My experience with Western society is that gender roles are conventionally a division of labour, whereby males are expected to do all the hard lifting in terms of solving life’s problems and women are expected to reciprocate by processing their (male) emotions for them.
This keeps everyone at a very infantile level, because the system of assigning genders to do certain roles can only work by means of projective identification. How can a woman process the various emotions a male might be feeling unless he projects them into her, to begin with? She accepts them as “the emotional one” and performs a hygienic role of allowing him to be unimpeded by emotions in his work.
Certainly I think this is what many men and women are reacting to. It’s where gender politics can go wrong, because often people are reacting to the dismantling of this practice and the way it leaves them out in the cold. It’s absolutely necessary for this system to be dismantled, but it means each person has to be an individual in their own right, not a function of part of one. Many “men’s rights” guys freak out because women are no longer playing their expected role. They are reacting to the betrayal of expectations concerning this role. Women, too, dig their heels in and refuse to budge when they create systems of female solidarity that reinforce the view that women are fundamentally emotional and sensitive creatures. We are not.
The feminist project is for both men and women to be stand-alone adults. This is a process of evolution and many people are getting hurt along the way. I’ve often feel hurt myself having to say, “I know you need me to play this role of processing your emotions for you, but I’m not available for that.”
Fortunately, my husband does not require that kind of service to feel whole. He’s done all the emotional work necessary to get himself to level of being where he is a really attractive man.
No comments:
Post a Comment