(Insert title here)
Orleander said:
Is she his Mom and he needs to be told?
I don't know where to start on that one.
And being in a 5 yr relationship doesn't mean a person isn't an asshole. It just means that person has found one person on the planet to put up with them.
And that's the great thing about assholes. We all have one, and we all are one. My apologies, of course, to those who have and are colostomy bags.
While an earlier consideration of sexism and misogyny as relates to the topic was set aside when my net access temporarily collapsed, I do want to counterpoint it in advance, in large part because you have put a context before me that suggests the need. Er ... or at least the opportunity.
Many men, myself included, and most likely Asguard, local friends of mine and longtime mates spread across the states, definitely my father and brother, some guys I used to work with, and certainly this moron named Dan who, for some reason, my friend Alison continues to put up with, receive a tremendous amount of information about how to regard women
from women. There are two complications, of course, that we cannot discount. First, obviously, are social cycles, while the second is no less obvious but even harder to identify specifically, and that is confusion, misinterpretation, or, since I believe the burden of communication is on the broadcasting/transmitting party, poor explanations.
Those two complications noted, though, the reality is that much of what a man does to piss off a woman, he learns from
other women. A superficial example might be the notion of
opening a door for a woman. I've learned, after years of conflict, to simply open doors for just about anybody. That way, I don't have to look at a woman and say, "What? I didn't want to insult your capability." And I don't have to suffer the ceaseless rage of a halfwit stripper with a feminist streak who would get pissed about little things like that. Best answer I could find was to find the best way to avoid
either extreme.
A more complex example, of course, would be abortion. A mother can be as genuinely feminist as can be, and she'll still say nasty things about her son's boyfriend's womanhood. My mother, who has taken the long road to feminism, said things about my daughter's mother that I generally wouldn't have said to her. Part of it, of course, is that despite all I badmouth my former partner, there are certain things I won't say, and there are certain things I won't say in certain company. And mothers are just one example. If I had called her one day and said, "Just so you know, in case sometime I let it slip out, she had an abortion yesterday," my mother would have done just fine with that. When I finally called her and told her she was to be a grandmother, she was horrified. Truth told, we'd all hoped that her first grandchild would come from a better woman, but life goes on. None of what's happened since has changed anyone's opinion of my former partner for the better ... well, okay, I take that back. One of my friends, at least, despises her less. But we leave the frustration that is
her out of it as much as possible. I mean, nobody pretends I'm any sort of prize, but ... but I digress.
The point being that nothing I learned from one girlfriend ever applied to the next, except
maybe a lucky streak of three or four women who never complained about my cunninlinguistics. But, really, the little things? If I've become cynical about women in sexual relationships, it's no more than the cynicism I show other people. I hear from Christians about Christians. I hear from women about women. Well, you can actually
lose a woman by being nice to her. Seriously. I have
lost a girlfriend before because I didn't treat her enough like a whore. (What the
f@ck!)
But not every guy on the planet is either so unfortunate or cynical as I am. Some of them really do think their girlfriends and wives are being truthful and accurate when they explain what "women" think and what "women" like. And it gets them in trouble, and if they're smart they figure it out eventually. If not, they run a high risk of becoming open misogynists who write off everything to the fact that women have vaginas.
Between their mothers and their histories, heterosexual men have a lot to figure out. My former partner said at least once that it would have been okay if I had just disappeared. In the first place, that wasn't going to happen. My first known blood relative on the planet, and I'm going to
disappear? And, to the other, I didn't trust her to hold to it. Nor, we should note, would I have pursued that in writing. I would imagine some guys
might, but if e'er there is a confession of ice-cold spiritual vacuity, that would be it. To the other, I've heard some tough talk over time. She doesn't need him. She doesn't want him. He can f@ck right off into the sunset. They're better off without him. And I've heard bravado, too. She wouldn't want him around. She wouldn't need him. He would only complicate things. And some of these women had boyfriends or lovers who were present at the time. Can we blame them if they thought, "
Awesome, dude. I'm in the f@cking clear!"
Maybe. But these
are the sharper examples, ranging toward the extreme. It is not impossible that a man could become accustomed to a specific mentality among the women he dates. And it
would be nearly impossible to presume that he understands the nuances of that outlook. After all, women are human too, and communicate their perspectives and intentions just as poorly as the rest of us.
Not every bad idea men have about women comes from the locker room, or the perverts' corner at the bar. Some of it comes from their mothers. Some of it comes from their lovers. Some of it comes from co-workers, chicks at the bar, women in the Bible study circle. Their wives' sisters and friends, their mothers-in-law.
And over time, ideas tend to firm up, become less flexible, harder to uproot. What grows from diverse ideological seeds can be unpredictable and, ultimately, mysterious.