Jun 22
There’s an interesting phrase. Man, woman, and child: those are my options, are they? Identifying oneself by one’s sex is a prerequisite for adulthood: if I don’t want to identify myself by my sex, as either a man or a woman, I’m left with identifying myself as a child. How interesting.
Actually, it explains a lot. Continue reading
Jun 11
I recently watched, with horrified amusement, a tv program about short men who choose to undergo excruciatingly painful surgical procedures (which basically involve breaking their legs and then keeping the bones slightly apart while they mend) in order to become a few inches taller.
Asked why they would choose to undergo such a drastic, and excruciatingly painful, procedure, they said things like ‘Do you have any idea what it’s like to go through life as a short person? To sit in a chair and only your toes reach the floor, you can’t put your feet flat on the floor? To not be able to reach stuff on the upper shelves in grocery stores? To be unable to drive trucks because you can’t reach the pedals properly? To have people always looking down at you? Do you know what that’s like?’
Well, yes, actually I do. I’m a woman.
Oh, but that’s different, I suppose. Why? Because we’re supposed to go through life inconvenienced? Feeling subordinate?
Ah. That’s the real problem. These poor guys can’t take their rightful place over women. (As one man, 5’6” before the surgery, explained, “I’ll be a better father and husband and son.” Yup. Sure you will.)
Jun 02
Business is male. Make no mistake. Everything about it smacks of the male mentality.
First, the obsession with competition. You have to be #1, you have to outcompete your competition. So hierarchy, rank, is everything. As is an adversarial attitude. It doesn’t have to be that way. Business could be a huge network of co-operative ventures, each seeking to better the whole. But no, we have to be better than, stronger than, faster than –
May 27
Motherhood is unfair to women in a way fatherhood most definitely is not. Not only are there the physical risks (pregnancy and childbirth puts a woman at risk for nausea, fatigue, backaches, headaches, skin rashes, changes in her sense of smell and taste, chemical imbalances, high blood pressure, diabetes, anemia, embolism, changes in vision, stroke, circulatory collapse, cardiopulmonary arrest, convulsions, and coma), there’s the permanent damage to one’s career: if she stays at home, the loss of at least six years’ experience and/or seniority; if she doesn’t, the loss of a significant portion of her income, that required to pay for full-time childcare. (And even if she can swing holding a full-time job and paying for full-time childcare, she probably won’t get promoted because she typically uses all ‘her’ sick days, she’s reluctant to stay past 5:00 or to come in before 9:00 or on weekends, and she occasionally has to leave in the middle of the day, perhaps even in the middle of an important meeting. In short, she can’t be counted on. Such a lack of commitment.) Continue reading
May 19
If he changes a diaper, he’s father of the year.
If he cooks something, anything, he’s a chef.
If he marries, but otherwise continues to live pretty much as he has to that point, he’s suddenly respectable.
If he continues to pay a child’s ball game into adulthood, he gets paid a six figure salary.
If he gets a B.A., he’s an expert in his field.
If he writes a book full of incoherence and grammatical mistakes, he gets (edited and then) published.
We don’t expect men to pick up after themselves.
We don’t expect them to be sensitive to other people’s emotions, or even be aware of their own.
We don’t expect them to be aware of, let alone appreciative of, natural beauty.
We don’t expect them to be interested in children.
We don’t expect them to be in control of their sexual impulses or their aggressive impulses.
Additions welcome.
May 12
“For guys who inexplicably want to do the thing that makes babies without wanting to support the inevitable babies, the obvious solution would be child support insurance — 0 to 18 plus college and professional school to say, age 30. They would have to sit down with their insurance agent and describe their sex lives in detail so that an appropriate premium could be calculated. Women could ask to see guys’ proof of insurance just as if they were Highway Patrol. In case of pregnancy women would receive regular monthly checks, without having to see chumpass motherfucker again. Letting his insurance company support his child would likely raise a guy’s rates into the stratosphere, however, making future intercourse prohibitively expensive.”
Hector B. May 31, 2010 I Blame the Patriarchy
May 08
It’s not just an enthusiastic spillover of violence and aggression. The act of sexual intercourse is too specific, too far removed from the other acts of wartime violence and aggression. Shooting a person twenty-five times instead of once or twice would be such a spillover; forcing your penis or something else into a woman’s vagina is not. Furthermore, war rape is often not a spontaneous, occasional occurrence; apparently it’s quite premeditated and systematic. Continue reading
May 03
It’s Monday night basketball, an all-comers pick-up game, supposed to be fun and a good sweat. But week after week I steel myself against the anger, the frustration of not knowing how to correct the problem, and the despair of not being able to even begin to do just that. Eventually it happens: this time it’s Josh who yells at me to switch, to guard the new grade niner who’s just come onto the court to sub for the guy who’d been guarding Josh and Josh would guard the guy I’d been guarding.
I am distracted, as always, by the insult, the unwarranted assumption that I’m always the worst player there (even worse than the new grade niners) (although I’m thirty-five and played basketball for all of grade nine, and ten, eleven, twelve, and thirteen), and by the faulty logic that weak offensive players* are weak defensive players and should therefore guard other weak offensive players. Continue reading
Apr 29
At one time, bank tellers and secretaries had a certain prestige – the time when such positions were held by men. Schoolteachers used to be schoolmasters – before women entered the classroom. People who boast that many doctors in Russia are women fail to mention that doctoring in Russia, well, someone’s gotta do it.
The thing is this: whenever women enter an occupation, it becomes devalued. It loses glory. It loses funding. It loses media coverage. It becomes unpopular, even invisible. So if we were serious, really serious, about ending war, we’d fill the military ranks with women. When becoming a soldier has about as much appeal as becoming a waitress (another archetype of the service sector industry) –
An added bonus would be that if the enemy army were (still) male, they’d start killing themselves. Because better that than be killed by a woman. It would certainly save on ammunition.
On the other hand, if the enemy army were (also) female, well, more often than not, the wars would probably just sort of fizzle out into some sort of stalemate. We just don’t have the equipment for pissing contests. But since no one would really care, or even know, because it would be a woman thing, well, that’d be okay. We could live with that.
Apr 25
I bet a man came up with that term as well.
But what most intrigues me here is how? I mean, what exactly made the first man to introduce the term think that approaching a woman for, what, a date? sex? was like hitting (on) her???
It does not bode well when the very initiation of a relationship is imbued with violence even in the terminology.
