Alright maybe it is them, but......

Right, so I’ve being giving this thing quite a lot of thought. A post a while back brought pretty unanimous disagreement and indeed, affectionate outrage from the rest of the Ladies. There are many posts about it, it’s just that no one’s got beyond the draft stage and most haven’t got beyond the ‘rant in pub’ stage – protoposts?

So what I’ve being thinking about is what exactly are the differences in the way we’re looking at many of the same issues. There are no doubt, many pressures obvious and subtle acting upon women to behave in ways that are indeed restrictive and probably oppressive. I think the crucial difference in our viewpoints is that I believe the way to deal with this is to stop responding to those pressures and just refuse to play ball, the opposing view believes that those pressures aught to stop. (I am so going to get totally creamed for this.)

In the interest of self-preservation: I am utterly sorry if I’ve misrepresented anyone here, I remain completely willing to revise and clarify.

I think probably the latter might be considered to have the right of the situation but possibly, mine has the virtue of being practically efficient, actually thought might be more accurate here – I’ll come to my rather obvious conclusion soon.

Just to be clear this does not apply to professional or practical discrimination, i.e. those situations where the state of mind of the woman involved would make no difference to the practical outcome. This is relevant to those things we end up somehow not exactly agreeing with but end up acquiescing to, all those barely conscious pressures that make the lives of so many women unnecessarily miserable.

So some examples might be; one must be thin, must be ambitious professionally, must be excellent mother, must be fantastic hostess/housekeeper, must not be hysterical/irrational/emotional, must not be frigid/unemotional/logical, whatever you’re having yourself.

Many, in fact probably the majority of women subscribe to some or all of these beliefs, while simultaneously believing them to be unfair and restricting. This is most often explained by women being helpless in the face of the barrage of both subconscious and obvious messages they have been brought up with and live in. But, if we’re going to be fair about it here, it has to be applied to all parties equally. Is the case not the same for men? Surely their latent and conscious attitudes have been formed by precisely the same processes, and yet we fully and justly expect them to get over this. And this of course is correct, I am not justifying or endorsing the continuance of any form of prejudice. What I am saying is that we must have the same expectations of ourselves. The patriarchy, and by the way this is not a helpful term folks, it just not getting anyone anywhere, is at about fifty percent female because that’s what society is, it’s about fifty percent women.

I still believe my solution has the virtues of speed and efficacy but as always the real answer is probably more in the middle ground.