dont cry at romantic mush. Conversely, i know plenty of emotional men.

I recently saw a blog putting forth the following young lady as representative of a typical female reaction:

I dont believe this excited young lady represents me or the way i would react to this film (or any film) just because we happen to share the same anatomy.

I did not take long at all to find a comparably emotional man on YouTube:

The difference here of course is that the man’s emotional response was more of uncontrollable anger rather than uncontrollable glee.

Ive been reading a book by the actor Rupert Everett where he describes Catholic boarding school as a young boy.

“You felt as if you belonged to somethingbig; your spine tingled with an Arthurian sense of destiny; and the plan was that you left Ampleforth a raunchy eighteen-year-old boy bursting with testosterone, a fully formed Empire builder with the added twist of a Catholic agenda. After ten years of prep and public school you were part of the gang; and if you weren’t, then you were a freak or a fairy. Luckily for me, I was both.”

Rupert Everett is openly gay now, but as a boy he was run through the man-making machine of corporal punishment, bullying, and parental abandonment. This little quote makes me feel like we sent a spy in to be a fly on the wall. A little snippet of explanation as the the lives boys live and how conditioning can skew emotional responses.

Take any one man and any one woman and their emotional responses will be unpredictable and varied.

Boys are no longer ushered off to Catholic boarding schools to be leaders while girls stay-home with the cross-stitch.

Gloria Steinem once busted the myth that women are inherantly more moral than men:

ONE FINAL myth that women are more moral than men. We are not more moral; we are only uncorrupted by power. But until the old generation of male chauvinists is out of office women in positions of power can increase our chances of peace a great deal.

I think it has been environmental conditions that led to the great divide of how women and men express their emotions. The stereotype of the man punching the wall while the woman sobs quietly in the corner is slowly washing away and blurring. It is insulting to men to say they have no capacity for emotion, and it is insulting to women to say they have no ability to control theirs.

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