Manly Thor's Day Special

Go ahead and generalize about women
I still remember a terribly pained conversation in which I upset a friend of mine by laughing his face.

In the middle of an otherwise pleasant conversation he pounced on something I said really aggressively. It was a conversation about politics not about women (I'll get to women later). The problem was that while there were lots of cases to back up my claim it wasn't universally true. And I said, "I didn't say it was universally true I said itw as generally true."

That's when it happened. My friend took up this very solemn attitude and said, "You should never generalize."

That's when I laughed. It wasn't just the obvious irony impairment in his using a generalization to condemn generalizations, although that was, and is, funny. It was the serious moral tone. He said it in the same tone he might have used to reprimand someone for drinking and driving.

That tone goes double when it comes to generalizations about women. It's just not done nowadays. It used to be done all the time and even feminist icons like Virginia Wolf used to generalize freely about women.

When I say "generalize" here, I mean generalize in in a critical way. No one will give you even  a moment's grief if you say that women are more sensitive (in a good way), that they have more meaningful friendships or that they have more empathy than men.

No the manly generalization is the critical one and all men will find they are discouraged from doing so. This is weird because women make critical generalizations about men with no fear of retribution.

The thing about generalizations—are you sitting down for this?—is that they can either be done well or they can be done poorly. I know, generally speaking, that is about as trite a thing as can be said. But it is nevertheless true.

There are hundreds of stupid generalizations about women. If I hear one more person telling me about what to do when a woman asks, "Does this make me look fat?" I am going to laugh in his face so hard he'll get spittle in his eyes. But there are useful generalizations to be made and no man should stop out of some fear of being a pig for having done so.