culture gives them short shrift, and US divorce laws which once moved to rectify a Victorian-era tilt, which then almost universally benefitted men, have swung equally in the opposite direction. Until only the mid-20th century, it was almost unheard of for a mother to gain custody of her children in a divorce. There was no such thing as alimony, in most cases. A woman lost everything -- house, family, respect, future, even when her husband was an adulterer or worse. Family courts were no friend to women, in my grandparents' day.But since I'm no legal expert, I'll mosey on over to the media's influence on our love lives. Fausta argues that men's lives are more difficult than women's. I think that can be debated. Individual circumstances will both support and undermine much of what she has to say. Still, this seems to be a transitional time for many of us, and nobody knows how to act properly during a cultural upheaval. But for some reason, the majority of those who are trapped in the confusing landslide seems to be men. There is no good reason for this.
MaxedOutMama says that Gonads Do Not Determine The Quality Of A Soul. I'll buy that. And, after posting an exerpt from Fausta's aforementioned blog entry, she interprets it thusly:
The endless propagandistic screeching about the evil and inherent treachery of men has taught many women to be acutely and deeply defensive in their relationships with men. The trust is gone, and that trust is what is needed in order to establish the type of reflexively loyal and intimate relationship which we naturally desire and of which we are naturally capable. (That's men and women!)M.O.M. adds her two cents, that Fausta missed the most important part of the thesis that "men have it harder": she left out the word "virtuous" at the beginning of the sentence. Both fault the media -- television shows, movies, magazines, and other arbiters of cult-yah, for selling men as monsters.
I have to point out that they missed the wider sales pitch: men are idiots and slobs. They can't open a jar of peanut butter for wifey, they can't figure out how to wash dishes without uxorial supervision, they are incapable of spreading butter on toast without shredding the toast, don't know how to change diapers on their own one-year-old children, can't (or won't) read a map, can't (or won't) pick up after themselves -- let alone do laundry --, don't know how to make the little lady happy without viagra... the list goes on and on. (Come to think of it, in comedies, everybody is an idiot, but that's another post, I guess.) The message, as I see it, is that men come in only two flavors: moron or jerk*.
Having known a few men in my long years, and actually enjoyed the company of more than a few of them, I can hereby say that people really are being sold a bill of goods, here. Men are as varied and as pleasant to be around as women. And they're very different from us, too. They think differently from the way we women think. They act differently from the way we act. They like different things, they're responsive to stimuli in very different manners, their anatomy is quite different so they even walk differently...
By and large, that's a very good thing.
And, yet, we are told that Men are just Wymyn with external plumbing
and a probable hormone imbalance. The incident over Mr. Summers' remarks at Harvard last year is a fine example of that sales pitch -- and the proof of its inherent flaw. The elder generation of hardcore NOW-member feminists has been trying to paint us as victims of the overly-aggressive dullard male of the species, meanwhile saying that we are, internally, exactly the same, but in different packaging. Are we, then, to be victims of ourselves, as well?
Probably so -- more likely, in fact, than the aging feminists' scenario. This seething sexist rage is a dangerous weapon, and, if you swing it around wildly, you're likely to lop off something to which you had grown rather attached.
*or anal aperture, if you prefer your terminology a little stronger
HT: The Anchoress
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