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Don’t Ask Feminists What Women Really Want — They Haven’t a Clue
What with all the sex scandals populating the news, I pour myself a refreshing cup of schadenfreude each morning when reading which lefty has been taken to the shed by his comrades in the previous 24 hours. Tuesday’s entry was Charlie Rose, who received the caning from his CBS “This Morning” co-hosts, Gayle King and Nora O’Donnell, who said:
‘”Let me be clear: There is no excuse for this alleged behavior.” She added: “This I know is true: Women cannot achieve equality in the workplace or society until there is reckoning.” She also said: “This will be investigated. This has to end. This behavior is wrong, period.”‘
Whoop, there it is! The Left’s holy grail — eQuALiTy!
I dunno, but it seems to me any woman who’s made it past, oh, 25 should have realized the last thing she wants is “equality” with men, God bless ’em!
C’mon ladies, think about it. What you really want for yourself or your daughter is the opportunity to carry a 50-lb. pack into combat? You want your daughter to have one of the most dangerous jobs on the planet where she might, say, find herself keelhauled behind a fishing trawler in the North Atlantic? You want to be so libidinous, you inadvertently (or advertently) humiliate yourself and others in private and, sometimes, in public, with uncontrolled animal behavior? You want to die five to 10 years sooner, be less likely to attend or graduate from college, be more likely to commit suicide? I don’t think so.
Ladies (and gents), listen up. What women really want is to be treated with the dignity of a child of God, which happens to be what men want, too, although it may have a different expression. Women want to be cherished. There. I said it.
Women have some sense of their physical and emotional vulnerability — or they definitely will if and when they decide to have babies — and, on some level, they realize they want men to honor that, to be protective of them, and to provide for them. Good men exhibit these behaviors toward all women, even the ones they’re not married to, whenever they see that a woman is vulnerable. This is called being a “gentleman.” Bad men take advantage of women’s vulnerability and act out. This is called being Bill Clinton.
I suspect men really want to be respected and admired for being good men — for protecting and providing for their wife and family, and for their accomplishments in their careers. My ideas about this come from my own 50-mumble-mumble years of experience on the planet, and from believing in the biblical consequences of The Fall:
16 To the woman he said: I shall give you intense pain in childbearing, you will give birth to your children in pain. Your yearning will be for your husband, and he will dominate you.
17 To the man he said, ‘Because you listened to the voice of your wife and ate from the tree of which I had forbidden you to eat, Accursed be the soil because of you! Painfully will you get your food from it as long as you live.
18 It will yield you brambles and thistles, as you eat the produce of the land.
19 By the sweat of your face will you earn your food, until you return to the ground, as you were taken from it. For dust you are and to dust you shall return.
The woman desires her husband’s protection and provision, especially as related to procreation, and finds her happiness in relation to a good man, for whom she yearns. And the man labors his whole life to provide for himself and his family — and, by implication, receives his satisfaction from it.
If you feel you’re an exception to this, you’re just that. An exception. Or, a lefty. Or, a feminist. But, I repeat…
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Hey now! Some of us have lousy metabolisms!
Come back, @gldiii! Come back, it’s ok, we are just talking about badly adjusted rich guys, that can’t be you, the badly adjusted part, I mean :)
There is another aspect too: no man that I am aware of has a problem with being with a woman who is better looking than he is, but there are some women who do not want to be with a man who is better looking than they are. When I was younger, many people-certainly not all, but many thought I was cute, but I was never a great beauty. I felt most comfortable with men who were on about the same level as me when it came to looks. I found it impossible to be interested in men whom I perceived as not being as good looking as I was-that’s brutal, but true, but I also had a real problem with men who were far better looking than me. I dated a couple of guys who were drop dead beautiful, and the prospect of living in their shadow did not appeal to me at all. I don’t like admitting what an incredibly vain and shallow person I am, but there it is, and I doubt that I am the only woman who has felt that way.
Has any straight man ever been uncomfortable about a woman who is better looking than he is? I doubt it.
Fortunately, it takes all kinds of women to make the world go around. Fortunately, not all women are like me. There are some incredibly beautiful women who really seriously don’t care what a man looks like. I know at least a few drop dead beautiful women who married men who really weren’t very good looking at all, and they didn’t do it for money. There are also women far more gracious than me, who don’t mind living in the shadow of a beautiful man. I am definitely not trying to claim that all women are like me, but I’m pretty sure that some women are like me, and we have an effect, and it’s part of the reason why looks are more important for women than they are for men.
Actually, it’s not uncommon, particularly if the woman is substantially “better looking”. Unless you have a supreme confidence in yourself, you can be in some doubt as to whether she’ll stick around when some classier guy comes along. Sure, we’re thrilled when some angel favors us with her attentions, but there are a lot of guys whose paranoia or insecurity then make them into jealous jerks.
Certainly in terms of what each gets out of it.
You don’t read IEEE publications for recreation. You read IEEE publications for information.*
You take apart the logic analyzer for recreation.
Except for the Letters to the Editor section of IEEE Spectrum during holy wars. Now that’s entertainment.
That makes sense, but that is not really what I am talking about. I didn’t go out with either guy for any amount of time, but when I thought about it, other women were really not my concern-I have known plenty of average looking guys who were fiends with women, and plenty of good looking men who were angels. Other women were not my concern. My concern was how I would live every day of my life with people looking at him and I together and saying, “Yeah, she’s ok, but wow, he is beautiful”. If the roles are reversed, I really don’t think most men or any men would have a problem with that, but some women do, and I am one of them. Not proud of it, but part of succeeding in life is being brutally honest about what we can deal with and what we can’t.
I have always called Ray my “trophy husband”.
Also known as Proverbs 31.
It’s not that different for musicians. The hippest male players I’ve ever known love to trade shop talk – about strings, keyboards, gear, drum heads, mouthpieces, reeds, instruments – whatever it is they work with. The women (who are terrific players, btw) – – not so much.
Perhaps we guys are more wired to want to work on things and fix things.
I suspect it’s also a confidence issue, at least for some women. When you’re speaking of technical things casually, it’s pretty easy to misspeak. Some women have the perception (rightly or wrongly) that they will be harshly judged for misspeaking even in casual conversation, in which case, it may seem better not to speak at all.
I’ve known (and sometimes been) women pretty voluble about technical stuff, at least when they think they can let their guard down.
Men are more venturesome than women generally (as one director I know puts it, “men have unwarranted self-confidence; women, unwarranted self-doubt”), and when it comes to speaking up in conversation, being venturesome covers a multitude of sins.
When we had some non-English speaking relatives over, I was quite impressed that my husband, though technically comprehending their language less than I did, had an easier time talking to them, simply because he wasn’t at all shy about “screwing up” with what little knowledge he had, whereas my first thoughts tended to be, “Am I sure I remember the correct grammar here?” Now, I’m unusually shy, even for a woman, about these things, and my husband is unusually confident, even for a man. But it was a dramatic illustration of a difference that, while usually less extreme, is often present.
Cockiness, as long as it’s not overbearing, can be a charming trait in a man. It is less so in a woman, and women know that.
Au contraire…”Out of my league” is a very common refrain among average looking guys.
Sure, but does “Out of my league” mean, “She will probably reject me, and I don’t want want to put myself through the grief”, or does it mean, “Even if she doesn’t reject me-even if it’s clear that rejection is extremely unlikely-I just don’t like the idea of her getting more attention for her looks than I will.” I suspect it’s the first scenario.
There’s also the “she’s gonna be really expensive to keep” one. A buddy of mine married one of those.
lol :) That is unfair, but if she is carrying an expensive pocket book, that is a red flag :)
This whole scenario is riddled with confusing outcomes. All of this #MeToo-ism is actually reducing my respect for some of the women claiming to be victims and, I think, setting back the idea of “equality” for women.
Take this from the Charlie Rose story:
Ten years? You mean you didn’t even know that you were being inappropriately touched until a group of other women told you it was inappropriate? This does not lend credibility to the accusations, either because it means that this woman is too-susceptible to group-think or that she has no sense of agency in her own life.
Here’s another bit from that article:
Are you kidding me? Say “No” if you don’t like it. Are these women — just like the ones who agreed to watch Louis CK perform his private show for them, only to complain about it later — so powerless that they will comply with anything at anytime?
You can make a case that women have been bred by society to be compliant, agreeable, passive, and I think there’s some merit to that (but I would argue that these traits are, in many women, natural and reinforced by socialization rather than fully artificially learned). And it’s important for men to know that’s not OK to exploit this disposition for their own sexual gratification, but…
These women who seem so confused about standing up for themselves, drawing boundaries of acceptable behavior in their presence, and even knowing their own minds, are often the same ones who are the loudest advocates for equality in the workplace. It sounds to me like they aren’t ready to leave the little kids’ table. This is supposed to be the vanguard of professional women who deserve as many positions of power and equal pay as any man, but they display in this claims of sexual harassment a staggering lack of agency. How can these women be leaders?
(I do not mean that no women in general can be leaders; it’s these particular women with this self-perpetuating victim mindset who arel claiming that it’s their turn to lead while showing no leadership qualities.)
This whole #MeToo mess, with all of these women who claim to have gone along to get along for all of these years only to now embrace this (to my mind) humiliating hashtag, brings to mind this real case which was made into this compelling, if flawed, movie.
I guess it’s shocking how pervasive is this culture of compliance that so many people, mostly young women, feel incapable of judging situations, asserting their own integrity, and negotiating their way out appropriately. I don’t know where the failure is here. Is it just human nature? Is it something bred by the moral laziness of a comfortable, affluent society?
Well, there was that experiment years ago which claimed to show that many or most people will do terrible things to other people if an authority figure is telling them to. The particular situation you refer to may show that people will also allow terrible things to be done to themselves by authority figures. I think it’s an aspect of human nature that our society does not do a good job of addressing.
And, I would add: no society in the history of the world has ever done a good job of addressing this problem. In America, we have a unique opportunity to address this better than other people have so far. It’s really an important thing, that we should be thinking more about.
Oh, it wasn’t all bad. He decided that the quickest way to the kind of job he would need was as a stockbroker, so he got his Series 7, kept studying for other certs and moved to NYC with her. Last I heard he was doing well; my one worry was that he liked to drink a bit too much.
W.C.,
This might be your best comment ever!