The human animal is an exceedingly complex creature, and worthy of extensive study. That study can be made more manageable by studying smaller segments of the whole and how those segments interact with each other, then integrating that knowledge into something of a cohesive whole. The easiest segmentation is along gender lines and consider human males & human females. This is part one of that consideration.
Growing up, I was surrounded by my mom, my two sisters, my cousins (97.8999% of which were female), my mom's sisters and all their girlfriends, not to mention all the women around me in school. When I hit puberty and truly realized there is a difference between boys & girls, I became obsessed with understanding this seemingly eternal presence in my life. I can't tell you how much I've read, written, heard, saw, thought, and analyzed about women in service of my obsession, because frankly, I just don't know. But given the biological imperative behind it, I did what I normally do: keep my mouth shut and my eyes & ears open.
I watched as they taught each other how to use make-up, saw the rules of how the lovely creatures you see walking around are built, and paid attention to the seemingly never ending work needed to maintain that beautiful, yet ultimately false image. I listened to the things they said they wanted and seen what they ACTUALLY responded to, heard the complaints they made about the men in their lives and watched them go back to those men time & time again, and paid attention to their cries as they rang out against the injustices the world wrought upon them, while taking note of how they perpetuate those same injustices on each other.
The first conclusion I came to, upon analyzing the information presented to me, is that women are slaves to their emotions. Like a ship adrift on stormy seas, women chart their course based on their current emotional state, which is why their thought processes never seem to have any logical consistency. However, due to this heightened emotional state, women show a greater empathy for others. This empathy, coupled with the biological imperative to nurture, has earned women the role of guardians of the moral virtues of society. This is why women are consistently thought of as more virtuous. This also explains why society tends to shun women who do not live up to that ideal, especially in areas of sexual promiscuity and motherhood.
Also, because women are prone to being swept up in their own emotions, they become, more often than not, the architects of their own destruction. Time and time again I've seen women ignore the real world in favor of their own illusions. And when those illusions inevitably shatter under the weight of reality, women will grab the broken shards of their world and, barring an outside influence, immediately rebuild it. What's worse is that modern society actually ENCOURAGES this behavior.
The second conclusion I came to is that women are built to endure pain. From the purely physical stresses of childbirth, through the psychological trauma of interpersonal relationships, women absorb pain with a talent that is, at times, astounding.
The third conclusion I came to is that over the course of time, the never-ending societal pressure laid on women to look good has given them the ability to pierce and break down the images presented by other women as well as men. Minute discrepancies appear as glaring oversights in the female eye.
The fourth conclusion I came to is that the worst pain and issues a woman will ever have to deal with will come not from men but other women. Their capacity for empathy gives women the unique insight needed to undermine the efforts of the women around them, and if it takes time women will endure until the proper time. All the while watching and taking note of all the weaknesses their target displays.
Overall, it has become apparent to me that the domain of the female is the realm of the mind. It's widely known that the bulk of the human brain, about 70%, is devoted to processing visual information. With society's pressures to look good, women are trained from an early age to affect others with visual cues. That effect opens a door that women can then utilize to manipulate others, with their capacity for empathy giving them the knowledge to make educated guesses as to how others are feeling. And yet, while the mind is the realm of female power, it is also the seat of their greatest weakness.
In the end, women are exceedingly simple creatures. With the proper information, they can be easily understood.
Er . . . hmmm.
ReplyDeleteNope, I think I'll leave this one alone. :)
Rodney, Rodney, Rodney - you appear to be an intelligent man. Slaves to our emotions? Just because many of us express them does not mean we are slaves to them. We function in so many positions that require us to act with logic and intelligence these days I had hoped we had gotten beyond these stereotypes. As for the pain issue - that's true.
ReplyDeleteAt no point do I disallow the capacity for women to act with logic and intelligence. Many women are trained by society to simply not use that capacity. Think about it, how many times have you heard someone say to young girls something like "Don't be too smart, boys don't like that." That's the start of women being trained by society to ignore their minds for their emotions.
ReplyDeleteAs for the slaves part, I've already had one woman decline from reading the second part of this essay (dealing with men) because she "was too busy being mildly offended". Heightened emotional states prevent women from action. Unfortunately, this behavior is trained into women by society, just as men are trained to ignore their emotions. Both ways seem to me, for lack of a better term, incorrect, but at the same time, human society has existed for several thousand years on it, so who am I to comment?
Stereotypes will remain in the human parlance for as long as humans continue to attempt to categorize the world around them. After all, that is what a stereotype is, a categorization of something. However, this isn't a stereotype.
This not meant to apply as it stands to every single woman in humanity. What I have listed here are simply facts as I see them. Listed together to form a basic template, a starting point which one can build on to gain further understanding of individual humans.