Is it all the fault of women
The man up post that inspired my my posts yesterday has, perhaps predictably, inspired someone to blame women. Yes, it's all because girls really go for jerks. This has its counterpart on the other side in the belief that men are only interested in big-breasted airheads and therefore it is really men's fault that some women are so ditzy.
There are, of course, cases of wimpy men who do well with women. There are examples of anything you care to look for them.
Now anyone who reads this blog will know that I am not easy on women in this post-feminist age. Like a lot of men, I had the experience of sitting in a room while a bunch of women cheered for Carrie Bradshaw and for Samantha Jones as if they were some sort of liberating heroines and thought, "Well, if that is really what you want then I'll give it to you Honey."
A lot of men, as in the link above, have responded to this stuff rather petulantly. It's easy to see why. First we're accused of being pigs, which we know we aren't, and then women turn around and behave like pigs themselves and say, well, we're only doing what men have always done. My mother used to say, you may as well get hanged for a sheep as a lamb; if we're going to be punished anyway, we may as well enjoy the life of crime first
But it isn't what most women really want and that is today's subject. Carrie and Samantha are fantasy figures much like James Bond. Women identify with them but most don't really want to be them and the women who try are shallow jerks just like the men who really try to be like James Bond. It's important what we fantasize about, of course, but, as I've said before, the point of fantasy is fantasy and it's not about real life. I'm off on a pastoral visit and I won't be back until this afternoon. As I go about my day, what i will be thinking about is what women really want. I'll get back to you about that ;-)
"...the point of fantasy is fantasy and it's not about real life."
ReplyDeleteExactly, and that's what I thought was lost in the articles you linked to yesterday's posts. Reading them one might think that young people today are taking their cues about how to behave from Draper, or Carrie, or Samantha, a scary thought indeed. If that is the case, I think it is a reflection of the education system. I guess I'm dating myself but when I was in high school and college, we took our cues from the characters we read about in Chaucer, Shakespeare, Tennyson, the English and American playwrights among others, and of course our parents. I think part of the reason is that in those days, teachers did character analysis, not just teach literary form and structure. In so doing they made the characters come alive. No wonder the kids today are bored. There was nothing more exciting for me all through high school than when my school went every Spring to the student previews at the American Shakespeare Festival Theater in Stratford CT where we would see enacted the play we had been studying for weeks before. I think part of it was that we took those characters seriously, and for the most part regarded what we saw on television and the movies as entertainment and took those characters less seriously. Somewhere between then and now something changed.