December 5, 2004
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Sexual mores revealed…
Being a man weighs on me sometimes. The socially prescribed sexual roles we live under, though radically more progressive than cultures past, still have a chauvinistic framework that places women in a secondary role in everything except mothering.
But why did it get this way? What lies underneath this need for men to push women into nothing but housework and childcare?
I think the answer lies somewhere in the biological and Darwinian basics. There being two sexes allows for greater genetic diversity, but most importantly, it gives the bearing sex a chance to survive the gestation period in their heavily exposed condition by relying on a partner for protection.
So the men are needed for survival, but the pivotal role of physically having the child makes the female the much more valuable sex in the end. A society with a low ratio of women to men would not thrive as easily as one with the ratio reversed. Men, consequently, are the more expendable sex, as can easily be seen in the shipwreck adage of “women and children first.”
Men live with this subconscious knowledge that they are less important, and yet because of their role as protectors, they inherited the physically superior body. This allowed them to become the subjugating sex. They think themselves better than women and use their physical dominance to enforce that view; but, paradoxically, what they ultimately want is the approval of that which they think inferior.
Couple this with the knowledge that you cannot perform the most important thing a person can do, i.e. make life, and now we see why men have this need to dominate women, and why that also translates into not letting them do anything else: their ego cannot take it. Since women did the childbearing, they were forbidden any other role. Men needed to feel superior, needed to control so they could go on living with themselves, their expendability the monkey beating on their back.
What’s scary is how ingrained into our sexual culture the roles now are, to the point where women will submit to the housewife character by their own will. I could blame religion, but it’s just a tool to make system work. And maybe the system had to come out this way because for us to be able to thrive; but somehow, that offers me no comfort.
I want to try to be a better man, and yet I have no idea what that really means. I try not to judge. I try to see things through other people’s perspectives. I try not to hurt anyone.
I can’t escape the system, but I do try to play it by rules that let me sleep at night with a cleaner conscience.
