Mars and Venus

So, lately I have been wondering about something. For years I've described myself as a feminist, in the why-the-hell-wouldn't-you-be sense that (I would hope) almost everyone is.

I am, however, dead against certain other forms of feminism. There seem to be a few voices in the world that, I am convinced, are being paid off by time-travelling Edwardian misogynists. Whereas the good ol' boys of the Industrial Revolution held that science and technology were male concerns that women's brains were unsuited to, these difference feminists hold that science and engineering and critical thinking and all rational thought are the product of the male mind: alien, and perhaps harmful to women.

What I find interesting, though, is where the idea of the male gender has gone. I kind of liked the old ideal of manhood back around the eighteenth century or so- proud, rational and sanguine. It's a pretty poor description for any human being, but a pretty good ideal for everyone, I reckon. What we have now is, if you'll excuse me a moment while I destroy any claims to classiness I may have had up to this point, exemplified in recent James Bond films. No, really. To be a man now is to be aggressive, forthright, and a little bit stupid. Masculinity is associated with a joie-de-vivre bordering on childishness. It's being a 'bloke'. There's a curious sense of inferiority to women. There's a defeatism that set in about the time that someone realised that while women's brains are blasted with hormones every month or so, ours are soggy with testosterone from the age of thirteen until we kill ourselves fishing with dynamite. There's an idea that we're good for opening jars and such, and that's about it.

It's all in good fun and might even be progress if it weren't for the whole discrepencies-in-earnings and thats-womans-work kind of things that still go on. Me, I'm going to keep on trying to be John-Stuart Mill, and anyone's welcome to come along.