Snippet #1: I was off to visit my team which was situated in another city a little while back. The day before I left, I had a team lunch as was the norm. The topic of my upcoming surgery came up and one person asked, "So, what's this surgery for?", to which I replied, "Oh, just some female stuff". He shuddered and exclaimed, "I'm glad I'm not female!", which earned him The Glare from both his manager (who's female) and I.
Snippet #2: I was chatting with a couple of senior executives recently. It was a casual hallway chat and these two have been needling at one another for some time now. One of them (let's call him Mr. A) was complaining about the other (Mr. B) treating him "mean" and solicited my input on the matter. My response was apparently quite funny to Mr. B (which wasn't really what I intended), who then proceeded to smack Mr. A on the arm and said, "See? Even she knows how to man up better than you do!"
I'm currently reading Off Armageddon Reef by David Weber. As with practically all of of his books, this is a great read. In this novel, the protagonist is a woman whose personality and memory has been put into an artificial body long after she died. She awakes centuries after her death to find the last human planet regressed and strayed horribly from the original colonization plan. Understanding that social mores have shifted back to hard patriarchy, she reconfigures her artificial body into a male one in order to nudge the world back on the original plan (and thus have a defence against the alien menace that wiped out Earth in the first place).
Here's my question to you all - I propose that were it a matriarchy and the protagonist was male, the thought of switching to being female to help achieve the mission wouldn't ever cross his mind. Thoughts? Am I wrong? I submit that there's nothing wrong with either solution in this hypothetical case - I'm just curiously exploring why societal norms seem to encourage a unidirectional "man up" attitude (and an unspoken converse of "fem down").
3 comments:
OK. Snippet 1. I go to the doctor when something is broken (like once a decade). And let's not even go to clothes budgets. Or worse, undergarment budgets. I propose that not wanting to be female is a completely rational response in that situation. Heck, it's a completely rational response for any guy at any time...
It has always been thus. Comments like"you throw like a girl", "be a man" all imply that it is best to be male. Just as it is an insult for a boy to be "girly" or a "mamma's boy", it is more acceptable for a girl to be a "tomboy". Why is it that the gentler female traits such as care and nurturing are not as highly valued by a large portion of society, yet aggression is? You could also consider the prediliction of popular media to glorify violence, not just crashes and the like, but in particular violence against women. It is evident in the way that women are viewed as objects or property to be leered at or used that some parts of society do not place enough value on the contribution and the innate power that women have. Women have a higher tolerance for pain because we have to put up with all of the things that society puts out that would make us into second class citizens. Is this not what we are fighting against? I am sure there are some men somewhere who value and treasure the role of women, but why is it that they seem so rare? And why don't more men speak up on the value of women? We should be able to work together to create a society that is respectful and caring towards ALL.
Haven't men tradtionally tested and measured themselves by things like physical prowess, strength, size and the ability to 'provide' for the family / clan? I speaking in VERY broad terms here but generally speaking women are physically smaller and weaker and so that places us (from the men's perspective) as lower down in the heirarchy. From there the common attitude has been to equate our mental abilities and our feminine values at a similar place in the hierarchy - namely less than the men. Until men embrace an alternate method of testing and measuring up against each other (we will never be rid of the need to compete with each other) that attitude is pretty much going to stay in place.
Now in regards to the hypothetical male protagonist in a matriarical society. If the persona and positions of power and influence were exclusively female, and he is dealing with an artificial body, then perhaps switching to a female body type to achieve his goals will not be so far fetched after all. Would it really be all that different from wearing a disguise or a mask? How far does the artificial exterior influence the concept of the self within?
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