Boys Don’t Cry

This blog is brought to you after extensive interviews with my best Tony and my Brother. Their serious engagement with the subject matter and their candid disclosure is a testament to their sensitivity. The two bottles of Chianti that I plied us with also helped (and explains the typos and the sweeping generalisations).

The great Blog+Gender debate started off by Fiona has been some fun. I still don’t think I ever fully articulated my view. A female caucus is a good idea and should be encouraged. Unfortunately due to pressures of time – so much to read so little time – I’d have to be honest and say I probably would n’t be participating a whole lot. I don’t read enough so when I do I deliberately don’t concentrate only on a narrow exposition of “women’s issues”. For this reason, and because I honestly believe that no amount of Cosmo quizzes are ever going to get me to that multiple orgasm nirvana, I don’t as a rule read “women’s magazines”. Thanks to the suffrage of generations before me, I sit fully convinced that that which separates my success from that achieved by my male partners is luck and my own endeavour.

I am interested in why people can’t see that Men and Women are not equal and shouldn’t be expected to be equal. After all Men and Men aren’t equal and neither are Women and Women. It is this diversity that creates life’s rich tapestry. But I’d like to be less airy-fairy and a little more incisive.

From what my interviewees tell me, men are constructed differently. They are hormonally driven to be the show off strutting their stuff. They need to win, they need to be seen to be winning and they are programmed to want to vanquish totally their opponents. Macho, bold and decisive, they are required to fight for, control and dictate. As a rule most dictators have been male and the few female dictators have been very masculine.

Women by design are less driven by the need to succeed in these male terms. They are hormonally driven to be less showy, to protect and guard. They are happy to pass up the appearance of winning for longer term, less heralded success. As a rule, they dislike confrontation and begin most counter arguments with “well that’s right, I agree… before proceeding to disagree!” Women are irrational, complex, and erratic and not easily understood individuals

But please don’t agree or disagree with any of the above. The above paragraphs are deliberately contentious. Instead if you are a woman, explain to the male blogger why it is okay to show emotion and how it can be so mature to cry. Tell them how we women love sensitivity . Explain how we will stop the oppression of men by demanding that they are tall dark and silent. Give them some way to get themselves out of the corners that their male egos constantly paint themselves into. Do anything that will turn the tide of suicide that is so particularly prevalent amongst our young men. If you are a man, forgive us for discriminating against you and try to understand that we are the ones with the issues not you.