Culture or Nurture

At the turn of the twentieth century, there was a women's movement to get the right to vote. This lead to the 19th amendment passed in 1920. Imagine that. Some 150 years after the formation of the country and women weren't guaranteed the right to vote. Then, in the 1970's, there was a push to pass the equal rights amendment so women would get equal pay for equal work. That one did not make it, even though there was fervor to make it happen. That was the second resurgence of women's rights and these women were called feminists.

Conservatives have done a reasonably good job at making feminism a bad word, much as they made liberalism a bad word. It was done subversively. Can you imagine, in this day and age, women trying to organize based on political ideas? The phrase "femi-nazis" arose claiming these women were men-hater, and indeed, questioning their sexuality. And what's more powerful a threat than that for the heterosexual masses?

Although there's been less organization among women these days than some thirty years ago, women have seen some advances. For example, in relationships, guys have become as self-conscious about their weight and appearance as women. Some guys even care about their clothing and appearance as much as women and have been branded as metrosexuals, straight guys who would otherwise be perceived as gay. In relationships, guys are as likely to cook as women, and women are as likely to not cook as guys. Women think of careers as a matter of course, not getting married. Nearly every couple I know have both spouses working, assuming they don't have kids. Raising kids is still predominantly a woman thing, even as some guys have helped shoulder the burden of raising kids.

Despite these advances, cultural norms are incredibly powerful. Nowhere did I get a stronger sense of this than when I went to a department store a couple years ago, and was surrounded by aisle after aisle of shoes. Women's shoes. And women's purses. Women seem to divide among those who are ambitious and may or may not care about these things, and those that like looking at catalogs or magazines to check out the latest fashion.

Even relatively bright women get caught up in this. I was hanging out with my cousin and his fiancee (at the time, his girlfriend) and we were at one of their friend's house. Now I'm maybe ten years older, but these days, older people are somehow much better able to understand the younger generation. I'm listening to music, for example, that people ten or fifteen years younger listen to, although, to be fair, there are people my age listening to these groups too. The notion that the older you get, the less satisfied you are with today's music and long for the music of youth seems to have faded, and even today's youth have resurrected careers. Johnny Cash, for instance, is as popular now as he ever was when he was alive, among a crowd that generally doesn't consider country music something they appreciate.

While we were at the house, someone picked up one of those Hollywood magazines that gossip on celebrities. This resulted in something amounting to a pig book, with the person reading it commenting on how ugly this person had become or that person had become. They had become total reductionist, judging people by the way they used to look and the way they look now.

It's partly a result of George Carlin's theory that a person's level of idiotness is proportional to their distance from you. The further away they are, the more of an idiot they are. People passionately hate Bonds or Bush in a way they don't hate their acquaintances (unless they do something specifically spiteful to them).

Similarly, you can comment on people's beauty from a distance. The further away they are, the more you can be critical of it. This is fascinating because I'd argue that women, having been raised on being told how beautiful they are from doting parents, have a weak psyche when it comes to their own self-image. Were I to tell this girl reading that she looked quite a bit more horrid than the last time I saw her, she'd probably freak out and start yelling. Of course, since I'd never seen her, this statement would be there to provoke.

But what I really want to get at, in terms of equality in men and women, has to do with everyday things. How many fathers feel that they have to teach their sons how to do things of a mechanical nature. Fix cars or anything mechanical, while telling their daughters none of these things, since this would be too mentally taxing, too butch for their minds.

Recently, our house got a bit flooded. This happens because the house lies a bit underground as many do, and water, which should normally get pumped out, can sometimes get clogged, as the water rushes over the bottoms of door, and into the basement area. It took a day of blowing fans to dry it, then a few hours of my roommates time to get the carpet cleaned so it would avoid a stink.

Now, suppose I had women living their instead. To be sure, I'm as incompetent as they come when it comes to all things mechanical, but as their is a cultural imperative for me to understand some of these things, I have to accept that I need to know a little bit of this. While I understand there are women who are more than skilled to do what my roommates did, I also understand that these numbers are small. Women are still, by and large, meant to leave such issues to men, even though the physical task should be well within the capability of women to handle.

And that leads me to the point I'd like to make, which is this. How many women tend to need to men to handle these kinds of problems? What percentage of women would do it? I could easily imagine that someone calling up our landlords, who are really quite elderly, and telling them it's their job to fix this problem (and to be fair, it sort of is, but it never came up during the cleanup that we should insist on them doing this for us).

Men, on the other hand, would generally be laughed if they said roughly the same thing. Guys are supposed to fix things themselves. Guys aren't supposed to whine and lean on others.

I've heard guys who lavish praise on the fairer sex, and that's fine. We all need to work together. But given the choice to have the burden of being a guy, most guys would take that, deciding there are some things that women should handle, and some things guys should handle.

If we're going to get to some level of equality--and there's incredible cultural pressure against this, then women have to do things that they normally say guys should handle. I believe guys are actually making better progress on this, perhaps because guys had further to go. Once upon a time, a guy wouldn't think of cooking or cleaning. That was a woman's job. Now, guys do this as frequently as women. But I can't think of a particular task, except possibly managing money, that women have now taken a greater step in handling (oh, yes, there is simply having jobs outside the home) than they once did.

Doing basic fix-up is really the last area that women need to make progress on. I think it will come, even if it is extremely slow in coming.

This, I realize, isn't a particularly PC comment to make, and would, were I dealing with a much wider reading audience, raise people's ire. I haven't even decided whether these differences have its roots in genetics, which may be.

Eh, it's good, every once in a while, to write something a little provocative.