Honesty.

But the amount of time I spend saying “But you didn’t SAY that. In fact you SAID the opposite.” and hearing “But you’re supposed to know what that means.”

really defies all logic. I can’t claim it’s a representative sample (as I almost certainly don’t date in a pool that could be called statistically median.) But god DAMN is it getting old.

I have no doubt I do it. I know that in my family my father’s big on that. He thinks he says things he imagines himself saying. It’s gotten to a point where I can see the look on his face when he’s “rehearsing” what he’d like to say before thinking better of it.

He does some stuff around the house, I do other stuff. It seems to work out okay. We don’t always agree on everything but on the whole we do manage to compromise without problems.

Either I’m very lucky or we’re both easy going people.

To be clear, I drink a lot of water. Does sitting really help?

Forgive me if I sound a bit sexist here – this is honestly my opinion and is completely unvarnished, but it isn’t meant to be prejudicial (even though it’s likely going to come out that way…oh well).

In my admittedly biased opinion, a large part of the dynamic these days between men and women, both in & out of the home is due to what the feminist movement has become within the last forty years. The original goals of feminism are laudable; equality, suffrage, redefining the “traditional” roles in parenting and marriage, and a complete rewrite of the role of women in the workplace. All of these things are good, and I applaud them.

The problem, though, is that feminism has changed a lot in the last forty years. Instead of demanding equality and all of the other things that the womens’ rights movement stood for in the beginning, we now have women insisting that they are better than men, in essence going from “feminism” to “feminine supremacy”, or in other words full circle. The ones that insist the loudest about a ludicrous “Patriarchy” running everything (and lemme tell you, if the “Patriarchy” has actually accomplished all of the things that some feminists claim, then I’d say my dues were well spent. h/t Ace) are the ones intent on setting up a Matriarchy in its place.

The problem, though, is that men see this happening. Women have done an excellent job at redefining their own roles in the world, without making any allowance for men to accomodate that or redefine our own. This has led to some very strange dichotomies between where we feel our roles in the world to be, and where everybody else sees us.

Think about it for a moment. When was the last time you watched any popular evening entertainment where the principal male lead was anything other than a lovable, bumbling loser that is at best tolerated by his ultracapable wife? This kind of stereotype permeates our culture – men have no clue, men never help around the home, men don’t want to do this or that, etc etc ad nauseum.

I don’t know about you, but I find that deeply offensive.

It’s gotten to the point now where this country’s educational system and youth groups have a drastic shortage of men willing to work within those roles, because on some level we’re afraid that a desire to work with children will translate into an accusation of molestation or pederasty. While I’ll admit that there are pedophiles out there, every man who loves children is not a pedophile any more than every man with intact “equipment” is a rapist. There have been numerous articles and studies on this, but I’m writing from work & don’t have time to research it properly. I’m reminded, though, of a story of a man from England who was actually placed in jail for waving to his daughter on the schoolbus after he’d been accused of molesting her by a vindictive and lying ex-wife.

I think I’ll actually put a blog post up about this at some point this weekend, Kate, because you’ve now got me thinking about it. (I know I haven’t updated in ages, but you would not BELIEVE the summer I’ve had….)

To be clear, I sit to pee, so the seat is NEVER left up (and I have taught my two sons to do the same), and there is none of that “buildup” to clean around the toilet. I am a great cook, I can iron, sew, hang curtains, etc. I just have no clue what women want.

Here’s the URL:

http://willardwallace.livejour.....tml#cutid1