RUTHFULLY YOURS

Sophocles is reported to have said that the male libido was like being chained to a lunatic.

I can honestly say, being a woman in 21st-century America, that I have him beat cold. I have somehow been chained to over a hundred and fifty million lunatics.

Okay, not every woman is a lunatic. I even have women friends. But making friends with women is like making friends in the science fiction field. I start by assuming they will be part of a strange form of Marxist victim-group and I look for signs they might, just might, be safe.

Then there’s a whole dance as you reveal yourself to the other as not-a-standard-woman.

At first, I thought American women had a chip on their shoulder, but I didn’t realize it was nearly this bad.

First, so you can understand where I’m coming from – because I have been told the reason I’m not hot for “feminism” is that women won the fight for me. The country I grew up in gave women the vote in the seventies. Further, when I was a child, getting a private passport for a married woman was difficult, and my mom had a “family passport,” which meant dad had to affidavit her every time she wanted to go to Spain to shop. Married women needed to have permission from their husbands to get a job. (Which meant many women worked under the table.) When I was in fifth and sixth grade, both of which were in mixed classes, it was assumed as a matter of course that girls couldn’t outperform boys, and when I did – routinely – the teachers acted like a wondrous thing had happened.

There were a lot of other restrictions, like the fact that no sane woman would go out after dark because there was a very high chance you’d be confused with a prostitute.

But here’s the thing: I don’t remember ever attributing any actual reverses in my life to being a woman. I managed to enter college. Heck, my cousin, who is 14 years older than me, is a chemical engineer. I don’t think she ever attributed any reversals in her life to being a woman either.

My mother ran her own business and out-earned my father for most of her marriage.

Sure, men discriminated against women. But women could still manage to be successful. And didn’t waste their time attributing their failures or their issues to men’s plotting.

Sure as a young woman I snapped off a lot of noses — and hands and… never mind. At fourteen grandma gave me a hat pin with which to discourage men rubbing against me in the bus. It worked too. And sure, I wished I could have more freedom and that people didn’t assume I was an idiot because I was a woman. But very few of them assumed I was an idiot after I had a chance to open my mouth.

And it truly never occurred to me to think that men were sabotaging me. Once you proved yourself, most men treated you fine.

I didn’t hear the phrase “he’s afraid of a strong woman” until I came to the States.

This was the eighties. To me, the U.S. was a wonderful place. No one acted like I was obviously less smart than boys. And no one treated me like I was a child.

And yet, I soon found that women about ten years older than me attributed all my issues or problems to “men are afraid of strong women.”

I’ve had bad bosses of both sexes, with a slight lead for women, mostly because I’ve had more female bosses. But none of those older women ever said, “Your female boss is afraid of strong women,” even though in my experience females are more likely to be afraid of women who are supposed to be their subordinates and whom they can neither intimidate nor control.

In fact, it was always a mystery to me how these male bosses were supposed to know that I was a “strong woman,” since in my twenties I was shy to the point of incoherence and polite to the point of self-effacement.

After a while that started annoying me, but even then, I don’t think I could possibly have guessed how crazy things were going to go.

Nowadays it seems to be an actual crime to be male. From schools to colleges, we are doing our best to make every boy behave like a girl and every man become just like a woman.

And even then, until this year I couldn’t have imagined the spectacle the Kavanaugh hearings have turned into.

How is it possible that Christina Blasey Ford has been asked to testify before the most august body in the land on a ridiculous, unproven and unprovable charge, which – should it prove true – amounts to the fact that a seventeen-year-old boy might have been uncouth and somewhat ridiculous at a drunken party, something that is neither a crime nor, to be fair, unusual. CONTINUE AT SITE