The Battle of the Sexes

Now there is an outdated phrase if there ever was one.  It brings to mind visions of Billy Jean King playing that tennis match against Bobby Riggs in the ’70’s.  But kind of like a wildfire in a peat bog, it may seem to have gone out, but it’s just smoldering underground, ready to burst into flames again with the right fuel. 

Not that it’s ever far from my mind, but the issue was really brought home to me today when I read Judith Warner’s blog in the NY Times, entitled “Dude, You’ve Got Problems”.  http://warner.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/04/16/who-are-you-calling-gay/?ref=opinion

She begins by telling the story of an 11 year-old boy from Massachusetts who came home and hanged himself after persistently being called “gay”  at school.  What Warner points out is that these bullies don’t really mean “gay”…what they mean is “you act like a girl”.  So I started thinking about what it means to act like a girl. 

I’m guessing it means some of these things:  Crying.  Not liking, or not being good at sports.  Liking poetry and flowers.  I’m trying to figure out how that can be a bad thing if you’re a boy, and a good thing if you’re a girl.  It’s either a good thing, or a bad thing. 

I previously mentioned that all the men I’ve ever been interested in are big sports fans.  I have a theory about that…which is that they have to do something with all that excess testosterone.  Football in particular I think is an exercise in vicariously beating the shit out of somebody, which is normally prohibited in everyday life.  But I failed to mention that all the men I’ve ever been interested in are also not that one-sided.  They like art, literature, theater, good food, the symphony, not necessarily all of them but some of them.  I wonder how many of them were able to express that as kids.  However they did it, I salute them for being able to express it as adults.  That’s probably what I really like…the intelligence and the courage not to be locked into a box. 

But girl-hating is alive and well.  It isn’t as popular as it used to be, so it’s gone underground like that peat bog fire I mentioned.  I rarely encounter it, and partly I think that’s because I’m not looking for it.  If you look for girl-hating, like racism, you will always find it.  I don’t conduct myself in a way that would make it rear its ugly head.   But there are still men out there who put women into one of two categories:  bitch, or slut.  If you aren’t one, you are the other, but it’s possible to be both.  I am neither.

I know hundreds of men vaguely, due to my work, but only one I would say is the epitome of the kind of man I despise.  This man is married, and from what I can tell, it’s one of those situations where the wife is “in charge”.  So all his interactions with women outside his marriage are full of resentment and revenge.  I haven’t seen this in person, but I know someone who plays golf with this man–not by choice, it’s a business thing–and he asked me one day if I had ever seen–we will call him Mark–when he’d been drinking.  Apparently, Mark’s treatment of women ranges from leering and ass-grabbing to outright abuse and humiliation.  It’s always someone he perceives as subordinate to him, like a waitress. 

So while I don’t look for it, let’s say that I’m alert to it.  Men and women are different.  We’re made differently, and we think differently.  But we aren’t different species.  The boundaries between us are not always that great.  At the very least, we should teach little boys that being like a girl is not the worst thing that could ever happen to you.