Do I have your attention? Good Recently Yashar Ali wrote an article by the same title. In this article he states that men are conditioned to "gaslight" women. "Gaslighting," he explains, finds its origins in the 1944 film Gaslight where the main character tries to convince his wife she is crazy by causing his gaslight to flicker. Or something. He then boldly claims this is what men do when they disregard a woman's emotions by saying "you're over reacting" or the like.
Now I am not a feminist, mainly because I believe there are biological, physiological, and psychological differences between men and women, go figure. The most obvious one is women can bare children and men cannot. Now if you ask me that is a pretty big difference between the sexes. However in an effort of fairness, not wanting to stereo-type all women as being able to bare children, we must ask ourselves why it is that when a heterosexual man shows up to meet another heterosexual man say half an hour late for a dinner, say beer and wings at B-Dubs, it is no big deal to either party. However when the same man shows up to meet a lady friend, girlfriend, spouse, 30 minutes late, it is a huge deal to the woman and not a big deal to the man? Different wiring. She has invested time, effort, etc, into this meal the two were going to spend together, she is emotionally attached to it. He is running late from work and it is just an average Tuesday to him. They both have different emotional wiring for what this meal means. Her reaction is different than the friends, thus his response is different. Lets look at another example, one more stark in contrast.
A man in a bar is pissing you off, then smashes your beer to the ground in the heat of the argument. (Probably over who's football team is better. See men can be emotional.) The man who had his beer smashed promptly punches the other in the face. Now if what Yashar is trying to say is that we should treat men and women identically. In a heated emotional argument about why Joe isn't home at 5:30 for dinner, Joe should pop Judy in the face, the same way he would any man that got in his face for being home half an hour late. I am sure this is not what Yashar is intending to have happen, however this is the problem with many forms of feminism, (of course those that hold that men are inferior to women would also say is is wrong for an inferior being to strike a superior one), the logical trajectory leads to a point where it will eventually decay into misogyny. Women will be treated by men as men treat men, which is barbaric at times.
An alternative is of course the biblical modal of man and woman, where though both are equally human beings, they are functionally different, (hence they, generally speaking, have different biology, physiology, and psychology). This would mean that men treat women differently than men. Back to our first example, the man is treating the man and the woman the same, if the late man to dinner was given flack about being late from the early man, I dare say he would "gaslight" the early man too. "Dude, quit being such a whiny little ..." Or something to that effect. The problem is not that men treat men differently than women, it is that men treat women the same. The solution is a return to treating men and women differently, not pressing men to treat women even more like men.
0 comments:
Post a Comment