Whine much?

Why can't men...

This is the absolute worst piece of whining drivel I have ever read in my life. Okay maybe not the worst, but it definitely is a front runner. If she's still single I am absolutely not surprised.

Women want rich husbands

Women want rich husbands
It is sad to think that despite all the education we give women in Singapore, we still get responses like above. There is a part of me that wonders "Why bother spending all that money on our daughters for their education? We could just marry them off to rich husbands!"

A look at Gender Bending

A thought came to my mind during the last seminar session on thursday. How many movies can you name where a woman decided to dress up like a guy? Okay, now how many of them seriously challenged the gender roles of men? Most of the movies I could think of usually had an ending where the girl takes off her disguise and then runs into the arms of the man she's been deceiving all this time but was actually secretly in love with. Most other movies that I know of that requires women to exhibit characteristics we deem as masculine  tend to either portray them as lesbians or just plain "unfortunate". Perhaps it's because Hollywood is still male-dominated, from executives to the producers and directors, and to suggest that men might have something to learn from women is tantamount to heresy. Ok I finally thought of one movie, it's a favorite, but it didn't require any man to dress up like a chick. It was the 1991 film switch, where a jerk of a guy is murdered by his lovers and reincarnated as Ellen Barkin. Although her character displays typically male oafish characteristics, in the end she becomes "feminized" towards the ideal, and even gets pregnant! Go figure. We have a yardstick of power in society that is fundamentally male-centric. It requires women to adopt characteristics that we would describe as masculine to get ahead in the corporate world and in many other fields. Male dominated society is going to have a hard time accepting that they have anything to learn from women.

Is the Sensitive New Age Guy still around? Last I heard he was replaced by a typical Alpha Male, the Firefighter. Like Lakehoff said it's about power, and if you look like easy prey, I don't think that bodes well for you. 

As an aside, I suspect that Tootsie didn't offend senses at the time because Dustin Hoffman's character was still fundamentally heterosexual. Now if Michael were to discover at the end of the film that he liked the whole being Dorothy gig well... No prizes for guessing how that would have been received.

I recall a Madonna song goes, "Girls can wear jeans, and cut their hair short, wear shirts and boots, cause it's okay to be a boy, but for a boy to look like a girl is degrading, because you think it's degrading". The song was released in 2001 but I think that sort of sums up the prevailing attitudes of today. Women are still seen as the weaker sex, and not just in physical terms of course, but in other aspects as well, probably even intellectually. Of course I don't think there's any basis to it, but that's just the way it's been socially constructed. Men are trained to view women as the weaker sex and women are trained to view themselves as such. Woe betide any interloper who decides to overturn the order of things.