February 22, 2003
-
Men and Women
I owe Exmortis for the inspiration for this. He had obviously been giving a lot of thought to the feminine gender when he wrote, of “The vast majority of women between the ages of 17 and 38,” that:
“They are utterly insensitive.
They are horrendously over-valued.
They are as dangerous as an un-exploded landmine.”
The first point, the insensitivity to male feelings that is exhibited by many women is, I think, self-evident. I was very young when I caught on that the cool mask of machismo was a pose meant to disguise a man’s passions and help him maintain at least the outward semblance of self-control. What is it about so many of my sisters that makes them deny all their own intuition and empathy and buy into the macho myth of men’s emotional invulnerability? Look around, ladies. The evidence of men’s sensitivity and tender emotional vulnerability is everywhere. Check out the works of Will Shakespeare, Steven Spielberg, and Ron Croxton for a good representative sample, if your own near and dear boys and men haven’t shown it to you.
What? Did I hear a soprano chorus of dissent? Yes. It trilled, “But I caught onto that, too, at a very early age. It gave me leverage, a little edge in dealing with the Master Gender, the Kings of the Earth. A girl needs all the leverage she can get, ’cause the guys have all the clout.”
Ah, yes. There’s that. Personally, I wouldn’t call the power games many women play with men, “insensitivity,” because some of them are quite sensitive to the effects of their manipulations. I’d call it something more like, “depraved indifference.”
I agree that nubile, fertile, young women, good breeding stock are, “horrendously over-valued.” Oddly enough, many of the men who value them so highly as sexual partners appear to have no interest in their fertility. Guys get vasectomies, use other forms of contraception, insist and expect that their partners use contraception, have abortions, or rear children alone or on welfare or under the protection and support of another man. I can’t blame the guys. Their attraction to young nubile women is hard-wired. It stems from many sensory stimuli, ranging randily from the preference for visual symmetry and tactile softness, to the men’s unconscious hormonal responses to invisible pheromonal scents.
The biological attraction is reinforced by cultural expectations. If a man happens to be attracted to little girls, he’s in deep trouble in our culture. If he keeps company with older women, he can be a laughingstock, an object of either ridicule, pity, or Oedipal speculation. Although most of the developed world recognizes overpopulation as a problem and approaches it with a variety of solutions, the child-bearing years of a woman’s life continue to be overvalued by men… or, maybe it’s the rest of the woman’s life that’s undervalued. Whaddaya think, girls? Anything to say on that topic, crones?
That young women are, “as dangerous as an un-exploded landmine,” is, again, self-evident. Three for three, Ron. Growing up in this culture, shielded from the harsher aspects of reality, living under the influence of soap opera and fairy tales, the young ladies are indeed dangerous. Each of them has the full power of a complete human being, and yet they are not just encouraged, many are coerced to believe or at least profess that they are inferior to and subject to men. Anyone who doesn’t know her own strength has no motivation to rationally and humanely wield her power with restraint.
By the time we’ve reached cronehood and are no longer attractive as sexual partners, many of us have learned our limits, owned our power, and developed some empathy. From my current cultural perspective, it is much less surprising to me that young women are overvalued, than it is that older women are so horrendously undervalued.
Comments (15)
Well this is interesting as hell! It runs at a 90 degree angle to what I thought before I read it, so I think I better re-think what I’ve thought because I think that your thinking may be better than mine. And I think I better read Exmortis too.
Thanks.
What’s more, men are hard-wired to be promiscuous–the more sperm we can fling around, the better our chances of passing on our DNA. (Which is the bottom line on love, romance and all that other happy horsehit–passing on the DNA.) Women are hard-wired to be very choosy–they want the highest possible quality sperm to fertilize their precious eggs. Different planets? Shit, we may as well be different species. Great blog, sweetie!
Rock ON. We can be brutal, but we care, sometimes, too.
I agree with all you’ve said, and I must say I never thought of all that in this way before.
Interesting as hell, like Elsa said.
Excellent post!
If it’s true of young women, it’s true of young men as well.
If “insensitive” = blindingly, selfishly ignorant, that’s supposed to have worn off after the terrible twos! It often doesn’t. For many, it has long before the arbitrary age of 38 mentioned here. But also, for many young people who fall into destructive habits, it would be better if they went back and relived the twos so they could see their own interests and the people around them through a different glass. By the time many reach 38 they’ve been through a wringer or two, but it’s anyone’s guess whether they’ll be better persons for it. Some just accumulate baggage.
As for over-valued, I think you have it right here that this supposed “value” is essentially a sexual use-value rather than an inherent-personhood value. And again, I think it’s a value applied to the young of both sexes, although thus far more so to women than young men.
I have absolutely no quibble with “dangerous as an unexploded landmine.” Except that you can apply that to our entire species, thank you very much.
As you can tell, I believe all generalizations should be deconstructed into the ground.
I inspired this? Wish I could inspire myself to write this well.
In a brief aside to Arms’ comment above, some recent anthropology theories are suggesting that promiscousness may be a valuable strategy for females as well…… Among primates, sleeping with a large sampling of the males allows the mother to imply that the baby might belong to any of them, and ensure it’s safety regardless of which might become an alpha later….
Interesting stuff.
Good Great stuff! Now… Can you explain why all the girls in my “dating range” (21-30) have kids? It’s not an issue, so much as it is an astonishment. Then again, maybe it has more to do with where I live and who I hang out with than anything else…
when elephants are young and relatively small, they are chained to stakes in the ground. they are unable to pull up the stakes and get away. later, when they are far more capable, they never try.
we need to stop raising cinderella’s, waiting for someone else to do it for her because she’s been convinced, had it INGRAINED, that she is incapable.
I keep laughing. I don’t think that’s what you intended for me to do here, K, but I keep laughing. Perhaps because I grew up with two older brothers and learned leverage at an early age… perhaps. Or…perhaps for a lot of reasons. This made me chuckle.
Eh…maybe it’s because I’m a crone and am no longer attractive as a sexual partner…???? I guess my empathy is reserved for those who show me they’re human and they know I am, too.
Ah, K, you are the diggity.
Whew! Still trying to catch up via e-mails. So I just had to come back and comment on this one. I don’t have a lot of years under my belt but I must say that 99% of the women I have met are evil right down to the bone. I realize how childish this must sound, but I’m hoping that maybe you can shed some light on the subject. The only thing I can figure is that for some reason chicks think it’s okay to be weak and stupid. Maybe it’s pop culture? Maybe it’s “American Idol”? Maybe it’s “The Young And The Restless”? I don’t know, it’s just that more and more I find myself being the only woman in a group of about 10 single guys who are all trying to figure out why their women left them because they didn’t have enough money, or they gained a few pounds, or about a million other bullshit reasons. Case in point: the recent bullshit with my mother in law. She recently turned 47, and was caught cheating on her husband of 32 years because she “didn’t have any passion in her life”. What’s even more confusing is that the guy she was cheating with was, like, 70. The night after her husband stormed out of the house saying he wouldn’t come back, she cranked up her Britney Spears cd and started singing “Slave” at the top of her lungs. Coincidence?
Women are most dangerous when they’re bored.
“…the ramifications of pyschobiology explored, life is neither simple nor fair nor able to be fully comprehended…so do we look to a higher authority?!”
~ Alan Dietrich
Xanga Gazette
Testostorone skews everything; love and passion and security skews everything; everything related to relations is skewed up. Do we look to a higher authority? Can a car write it’s own owner’s manual? I have my answer(s)!
Peace, Love, & Plenty!
Well said!
I do think older women are undervalued for the most part. But I also think due to the breaking down of misconceptions and maybe of individuals who do not want to conform.
There is a growing trend of 40 plus women who are actively involved in careers and communities. You’ll see examples of older women bearing children (surrogate grandmothers) or elderly doctors (at age 80) or those who participate in sports others deem too dangerous at their age. There are also the traditional elder females who are still active in their family way past their prime (esp’ly in european families).
Again some interesting facts/opinons.