Male and female created he...

Nothing book- related to occupy my mind just now so I’m thinking about Chillside’s blog on women’s suffrage and the lack of interest many women show toward the hard-won privilege nowadays.

It continues, for me, a conversation I had with my daughter yesterday about the role of men and women. That conversation started in an oblique way during the early morning coffee exchange about the well-being of her son, soon to be ten years old and already interested in getting ‘dates’ (usually just a bike trip round the local park as far as we know...) Chloë was waxing worried about his future experiences and the unkindness of schoolgirls, in fact the horridness of girls who will soon be tormenting her son. I must say I join her in that worry. Unlike Chillside I have a jaundiced view of women and see them as the stronger sex, very manipulative and overbearing toward their male counterparts. These days especially, young women are hurtful and bitchy toward the lads who they taunt, tantalise and string along, then make fools of.

Chloë remembers herself coming on to men when she was quite young - jail bait in fact. It’s wrong to say young girls don’t know their own power - they do and they glory in using it. I remember how much fun certain girls got in my Grammar school from trying out their charms in order to make the young maths master sweat and stutter. We were twelve years old.

We thought about the marriages we know that seem to ‘work’ and generally there is not only mutual respect between the partners but a sense that the male is strong and in charge. He will have the last word in any decision making. Chloë doesn’t want any more weak men; she wants one she can respect and put into a conventional role of provider and protector, even though she is herself very strong and is doing the providing very well just now. Unfortunately I don’t think boys these days have much chance of learning that role since so many of their fathers have had their testosterone derided and their masculinity despised.

I think my son has managed to survive being the one male in a household of females for many years of his life and still emerged essentially masculine. He had some good friends wth strongly masculine, intelligent fathers. He had his own father, at a distance but still present in our household in many ways, who is also strong and male in an intellectual way, very confident and very able to find his way about the world. I hope I also did my bit to give him self-respect and to make sure his sisters showed him respect as a human being, even when they were having problems with the whole sexual identity thing and finding his male energy hard to endure. He in turn learned a lot about the emotional roller-coaster women ride, hagridden by their hormones.

(As an aside I think that self-respect is the key to any good upbringing. If a child isn’t given that by the close adults in its life, and hasn’t been able to see those adults respecting themselves and each other then life is much much harder for them along their own journey.)

Getting back to the question of suffrage. Could it be that more women than care to admit actually WANT the world to be run by men? There is a joke about the wife who takes all the decisions on how to spend the money, where to go on holiday, how to bring up the children etc. etc. whilst the man sees the world to rights by keeping an eye on politics and world affairs. It’s all about division of labour and I feel I am cut out for a different purpose to men. I never wanted to rule the World. I like to rule my own world which is a not the same thing at all. I wanted my husband to be strong. Mostly he was and I respected him at those times even when it frustrated my whims.

Like most of the human condition the roles and relationships of men and women will never be fully defined because we are all individuals and what’s good for one isn’t good for the other. Furthermore we all have the ‘corpse in the cargo’ (as Ibsen called it,) our own unique inherited mix of nature and nurture.

Ouch. Too many thoughts. My head hurts.