Matt Gregory wrote:
Sue, you crack me up. I doubt I could ever write like that. Is that what you get when you write from the depths of your ego or something? That's the impression I get from that. When I do that I get that juvenile bathroom humor: jokes about pubic hairs and fat bitches.
It’s called channeling the devil.
I think my deepest egotistical impulse is just to rebel against all of society. It's got to be a male thing because I've always been confounded thinking that a woman would be the same way, even when she dresses up very strangely, like dying her hair jet black. You would think that jet black hair on a woman stands for rebellion, but it doesn't. It doesn't stand for anything. Women don't do things to express a principle, they just go with whatever feels best, I guess. Rebellion doesn't run very deep in them at all. That's almost incomprehensible to me because supposedly they are the downtrodden ones who would benefit most from it.
What you write is frighteningly true. Women don’t need principles, men do – women just need men.
You write that you find all this men and women stuff, “almost incomprehensible†– hell – it makes the gods sweat blood. Just the same, let’s see if we can make head or tail of it.
When a baby boy is born, his unformed future lays before him. As he grows, he prepares himself for the challenges ahead. Fully grown, he takes up a job that will from then on define him as a man.
With a baby girl it is different; she is born with her life fully formed. Femininity defines her; therefore, the moment of her birth, and the moment she reaches her full potential, are one and the same.
Accrediting your “impulse to rebel†as “a male thing†is correct when you consider how and why men lead the lives they do. Males, from any time or from any place in history, have all faced the same demands from their society – get a job, get food, get a mate, then fight other males for a better job, better food, and a better mate. All male endeavours can be boiled down to this cycle of toil. When men become great artists, musicians, scientists, leaders, or thinkers; they are still trapped in that same cycle - they have just pushed the bar up a peg or two.
A woman’s life is defined through her relationships with others. She becomes a child, girlfriend, wife, mother, or grandmother, because that role has been created for her through the other person. The more relationships that come her way; the more Woman she inherits. Even if she doesn’t have any relationships, and is alone in the world, she is still defined by Woman through the
lack of them. Because women are not defined by their actions like men are, what they do is of little consequence, that is - as long as they don’t stray too far from Woman. For example, an unmarried female President and her unmarried sister, raising six kids, have exactly the same status in the ‘Woman Stakes’ as each other - because they both lack that crucial relationship. For a woman to reach the highest that Woman has to offer, she would be married, or at least be coupled with someone, have children and lots of friends.
These relationships are extremely necessary. Through them, women’s emotions are given life; which in turn, gives her life meaning.
So women’s lives aren’t like men’s; they don’t have to fix their lives to some goal to create their own existence. Their lives flow freely from relationship to relationship, from circumstance to circumstance. Men can change and grow from their experiences; women never change, because they never experience anything directly – only through their emotions.
And Matt, your being “confounded†by Woman, is inevitable. Men value certainty - something woman can’t possess. Her emotions pull her first this way and then that way. Never are they at rest. Never are they satisfied. Women are compelled to change their hair, clothes, décor, boyfriend, job, ideas, husband, loves, hates - everything, all the time. No thing escapes this emotional whirlwind. Even the idea, that she is “downtroddenâ€, becomes just another emotional fix.
So Matt, you hit the nail on the head when you said, “Women don't do things to express a principle, they just go with whatever feels bestâ€. Expecting women to be able to have a principle, let alone express it, is asking something of them that they are entirely incapable of ever achieving.
Sue