Saying It Here So I Don't Piss Off My Coworkers

Yesterday I gave my supervisor an earfull, so I'm going to vent here instead this morning.

I've been reading Warren Farrell's masculist work The Myth of Male Power and found a lot of what it said very true, while a bunch made me defensive on the behalf of feminism. But just last night i found TWO examples of exactly what he was talking about. One was the way men have very little power to escape their gender role. While women have in the last thirty years gained extensive ground to decide what sort of person they want to be, men are still herded into traditional male roles which are not only limiting, but often unhealthy. So last night, I saw two ads back to back, one for Gatorade, and one for some fast food restaurant. The Gatorade ad showed amer. football players being tough and sweaty and manly! The rhetoric was something like "prove yourself! show them what youre made of! give it everything you've got because in the end, it's all you are!" and the players on the tour bus are looking at their coach, who nods silent aproval of their achievement. HOORA! The fast food ad was for customizable salads. It showed women and families laughing together and the rhetoric was "be yourself and do things your way. you deserve it!" WTF!!! The message to men is that you need the approval of other men and products to be complete. You cannot be a good man unless you prove youreself a good man. Yet a woman, so says the food ad, should be true to herself. She has a personality independednt of products and other people, and has the right to express that nature. Now I'm going to be looking for ads that do the oposite for each gender.

The othe thing this book mentioned was that men have been taught to treat their oppression as a strength while most other oppressed groups have been taught to see the limitations of social pressures and resist them. This was illustrated for me in my comic Bone when the scrawny little protagonist insists that he do the "man's" work of chopping wood, while the woman (who happens to be much larger than him) do the "woman's" dishes. He can't even remove the axe from the chopping block and when she laughs he says "I'm doing chin-ups, go do the dishes!". He is of course embarrassed and she brushes it off. This scene is not new to me in any way, it happens in highschool dramas all the time and is well known to me in my own life. It illustrates that the male gender role is not appropriate for all men, just as the female role isnt apropraite for women, yet men volunteer the oportunity for it to be unduly thurst upon them. When they fail to live up to the role that any sensible person could see is not right for them, they are ashamed. Sometimes this shame is reinforced by teasing from peers, sometimes it's sympathized with (usually by women, although it really should be men who console men on this topic). Men fight for the right to be oppressed by their ancient gender role.

Now I'm really going to keep my eyes open for cultural support for this book. And I'm only 30 or so pages into it! Oh my poor, poor coworkers.