And it highlights a point and reminds me [[queue Nerdy Star Trek example]] of an episode of some Star Trek series where Worf is being made fun of by a few other Klingons who make taunts about how he's lost his warrior spirit, how Star Fleet has tamed him and how he's become weak and pampered. Worf retorted that the Klingons were, in fact, the weak ones because they were doing ONLY that which came natural and easy to them. The stronger person always fights the battle that is the hardest. That the toughest war to fight is with yourself, to always improve yourself and to see something bigger than your natural compulsion to do a thing.
As the series progressed and they developed the Klingons into three-dimensional characters, we eventually learned that Klingon women are arguably even tougher than their men. Someone asked Worf to describe a Klingon mating ritual. He got a faraway look in his eyes and said wistfully, "The women stalk us and throw heavy objects." When asked, "So what do the men do?" he replied, "We read romantic poetry to them... and duck a lot."
Nonetheless the women were not treated equally under Klingon law. I don't remember it precisely, but a widow was in danger of losing her husband's estate if she didn't remarry within a prescribed time period. Quark the Ferengi smelled a profit and offered to marry her to solve her problem, if she'd share some of the swag with him and then divorce him. They went through with this and after everything was settled he was quite ready for the divorce. He asked her with some trepidation how divorce was done among Klingons. She said, "Easy." She picked him up, threw him to the floor, yelled some ritual chant full of guttural Klingon consonants, and spit in his face.
In this case, I like to remind "manly men" that if they are only fighting the "physical fight" then they aren't being as tough and brave as possible.
Cultural habits change slowly, and this has become a problem in recent centuries as our technological development has accelerated.
Look no further than the Third World, where just a couple of generations ago women had to bear as many children as possible to make sure that a couple of them survived to keep the bloodlines alive, take care of the family business, and provide for the elders in a society with no safety net. Today sanitation, vaccines and antibiotics keep ten of those twelve children alive and it's ruining their economies, but they can't change
who they are.
Not long ago even we in the West had hard lives requiring women to stay home bearing and nursing children in safety, while the men went out to battle predators, other men with uniforms and weapons, or the topography as they laid railroad tracks and built steel mills. Every generation passes down its own values and customs to its children; after all, how else do children learn?
Those of us who lived through the Generation Gap in the 1960s saw a singularity, as a whole generation rejected our parents' values regarding race, religion, war, sex, intellectualism and many other things. Nonetheless, for every traditional value we rejected there were twelve that we unconsciously accepted. We speak proudly of feminism and it was indeed a real breakthrough, but it hardly overturned 100% of the traditional role assignments. Look at Helen Gurley Brown and her so-called "stiletto feminism," in which women were taught to get what they want by manipulating men via our libidos.
We old hippies are proud of the advances in the male/female dichotomy in the last fifty years, just as we are of the advances in race relations. But just as an Afro-American in the White House doesn't mean Jim Crow is dead (Voter ID, anyone? there's less than one case of voter fraud per state per year), the fact that a woman came close to getting the nomination he won doesn't mean that there isn't still a caveman or cavewoman lurking inside each of us.
Try to identify your stereotypical male behaviors. Analyze them. Some of them are okay because for the goddess's sake
men and women really are different, duh? But if you find one that is not okay, just spend some time thinking about it. Is it something that would improve the world if you could fix it, or is it just something silly that makes life interesting?
Put your effort into the things with the greatest payoff. You know what I have trained myself to do? Always put the toilet seat down. I don't care what arguments you guys can muster for not doing it. My rejoinder is: "If you can make a woman
that happy with such an infinitesimal amount of time and effort, you have to be a
real oaf to not do it."
As many of you know, my wife and I have been living on opposite coasts for several years due to my job. And as many of you may also know, since I have no interest in sports and I don't enjoy being drunk (right there I've failed the he-man test), most of my friends are women. She really worries about me. She says, "When you walk out of one of your female friends' house, and she goes into the bathroom and sees the seat down, she probably comes running out into the street banging on the trunk of your car, shouting, 'Hey wait a minute! You come back here!' "
What manly things do you other guys do to make women chase after you?
