If a man speaks in the forest and there is no woman around to hear him, is he still wrong?
Uncles and Great Uncles in my family actually get together and <bold>whine** about this one. Men are SO abused in today’s society and and they have no idea why.
“Well, well,” they huff, “with all the anti-discrimination laws, politically correctness dogma and…” who else is there to pick on but us?
So what do you think?
Are men abused for:
No good reason?
Some reasons?
Good reasons?
Damned good reasons?
Isn’t that glib little line a slam against female self rightousness. I don’t read it as meaning men are always wrong but that women just think they’re wrong.
I think you’re barking up the wrong tree falling in the forest. :::sound of one hand clapping:::
Elmer J. Fudd,
Millionaire.
I own a mansion and a yacht.
Men put down women, women put down men. So what? I mean white people put down black people, black people put down white people.
Used to be this: “Women’s faults are many, but men have only two, everything they say and everything they do.”
I think this is supposed to be a light topic, so I won’t get all weird about it. However, if someone posted the same question
but asked about women, I’d probobly be a little miffed. I personally don’t think it’s any funnier to make fun of men and rag on them then it is for them to make fun of women.
In addition, I think that women who pick on mens housekeeping skills, cooking attempts, and baby care skills are doing themselves a great disservice. It only serves to undermine any confidence they may be trying to build, and builds resentment even when it’s said in “jest”.
PS- if you’re a women who does this to your husband, try stopping for a week and instead compliment your husbands strengths. Amazing things will happen. (IMHO)
Love is like popsicles…you get too much you get too high.
I may be taking this topic too seriously, but here goes. This is a subject near and dear to me because the core of my life philiosophy is that people live up to or down to the expectaions they percieve society has of them. It is the only thing that explains things like malnourished ten year olds working eighteen hour days in coal mines during the the industrial revolution. If you were to put any modern ten year old, or even any modern adult, in that situation, we could not do it. I would collapse after the first week. I would starve to death because I doubt I could will my muscles to keep working. But these kids worked like that for years. The only explanation I can come up with for this is that they never considered any other possibility–they were expected to do so, so they did.
I think this principle applies to everything, and that is why blanket statements about groups are very dangerous, especially when they are incorperated into popular culture as “the way things are”, not just presented as some guy’s opinion. That is why I am very leery of the message so ubiquitous in the media and reinforced by such unlikly bedfellows as “Take Back the Night” date-rape awareness movements: namely, that the idea that every man is constantly plauged by the unquenchable demons of rampant sexual desire and a beer or two away from becoming a rapist. Hollywood and advertising contantly patter that a real man is always horny, always wants it, can’t get enough, would fuck a pile of rocks if he thought there was a rattlesnake under it. This is a cultural perspective, not a universal human view–even as recently as the Victorian era a man was expected to be able to control his libido and restrict its expression to socially acceptable channels. For the Victorians, women were the potentially reckless group because of their lesser intellectual abilitys. Women were the sex that had to be chaperoned and kept buried under yards and yards of fabric-they could not be trusted not to loose their heads in a moment of passion.
My point then, is that if we push the expectation that men cannot control thier sex drive, what we are going to end up with, and which I believe we are already starting to see, is a generation of men who cannot control thier sex drive, and in fact believe that having a controllable sex drive is somehow unmanly. We could loose a generation of productivity because men have been trained to think with their genetalia, not because they were born that way. I don’t know what to do about this; the media is not about to quit using the incredibly easy button of sexuality to sell products, but it does worry me.
It is currently considered socially acceptable to make men the butt of jokes in a way that it would not currently be socially acceptable to make women the butt of jokes (with maybe the exception of “blonde” jokes). In fact, there seem to only be two groups who people can joke about with impugnity – men and the French.
“East is east and west is west and if you take cranberries and stew them like applesauce they taste much more like prunes than rhubarb does.” – Marx