This was a great post, but I especially loved this observation. This is such a simple thought that sums up so perfectly the way that so many people behave. Well put indeed!

I am a man who believes that woman is the “purest” expression of human. We all start out as female in the womb. That, to my mind, means that the basic template for homo sapiens is female. It is only later during gestation that the shift to male takes place and to me it has always seemd like men are an abberation, a necessary variation perhaps, but a change from the ideal in form and temperment.

However, I have also never agreed with the cliche notion that if women ruled there would be no war. Women often embody the best that the human race has to offer…but they can also display the worst and this post makes that point very clearly.

If women are the purest expression of the human condition, they can express the dark side as well as the warm. I am in awe and in fear of them at the same time, as I think most men are! (I’m kidding a bit there…but not much!)

I receive, to a lesser extent, a similar kind of disregard from certain quarters when I reveal that—despite a rather large published oeuvre, an obvious facility with language, a grasp of history, and various other emblems of intellectual ability—I am “only” a high school graduate. All of a sudden, I am a less significant person, someone certain people wish to treat as either an aberration or an intruder. They went through the paper mill and got their degrees, so how dare I presume to speak to them as equals? It’s often such a subtle shift in attitude that I find it difficult to define and combat. (I am largely self-taught.) It’s a class distinction that springs from people deriving self-worth from association rather than merit. It’s easier that way. One need not “prove” all the time what one can do, one merely has to point out that one has a degree from XYZ University, and that, supposedly, says it all.

Women have it much harder because they can’t pretend they aren’t women. (Some do, of course, but it’s much harder and less successful.) I have the option of saying nothing unless pressed–and everyone assumes I have a Masters Degree at the least. I can “pass” easily (except on a job application). Likewise with the race issue.

It is absurd and a measure of the lack of confidence we bring to the table. And people who have never felt this kind of discrimination often really have no idea what you’re talking about and think you’re nuts when you bring it up. (You must be one of those crazy “femin-nazis”!)

I remember one of the major points of the Women’s Lib movement was that until women were liberated, men would remain enslaved as well. Pity how much some people like their chains.

The majority in my profession are men. That has changed somewhat with time, but still it is largely true. I’ve always preferred it that way. Part of it of course is that I like men, have chosen to marry a couple of them (serial monogamy), but mostly it is because I didn’t like the petty problems that seemed to arise in female dominated offices. I didn’t like the tears that resulted when even the simpliest error was addressed (this file is in the wrong color folder…weep, weep). I can take some of the blame myself, I have a tendency to be blunt, especially when rushed, but I never had a man cry when I corrected an error. It occurred to me one day that I was being sexist, and asked myself if my preferences were only a sign of that bias.

To some degree, I think they are. When you ‘play with the boys’ you get to do the things they do. It was science and volleyball when I was a kid instead of dolls and tea sets. Grown up it means that I don’t make the coffee for the meeting, I’m at the conference table with something to say. But I don’t think that is all of it.

We women have an enormous amount of power, but we squander it by not even recognizing it. Most children spend a lot more time with their moms than with their dads. Very few dads get to be stay at home dads, and in many cultures, the child rearing is handled nearly exclusively by the women. We have the power in our hands to shape the next generation, but we allow stereotypes to determine too many things. We allow the girls to weep, but tell the boys to buck up and take it. Then as grown women we take out petty spites, gossip and otherwise demean the women around us, and more importantly, demean ourselves in the process. Just today a woman I know was insulted by a coworker for her clothing as being too tight. The “insultee” is a single woman raising children on a small paycheck and has gained some weight so her clothes are a little tight. Her dress should have been of no importance to the co-worker, and secondly, should have been overlooked as necessity. Now that slight will not be forgotten, as Chris describes above, and someone gets to deal with the ill wind between the two.

There is an old Native American joke: a man was walking by with two buckets full of crabs. Every few feet, the man would have to stop and put back in the crabs that had climbed out of one of the buckets. He didn’t have the problem with one of the buckets, the crabs all stayed in. But the crabs in the other one just kept getting out. Someone watching asked why one bucket of crabs stayed in and the other one didn’t. The man replied, “One is a bucket of white crabs. They climb on each other and get to the top and over the edge. The other is a bucket of Indian crabs (”In-dans” to us, “native Americans” to you). Everytime one of the crabs gets up a bit, another one pulls him back down to the bottom.”

That’s what it sometimes feels like to be a woman. We just keep pulling each other down.