Dear Woman: What These Men Say May Surprise You (VIDEO)

Comments

1. Joy Balmer says:

   February 27, 2013 at 6:19 am

   I do have to credit some of it to “unconscious”–I think social structures that we grow up with are pretty much taken for granted and hard to recognize and break. A boy growing up seeing his mother as a “background” person assumes this is the woman’s role…just as much as the girls in the same family grow up assuming this is the role they will play.

   I had an interesting interaction early in my current marriage (we were in our 40s when we married), to a terrific man who had been an instigator in, for instance, integrating women into his local Rotary club. He would speak up in a meeting where a woman’s opinion was being dissed, saying, “Excuse me, but I’d like to hear what she has to say!”

   Yet he continued to interrupt me when we were talking. We had a big argument over it one day, and he went without me to a scheduled visit with his family, where instead of making a fake excuse for me, he leveled with them what we’d argued about, questioning why he would continue to interrupt without realizing it. His sister responded–”Oh, it’s a man thing!” He asked his mother if their father had done this to her, and she answered, “All the time.” My husband was astounded.

   Twenty years later, he still does it, though not nearly as often, and is still surprised when I point it out to him. He is a true feminist, the first to respond to and repost a women’s rights issue, and yet these simple–yes, “unconscious”–remainders hang on, and he constantly fights this particular one.

   Racial issues are the same thing. I’m an adamant equality person, and yet it took decades for me to realize something: as teenagers in the 1950s, our church crowd used to occasionally drop in on a local black church, because we loved the music. This, in a tiny rural community of a few hundred people. Yet it never dawned on me to wonder why no black kids went to my high school–or even where these people may have lived nearby, or where they went to school.

   There are ignorant, loud-mouthed racists today, just are there are still ignorant loud-mouthed misogynists, but I think in either case, the majority of us–men AND women–quietly grew up with the social attitudes that were modeled to us, so ingrained in our society that the women’s movement was as much a shock to the women as to the men. After all, women played their roles admirably, fed by TV and the women’s magazines, until Betty Friedan came along and smacked us all upside the head. I distinctly remember the day I felt that slap on MY head, and I was never the same after that.
   1. Concerned says:

      February 27, 2013 at 7:49 am

      Given that Betty Freidan et al was at least 50 years ago, your argument seems outdated by at least, well, 50 years.
      1. Joy Balmer says:

         February 27, 2013 at 12:17 pm

         Concerned: Well, yes. That WAS when the Women’s Movement began. The state of mind after WWII was wrapped around women being the “center” of the home, taking care of the house, the children, and–primarily–the husband. In the 1960s, Betty Freidan et al, were the leaders of the movement to raise first women’s then everyone else’s awareness to first the question “Is this all there is?” through trying to find the answers.

         Dear, there are plenty of people still alive, including me, who remember it all well, and who are still influential in guiding younger women to hang onto the progress we made back then. There’s nothing “out of date” about any of this–progress moves on, slowly, and as long as there is motive to keep influences such as the Republican party in 2013 from taking everything back to the 50s, then my “argument” is more valid today than ever.

         Were you thinking the “women’s movement” was more recent than that?
         1. Concerned says:

            February 27, 2013 at 8:50 pm

            Nope. My argument remains the same; in light of all the various women’s movements down thru the ages, men have only become more ‘conscious’ of their actions against women thereby making their present day actions more unconscionable.