First off- I don’t hate men. I like men. I love men. I have a great relationship with my dad, my oldest friend is a boy, I tend to spend a lot of time with men and I like them. They’re funny, interesting, different, irritating- all the things that make every other human being on the planet fascinating to the next person. So perhaps I am not the right person to be discussing the woeful situation that has be-felled my mysterious masculine mates. Or perhaps I’m the perfect person to be discussing it.
I need to preface this article by openly stating that I have a negative attitude towards contemporary feminism. I don’t get it. I’m 21- I’ve never lived through a sexual revolution or gender war and for the most part I have surrounded myself with men who treat me as an equal; or at least they try their hardest to do so. So I find myself mystified when females around my age bang on about how shit men are. They’re not that bad! I don’t want to make excuses for men who are genuinely misogynistic or chauvinistic but I think the sooner that women start to realize that not all men are “pigs” the sooner this “equality” that we seem to be so desperate for will materialize. Similarly the sooner we (women), and men, realize that WE ARE DIFFERENT the sooner we can move on from these differences and- if I may be so bold- embrace these differences?
As much as I like men, I can openly admit that I don’t understand them. I have had insights into the ones who have allowed me to get close to them and or who have tried to explain the male “condition” as it were, but these insights are for the most part very specific to the person themselves and in the grand scheme of things I’m just as clueless as the next girl as to how the male brain works. And I’ll bet most men can admit the same about the way girls think. But I think it is unfair for men or women to take this lack of understanding and judge the other gender for it. Its not men’s fault I don’t get them….and its certainly not my fault when men don’t understand me! But please don’t let the lack of understand cloud your judgment about the opposite sex. Embrace it. Surely in an age where we can jump on Google and get an answer for pretty much anything we should rejoice in the things in life we can’t get straight answers for? Maybe that’s just me. But I like the idea of having a bank of unexplored people and experience that lays waiting for me to uncover. Boys- the final frontier?
This little musing is inspired from my exposure more neo-feminism than I care to be exposed to in recent weeks. Let me state, for perhaps the first time, that feminism in its purest form, in its real, true and historical form, was a movement that needed to happen. I may look at the ideal of Betty in Mad Men and think “wow it’d be nice to be able to just marry a beautiful man and have beautiful kids and keep a beautiful house and just be beautiful all day” but really and truly I know I’m not kidding anyone. The women in my gender’s past have done me a tremendous service in allowing me to be the vocal, opinionated and (seemingly) confident young women I am today and I will forever be grateful to them for that. But I refuse to believe that the search for equality between the sexes that these women strove toward was meant to turn into the vicious, spiteful rage that has spawned itself in the modern woman. Men are not the enemy. No one is the enemy. We don’t have to have enemies. But we’re so used to being on the offensive that the ‘enemy’ just keeps rearing its ugly head. Worryingly though I think it’s ourselves that have become said enemy. But I don’t want to spout another “love yourself” rhetorical piece of self-affirming nonsense that we modern gals have grown up reading. The only self-affirmation that a women needs is the safety of being a woman and the understanding that goes along with being a woman. Men are different and scary, but really and truly that’s why we love them right?
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