Site hosted by Angelfire.com: Build your free website today!



(A response to a claim that women have been oppressed. Made by a woman, so this proves not all women have been hypnotized by the media.)

James

 

A response to a claim that women have been oppressed

Written by "Baltoship"


I don't know if women were actually "oppressed" or not. If they were, I think men were just as oppressed because they were not (and still are not) permitted to act in "traditionally feminine" ways. It was just like everyone was stuck in his/her particular gender role, and no one was allowed or accepted to do anything else. I think there might have been some negative impressions that women had to deal with - for example, maybe people didn't realize they were *intelligent* enough to do the same things men were doing, and they were treated as simpletons. And it's true that, in history, women were considered lesser, because they weren't even allowed to vote, and the law used to say that a husband actually "owned" his wife. So it was kind of like slavery in that sense. But most of that changed long ago, quite a while before the 60s, so the "Liberation" thing really did not have to do with becoming "free." For some reason, women got the weird idea that anything men were doing had to be good and worth doing, so they decided to do it too. (Promiscuity? Sure ! That's a good idea !)

Of course the irony is that in all their rushing toward "female empowerment" (hmm...) they basically *dumped* what made them feminine, and glorified masculinity even more by imitating it. It seems to me like now women have claimed that for themselves, and now men are in some weird in-between - not allowed to act like "traditional men," and also (STILL) not really allowed to have feminine characteristics. It's like everybody's trying to be everything, sort of. Meanwhile, everyone is promiscuous, half the kids out there are accidents, and there are no families anymore because everybody's too busy having fun to raise kids properly.

I really don't know what the gender roles are anymore (Does anyone?) but I know that women have really put themselves into a bind. Now they have to be providers *and* beautiful sex objects, but they may still be considered "sluts," and modesty and virginity are no longer options, because that makes them "prudes." I don't know what the male situation is, but I'd suspect it is similarly confused.

I still hear them complain now and then, but I do not think oppression is such a big topic now. More than anything now, I hear women complaining *ceaselessly* about sexual attitudes toward them and how they are treated like objects or "meat" instead of human beings. Kinda puts the whole misguided "liberation" thing into perspective.

On a related but different topic, I have noticed that the media seems to portray men as oafs and simpletons, especially in commercials. It's not unusual to see scenes where men are just lying around while the women do all the housework, or they're incapable of cooking for themselves or cleaning up after themselves, and especially they are seen as incompetent around children. I am not sure what that is about or how it started, but it seems pretty sexist and unfair to me. If they showed women in a similarly incompetent light, people would probably complain. I am sure there is some material like that (About women being incapable around cars/machinery and such) but the ones about men seem a lot more common. Another example would be Disney films (my thing!) where the fathers are often half-witted as parents (Belle's father, Jasmine's father) or too stern and not quite sensible (Ariel's father) and there are never mothers around for very long. They are always taken out of the stories early on because "they will solve all the problems too quickly." Basically, there has to be a bumbling idiot parent around that the story will take a long time to resolve, and Disney does not like to portray women as idiots, so the idiot is always the dad. Pretty interesting . . .

"Baltoship"