I am surprised and ever panting at the rate that my generation devolved from inertia, consumerism, and empty hallmarks of culture to living in interesting times. The result of the baby boom was enough time to raise two generations whose faith in progress made them think they would never go poor or hungry again. The freedom and future centric focus of baby boomers who broke through the ties of both the large family community where younger members have a specific place/owe a debt of gratitude to their elders and the quaint mores of the nuclear family cemented during the Victorian age brought forth in us materialism, individualism, and resultant alienation. Our x-boxes, technological luxuries, independence and isolation as a country are being wrested from us at a non-idealistic level, our purse strings. Americans have bought the freedom to not depend or communicate through distant relatives and community structures through avoiding the landline, moving far away, and building the kind of nuclear family whose reward is perhaps a mother in law not living in the next room and breathing down her son's neck or not living in communal apartments like my family has in the past. Yet, when not distracted by tv, activities, or even a job, the discomfort of our alienation, our roomy suburban houses with two acre zoning or our tendency only call our friends to hang out is being felt. The hurricane forced us to recognize that being trapped in the basement of our house without power for five days or much worse is less painful with the society and support of our neighbors. Even if it means some unpleasant and outmoded social overtures. I don't know if I want the interwoven social niceties of large communal societies or places where filial piety is more important than the freedom to realize one's wishes. If America becomes a less individualistic society, I'm hoping that it will have a modern take on community. I'm hoping that women will still retain some of the freedoms of, say, marrying someone you love rather than being married off as a political and economic decision or being able to take the career of your choice. Better yet, I'm hoping for a re-definition of how the sexes relate to each other that will alleviate the anxiety of the fact that women are slowly breaking the barrier of a society in which they've struggled to have the same opportunities as men.
Men seem to be processing this as "women trying to become men." This is not true, as far as vague social definitions of gender, this means not being barred from doing things because they are only to be defined by weakness and childishness. Mostly this is only to benefit from the same legal and life niceties as men. This means to not to receive lower pay based on sex, to be able to be admitted to the sports of their choice, to not be judged disapprovingly or differently for their choices or bodies, to seek the careers, lives, and relationships they want without barriers because of gender. And to not be defined in relation to other people in the same way men are not. This doesn't mean that some women don't want the door opened for them or to be paid for on the first and second date, or that they don't seek a committed loving relationship because they don't keep the box locked. My idea is that feminism is based on lack of impediment, rather than even equality. Meaning, I don't necessarily want to be punched because a man got punched and we're equal and I can take it, but I don't want to be cheated of a home loan, discriminated against in the workplace or school, or at the doctor's office, not to mention deal with danger at night. While our tendency to be seen as people "acting masculine" or "trying to be a man" is flawed and silly, the fact is that many women do want fulfilling relationships, and the sexual revolution has stacked cards in such a way that women are displaying their plumes to men and the plain grey men take their pick. This is where the problem is. A misinterpreted, simplified version of the feminism that I see as a historical, theoretical, and practical movement with many theories and great complexity is what makes a relationship where each person fulfills a different role or "energy" difficult. As I understand it, in a relationship, each element maintains commonality, but fulfills a different function in working together. This means that both members of the relationship are not going to be able to do the same things. Taking care of one another is important, but each takes care of the other in a different way. What I'm saying is that one thing I've learned from my mother is that the woman, due to being able to register emotional complexities, has to be the "cunning" one in the relationship in order to maintain it. Avoid arguments and such. Or at least one person has to. I know that I want certain things, like to be protected and supported in a concrete, thoughtful, nonverbal way (such things in the past have been coming with me to places, bringing me something or acknowledging when I don't feel well, occasionally just paying for meals rather than the looking at the check like it's on fire song and dance, small things). But, I am also controlling and domineering (when it comes to picking restaurants, music, and other trivial things),verbally overpowering, insecure, negative, and many other things that make it difficult to get the bottom line support that my father gives my mother. This behavior attracts calm, quiet men who really want someone to fill the silence and talk and at the beginning don't care about trivial things like me choosing music or restaurants or foisting internet articles on them until I overshare or overstay or over everything. In other words, there is a strong, rigid element and a flexible element. This does not have to be gendered, but one element complements or supports the other. I just want to be supported and the flexible element bends, but does not break, and therefore is the strongest. There is not much use for a domineering, unsubtle woman, who just really wants to babble about her insecurities and be "completely open" just like a "straightshooting honest" man who delivers unpleasant comments in a random, unasked for way to women will not find a listener that he finds pleasant. My mother changed and I have to change. She became less sarcastic, more pliable and realized that she had to both play a game and pick her battles. Mystery and challenge keeps both genders engaged, so, usually when I am on the chase, the man is challenging and withholding and I hold the losing hand. There are certain feminine hallmarks distasteful to feminists who don't realize that a relationship has to do with complementary roles that I will have to adopt if I want a strong, supportive partner. Like, I have to learn to cook and "keep the hearth" which is legitimate to me, because I want a hearth and either my apartment or my mom has kept it in the past. These are skills and tricks that I took for granted before I learned what being a woman is. Or being more positive and pleasant, which is a natural offshoot of going after my own goals. As someone who loves to remark on things and generalize, I am negative and I imagine that it makes me more truthful. Lemon is beautiful and relatable because she is flawed, vulnerable, and intractable in ways a woman can understand and has personal traits that make us automatically view her as the protagonist whose world we see through. Most of the men I've met in a dating context have asked at some point if I cook (probably because I talk about food so much), if I love my job, like sports, if I want children "at some point," and such things related to being a woman who is both feminine, pleasant, and positive, or someone a man enjoys being around and coming home to. I appreciate the value of home and hearth myself. Good food, a beautiful apartment, and a nice place to live. Who is going to create it if not me? Eh, the man could screw it up anyway. I loved the apartments I had, but they were lacking in furniture and certainly in timely meals. I think I love to go to restaurants and coffee shops because they have a pre-created ambiance with homelike, discriminating taste without me having to do any of the thinking and decorating. This makes them sound like an airplane food version of the home environment, but they are just trendier and I find home decoration really difficult. Most people would find me really annoying and negative, but I'm lucky that my friends can stand me for any length of time. Unfortunately, this requires little effort on my part to become a more engaging person, maybe one who talks less and asks more leading questions, so I can't say that I'm "good" at my friends. I'm just lucky to have the friendship. I've been frustrated that with little reveals or indiscretions, with staying too long, talking too much, showing too much interest, someone who you are trying to form a symbiotic relationship with can write you off. Maybe I don't have the physical attributes that excuse my not winning at life enough (I'm sure sure super attractive unemployed girls get at least a couple of months before they are written off) or talking too much, as a result, the other person is testing me or interviewing me tribunally and I don't have the advantage. At the same time, I've found the reasons for rejection to be painfully simple when people do tell me and painfully indicative of my core flaws, it isn't that they themselves suck, they do see me lucidly and why I'm not good enough for them. The freedom of having a home, job, and life whose course you steer is markedly different and provides a different set of challenges than those of living with and accomodating oneself to another person. In the corporate work environment, one is an instrument toward a purpose and one's daily work must as much as possible be in service of that purpose as well as one's behavior as a "leader." Going home, I have respite from needing to (and not making) calculated movements toward being seen as instrumental and surviving as well as the corporate rhetoric which is really of being a tool toward the bottom line or company goal. I have the freedom to be vulnerable, to party, to eat, and to wander with dreams. I imagine that home with another person again requires scrupulously framing your image as an instrument of preserving companionship, not seeming negative or crestfallen from the work day, re-applying makeup and brushing teeth on waking up. And the worst part, not going to the bathroom because apparently women don't do that freely. Omitting various things that make you shrill or slothful looking in order to have companionship, sex, and such things. For a date, I feel like it's necessary to prepare most of the day before and get into the mode of having to possibly make the omissions, confidence, and concise phrasing that I only use on telephone interviews. On telephone interviews, you are barred from saying anything unconfident or not positive about yourself so the content is incredibly rigid. As a result, when men ask me what I have going for the rest of the day, I know it's over and I'm also livid because a date is something you schedule around much like an interview. Maybe if I'm seeing a friend I have something going for the rest of the day, but no I'm not going to a benefit concert. Loneliness and lack of companionship vs. some constraint and lack of comfort and vulnerability, which is tonic after the working day. The strange thing is that romance fades as constraint, hiding, and playing games fades.
A feminist may take offense to the idea that, depending on the type of partner you want, you may have to exhibit characteristics that are not unpleasant or that complement their personality. Or that you may have to take charge with the "picking battles" and not being shrill portion of the relationship. This is something that I may have to do. I don't see many women, particularly those in relationships, that behave like me so I don't have a good frame of reference, I am at a high scale of vulnerability and unattractive habits. I carry rocks and peppermints in my pockets, I have a problem with my skin, I am bad at wearing make up, and bad at outfits among other things, I am quirky in a way that can be taken to an extreme, but not in my clothing or personal image. I bore myself with my stories and soliloquys, yet have the insatiable urge to talk. I idealize my talking companions ability to satisfy my need for intelligent novelty and entertainment, as well as a quickening of the spirit, which most men can't provide. I take a long time to do things like get up, cook simple things, etc. This is partly because I'm unused to taking care of a partner and I'm not sure if the Ally Sheedy parka is endemic to me. Yet, I don't like Liz Lemon for her finicky and particular habits like shrill insistence on rules:
Cashier: No $100s, Small bills.
Liz: Oh, I knew this was gonna happen.
Cashier: Store policy.
Liz: Yeah, Well, That's an illegal policy. You have to take this.
Cashier: No, I don't
Gray: Yeah sir you do, it says "legal tender for all debts, public and private."
Cashier: Does it say anything about $100 for a bottle of water?
Gray: You can't decide what money you'll accept. That's illegal.
Liz: It's an illegal policy.
Cashier: You're holding up the line!
Liz: (Along with Gray) No, You're holding up the line!
I am surprised by the new habits I might have to learn to adopt because I haven't thought of them before. Of course, attractiveness comes with realizing personal goals and the resultant contentment and busy sheen the body takes on in response to achieving personal goals. Yet, what creative person can dedicate themselves to whatever unfinished, torn art they choose when they are working at every point to bring their persona into fruition? What creative person does not allow themselves to be torn, uncomfortable, slightly broken rather than some sort of burpee-doing vegetarian going after their start up idea? I'm almost worried about working on my intractable habits and sloth because of this. Because I think motivational people who hold their lives up as an example are typically overly self focused and broken, because imperfection and the distance of a dream make it easy to calm oneself by imagining something better. I don't think people who have simply realized their dreams, particularly material ones, are happy, I think they are people who know what is around the bend of a road and no longer excited to find out. The only way I can find to not become a soft feminine cat like Ms Alba is to treat externals independently of what is internally inside me and work on internal goals irrespective of how they might enhance my femininity. Because ultimately doing something will make me more pleasant and less miserable to be around, and doing something that realizes my dreams, moreso. Even though realizing one's dreams brings the possibility of monomania, as one becomes a vessel for the message of healthy eating, or sculpture, art, or worse, a motivational speaker. I think seeking improvement through one's own body rather than creating something external is toxic and makes a life perfectly lived into one's art. When you make your life your art, that's just messed up, man. Although, when you sacrifice an imperfect life with someone you love to the perfection of a goal or art, it can prove just as damaging. Finishing A Hat, but giving up the idea of a perfectly or well lived life is the only avenue toward that type of happiness..
I've never really found my habits intractable before. I didn't even see anything wrong with them. And I think it's that I'm used to myself inexpertly holding up the hearth. Or getting some ethnic food when I can't. Maybe it's that men require things of us that we don't require of ourselves, things we have to learn later in this culture that protects us from learning about relationships, facilitating interdependence, or even the emotional dimensions of sex. These are things we maybe think we don't need to learn. I think the old adage is that in a primal sense, men and women are different and require different things of each other, things we can't automatically imagine. These are shocking because they do not follow the "require of others what you require of yourself" rule. The odd marriage of "companionship" or friendship with a side of sex that men seem to view relationships as, along with the strong emphasis on loyalty, is somewhat puzzling to me. Though the various requirements of women to be supportive, but not excessively, to engage, provide a core of affection, entertain, and mystify are odd to men.
We learn the shallow gloss of nonessentials like the time and place of the Tea Party, but not how to write cover letters, create solutions to problems as they come up, take calculated risks, bring an idea to fruition, and teach ourselves. The baseline critical thinking, problem solving, and analysis required to learn and assimilate new tasks is something we learn when we are forced to make do with the insufficient teaching and lackluster instruction of weeks' training. On the job we frequently digest insufficient information and are not led by the hand in any way. There must be some benefit in not teaching us to exercise the mental tools we have equipped to deal with new information and amorphous problems because no teacher ever taught that to us.
Men seem to be processing this as "women trying to become men." This is not true, as far as vague social definitions of gender, this means not being barred from doing things because they are only to be defined by weakness and childishness. Mostly this is only to benefit from the same legal and life niceties as men. This means to not to receive lower pay based on sex, to be able to be admitted to the sports of their choice, to not be judged disapprovingly or differently for their choices or bodies, to seek the careers, lives, and relationships they want without barriers because of gender. And to not be defined in relation to other people in the same way men are not. This doesn't mean that some women don't want the door opened for them or to be paid for on the first and second date, or that they don't seek a committed loving relationship because they don't keep the box locked. My idea is that feminism is based on lack of impediment, rather than even equality. Meaning, I don't necessarily want to be punched because a man got punched and we're equal and I can take it, but I don't want to be cheated of a home loan, discriminated against in the workplace or school, or at the doctor's office, not to mention deal with danger at night. While our tendency to be seen as people "acting masculine" or "trying to be a man" is flawed and silly, the fact is that many women do want fulfilling relationships, and the sexual revolution has stacked cards in such a way that women are displaying their plumes to men and the plain grey men take their pick. This is where the problem is. A misinterpreted, simplified version of the feminism that I see as a historical, theoretical, and practical movement with many theories and great complexity is what makes a relationship where each person fulfills a different role or "energy" difficult. As I understand it, in a relationship, each element maintains commonality, but fulfills a different function in working together. This means that both members of the relationship are not going to be able to do the same things. Taking care of one another is important, but each takes care of the other in a different way. What I'm saying is that one thing I've learned from my mother is that the woman, due to being able to register emotional complexities, has to be the "cunning" one in the relationship in order to maintain it. Avoid arguments and such. Or at least one person has to. I know that I want certain things, like to be protected and supported in a concrete, thoughtful, nonverbal way (such things in the past have been coming with me to places, bringing me something or acknowledging when I don't feel well, occasionally just paying for meals rather than the looking at the check like it's on fire song and dance, small things). But, I am also controlling and domineering (when it comes to picking restaurants, music, and other trivial things),verbally overpowering, insecure, negative, and many other things that make it difficult to get the bottom line support that my father gives my mother. This behavior attracts calm, quiet men who really want someone to fill the silence and talk and at the beginning don't care about trivial things like me choosing music or restaurants or foisting internet articles on them until I overshare or overstay or over everything. In other words, there is a strong, rigid element and a flexible element. This does not have to be gendered, but one element complements or supports the other. I just want to be supported and the flexible element bends, but does not break, and therefore is the strongest. There is not much use for a domineering, unsubtle woman, who just really wants to babble about her insecurities and be "completely open" just like a "straightshooting honest" man who delivers unpleasant comments in a random, unasked for way to women will not find a listener that he finds pleasant. My mother changed and I have to change. She became less sarcastic, more pliable and realized that she had to both play a game and pick her battles. Mystery and challenge keeps both genders engaged, so, usually when I am on the chase, the man is challenging and withholding and I hold the losing hand. There are certain feminine hallmarks distasteful to feminists who don't realize that a relationship has to do with complementary roles that I will have to adopt if I want a strong, supportive partner. Like, I have to learn to cook and "keep the hearth" which is legitimate to me, because I want a hearth and either my apartment or my mom has kept it in the past. These are skills and tricks that I took for granted before I learned what being a woman is. Or being more positive and pleasant, which is a natural offshoot of going after my own goals. As someone who loves to remark on things and generalize, I am negative and I imagine that it makes me more truthful. Lemon is beautiful and relatable because she is flawed, vulnerable, and intractable in ways a woman can understand and has personal traits that make us automatically view her as the protagonist whose world we see through. Most of the men I've met in a dating context have asked at some point if I cook (probably because I talk about food so much), if I love my job, like sports, if I want children "at some point," and such things related to being a woman who is both feminine, pleasant, and positive, or someone a man enjoys being around and coming home to. I appreciate the value of home and hearth myself. Good food, a beautiful apartment, and a nice place to live. Who is going to create it if not me? Eh, the man could screw it up anyway. I loved the apartments I had, but they were lacking in furniture and certainly in timely meals. I think I love to go to restaurants and coffee shops because they have a pre-created ambiance with homelike, discriminating taste without me having to do any of the thinking and decorating. This makes them sound like an airplane food version of the home environment, but they are just trendier and I find home decoration really difficult. Most people would find me really annoying and negative, but I'm lucky that my friends can stand me for any length of time. Unfortunately, this requires little effort on my part to become a more engaging person, maybe one who talks less and asks more leading questions, so I can't say that I'm "good" at my friends. I'm just lucky to have the friendship. I've been frustrated that with little reveals or indiscretions, with staying too long, talking too much, showing too much interest, someone who you are trying to form a symbiotic relationship with can write you off. Maybe I don't have the physical attributes that excuse my not winning at life enough (I'm sure sure super attractive unemployed girls get at least a couple of months before they are written off) or talking too much, as a result, the other person is testing me or interviewing me tribunally and I don't have the advantage. At the same time, I've found the reasons for rejection to be painfully simple when people do tell me and painfully indicative of my core flaws, it isn't that they themselves suck, they do see me lucidly and why I'm not good enough for them. The freedom of having a home, job, and life whose course you steer is markedly different and provides a different set of challenges than those of living with and accomodating oneself to another person. In the corporate work environment, one is an instrument toward a purpose and one's daily work must as much as possible be in service of that purpose as well as one's behavior as a "leader." Going home, I have respite from needing to (and not making) calculated movements toward being seen as instrumental and surviving as well as the corporate rhetoric which is really of being a tool toward the bottom line or company goal. I have the freedom to be vulnerable, to party, to eat, and to wander with dreams. I imagine that home with another person again requires scrupulously framing your image as an instrument of preserving companionship, not seeming negative or crestfallen from the work day, re-applying makeup and brushing teeth on waking up. And the worst part, not going to the bathroom because apparently women don't do that freely. Omitting various things that make you shrill or slothful looking in order to have companionship, sex, and such things. For a date, I feel like it's necessary to prepare most of the day before and get into the mode of having to possibly make the omissions, confidence, and concise phrasing that I only use on telephone interviews. On telephone interviews, you are barred from saying anything unconfident or not positive about yourself so the content is incredibly rigid. As a result, when men ask me what I have going for the rest of the day, I know it's over and I'm also livid because a date is something you schedule around much like an interview. Maybe if I'm seeing a friend I have something going for the rest of the day, but no I'm not going to a benefit concert. Loneliness and lack of companionship vs. some constraint and lack of comfort and vulnerability, which is tonic after the working day. The strange thing is that romance fades as constraint, hiding, and playing games fades.
A feminist may take offense to the idea that, depending on the type of partner you want, you may have to exhibit characteristics that are not unpleasant or that complement their personality. Or that you may have to take charge with the "picking battles" and not being shrill portion of the relationship. This is something that I may have to do. I don't see many women, particularly those in relationships, that behave like me so I don't have a good frame of reference, I am at a high scale of vulnerability and unattractive habits. I carry rocks and peppermints in my pockets, I have a problem with my skin, I am bad at wearing make up, and bad at outfits among other things, I am quirky in a way that can be taken to an extreme, but not in my clothing or personal image. I bore myself with my stories and soliloquys, yet have the insatiable urge to talk. I idealize my talking companions ability to satisfy my need for intelligent novelty and entertainment, as well as a quickening of the spirit, which most men can't provide. I take a long time to do things like get up, cook simple things, etc. This is partly because I'm unused to taking care of a partner and I'm not sure if the Ally Sheedy parka is endemic to me. Yet, I don't like Liz Lemon for her finicky and particular habits like shrill insistence on rules:
Cashier: No $100s, Small bills.
Liz: Oh, I knew this was gonna happen.
Cashier: Store policy.
Liz: Yeah, Well, That's an illegal policy. You have to take this.
Cashier: No, I don't
Gray: Yeah sir you do, it says "legal tender for all debts, public and private."
Cashier: Does it say anything about $100 for a bottle of water?
Gray: You can't decide what money you'll accept. That's illegal.
Liz: It's an illegal policy.
Cashier: You're holding up the line!
Liz: (Along with Gray) No, You're holding up the line!
I am surprised by the new habits I might have to learn to adopt because I haven't thought of them before. Of course, attractiveness comes with realizing personal goals and the resultant contentment and busy sheen the body takes on in response to achieving personal goals. Yet, what creative person can dedicate themselves to whatever unfinished, torn art they choose when they are working at every point to bring their persona into fruition? What creative person does not allow themselves to be torn, uncomfortable, slightly broken rather than some sort of burpee-doing vegetarian going after their start up idea? I'm almost worried about working on my intractable habits and sloth because of this. Because I think motivational people who hold their lives up as an example are typically overly self focused and broken, because imperfection and the distance of a dream make it easy to calm oneself by imagining something better. I don't think people who have simply realized their dreams, particularly material ones, are happy, I think they are people who know what is around the bend of a road and no longer excited to find out. The only way I can find to not become a soft feminine cat like Ms Alba is to treat externals independently of what is internally inside me and work on internal goals irrespective of how they might enhance my femininity. Because ultimately doing something will make me more pleasant and less miserable to be around, and doing something that realizes my dreams, moreso. Even though realizing one's dreams brings the possibility of monomania, as one becomes a vessel for the message of healthy eating, or sculpture, art, or worse, a motivational speaker. I think seeking improvement through one's own body rather than creating something external is toxic and makes a life perfectly lived into one's art. When you make your life your art, that's just messed up, man. Although, when you sacrifice an imperfect life with someone you love to the perfection of a goal or art, it can prove just as damaging. Finishing A Hat, but giving up the idea of a perfectly or well lived life is the only avenue toward that type of happiness..
I've never really found my habits intractable before. I didn't even see anything wrong with them. And I think it's that I'm used to myself inexpertly holding up the hearth. Or getting some ethnic food when I can't. Maybe it's that men require things of us that we don't require of ourselves, things we have to learn later in this culture that protects us from learning about relationships, facilitating interdependence, or even the emotional dimensions of sex. These are things we maybe think we don't need to learn. I think the old adage is that in a primal sense, men and women are different and require different things of each other, things we can't automatically imagine. These are shocking because they do not follow the "require of others what you require of yourself" rule. The odd marriage of "companionship" or friendship with a side of sex that men seem to view relationships as, along with the strong emphasis on loyalty, is somewhat puzzling to me. Though the various requirements of women to be supportive, but not excessively, to engage, provide a core of affection, entertain, and mystify are odd to men.
We learn the shallow gloss of nonessentials like the time and place of the Tea Party, but not how to write cover letters, create solutions to problems as they come up, take calculated risks, bring an idea to fruition, and teach ourselves. The baseline critical thinking, problem solving, and analysis required to learn and assimilate new tasks is something we learn when we are forced to make do with the insufficient teaching and lackluster instruction of weeks' training. On the job we frequently digest insufficient information and are not led by the hand in any way. There must be some benefit in not teaching us to exercise the mental tools we have equipped to deal with new information and amorphous problems because no teacher ever taught that to us.
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