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I struggle with men. I struggle with women too. In fact, the whole idea of men and women and all the complexities inherent in that, can leave me cold.
Fighting for this, fighting against that, finding common ground. Men are from Mars and women are from some other planet we’ve never visited. It can all feel superficial and facile. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not diminishing the search for balance and truth. I’m all about that. Yet the debate and the diatribes never end.
I have met many men who fit all of the male stereotypes. They’re dominant in their behaviour, sexualise their interactions with women and dress in a ‘manly’ way. They struggle to get in touch with, let alone express their emotions. But I’ve also met women like that too.
Similarly, I can’t tell you how many women leave me scratching my head at their love of numerous handbags and makeup kits. I mean, how many palettes of makeup do you really need? Why are you putting layers of stuff on your face, wiping it off, adding more layers of other stuff and then covering that over too? Isn’t that a form of madness?
I like makeup to a degree. It takes the edge off! As I mature in my physical expression (yes, that’s a nice way of saying getting older,) there are definitely more crevasses and precipices to blend away. Yet that can be done minimally. And I don’t understand why this diminishment or enhancement tool, isn’t available to men too.
Gender rules
Don’t we all need to take the edge off after a certain age? It can definitely help when you want to feel less crinkly! You see it’s precisely all of these conflicting rules parodying themselves as inherent to a particular gender, that gets me riled up. These endless rules of engagement.
It’s the pointless narratives holding themselves up as truth, that annoy me. Yet none of these rules really challenge the whole concept of how genitalia A makes me completely different from genitalia B.
After all, didn’t ancient Egyptian pharaohs wear eye makeup? Weren’t white face powder, beauty spots and rouge, the norm for ‘aristocratic’ men in ye olde England? Don’t like ads? Become a supporter and enjoy The Good Men Project ad free |
After all, didn’t ancient Egyptian pharaohs wear eye makeup? Weren’t white face powder, beauty spots and rouge, the norm for ‘aristocratic’ men in ye olde England?
Just as with race, there are preferences I may have that seem innate because of how I was raised. For example, there are certain foods that I crave precisely because of what they’re associated with in my memory or culture. There are also certain foods I crave precisely because they weren’t, a part of my culture.
My preferences or conditionings don’t qualify as absolute truth. They are what they seem, preferential. Even when preferences and conditionings are innate (i.e. handed down in the form of DNA) they’re still not absolute truth.
I get to change, grow, evolve and be self-determined
That’s the beauty of being human. Even my DNA has space for that. After all, how do I know that junk DNA isn’t just hidden lifetimes’ worth, of information?
Maybe I was a man in a previous life. I might have been a sensitive soldier in the Crimean war, who cried because he was forced to kill his fellow man. How do I know I wasn’t a syphilitic prostitute who broke all the rules of what was acceptable with regard to female behaviour? Who knows? Does it really matter? All these examples determine is that we all got to play lots of roles and therefore also prove that nothing is written in stone.
The outrage from those who fully believe in their conditioning and the rules they live by, is intense. It’s intense precisely because they struggle to remain open to other points of view. They want certainty, so they abide by or create that certainty in the form of restrictions. Particularly restrictions on which gender does what. Yet those restrictions are also fluid because their rules change and evolve over time.
It now seems quite ludicrous to most of us in the West these days, that a woman showing her ankle in Victorian times was scandalous, yet we get up in arms about a woman wearing a burqa in some other culture. Same rules, different time. The hypocrisy is hilarious.
I see my conditioning
I see how I’ve been conditioned to behave, think and act. I look at it all with a skewed eye. I check myself regularly to see if what I’m believing in is real or learned behaviour. When it’s learned, then I check to see if I still want to remain identified with it. If I can’t detach from it, I accept that, but I don’t call it real. I let myself be in the narrative, while still looking beyond it and take it from there. I hope for a world where that becomes the norm.
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This post is republished on Medium.
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