I’m tapping into the deep well of female doper wisdom in looking to construct a meaningful and useful list of ten things an adult woman should know by the time she is 25. These can be things you should know about, or things you should know how to do.
They don’t have to be epic things, in fact they can little and somewhat mundane things, but they should be things which are useful and meaningful to a person’s quality of life, or their ability to get along in the world as an adult.
You don’t have to list 10 things. You can only list one if you choose. I’m looking to build a list so list whatever number of suggestions you have.
I’m not female, and these are in no particular order:
Give a blowjob
Cook a meal
Change a tire
Safely use a gun
Change the air conditioner filter
Locate the circuit breaker panel in her home, flip breaker to turn off power to specific circuit
Use a hammer/screwdriver as needed
Start a lawnmower
Jumpstart a car
Drive a stickshift
I’m not sure why a woman would need to know anything different than a man would need to know (except that for the man the blowjob would be optional :rolleyes:).
Ditto this, and including oral sex. (Not that I think people “should” be familiar with particular sexual expressions by a certain age, but that oral sex isn’t particularly gendered for me.)
Thirded. Anything that is specifically “manly” or “womanly” should not be mandatory for basic getting along in the modern adult world; things that are just expected of the genders by mere social convention fall into the “nice to know” but nonessential category.
These things always strike me as kind of classist. If you’re nowhere near being able to afford your own house or vehicle, what good is it to know much about the maintenance of them? Some people need to know how to drive a stickshift, other people just need to know when the bus is coming.
I intended making a reasoned response to the OP but the first list I see mentions firearms and I remember this is a US board. Anywhere else on earth you would go hundreds or thousands of posts before anyone mentioned guns.
Good idea, but given proper membership in a motoring organization, not necessary. (Also given that my wife has my phone number, not likely to be necessary.)
Absolutely unlikely to arise as an issue in our city.
Our cooling system does not require this skill.
I normally do this. If I were away my wife could probably sort it out, but if not, she has plenty of siblings who could talk her through it.
She can probably do this better than I can.
We get a man in.
Both our cars are automatics.
My wife can do this, but if we only own automatics, why is this a required skill?
The only skill I can think of that is fairly universal (at least in the Western world) and gender specific is that by 25 you should have figured out either a system or the signs for “today would be a bad day to wear light colored pants.”
That isn’t normal even by US standards. I’m a firearm owner, but I do not believe that the safe operation of such is a basic skill that everyone needs to know.
Agreed, I think most necessary skills don’t have gender-specificity.
As for me, I didn’t own an air conditioner or a gun by age 25 (and have never personally owned a real gun) though I did learn safety with my Daisy air rifle, which I asked for as a kid - and had just barely bought my first car by then. It was an automatic, because I grew up with automatics in the family. My parents were both farm kids and grew up driving stick vehicles, but completely switched to automatic transmissions as adults. I guess it’d be a nice skill to know but I haven’t had any use for it yet.
The foreign perception that all USAans are packing heat is curious to me. I’ve lived in this country for 50 years and have only fired – or held – a gun once. And that was a very odd circumstance.
I agree. The signs can be subtle and can take years to figure out, but by 25 a woman should have this down. I can’t think of anything else that’s gender specific.
