(In the interest of fairness we here at Colette's Grave are allowing the oppositional viewpoint to be heard....so here in a thought-provoking retort is my husband's response to the MSN article
'Mid-Wife Crisis' I posted yesterday.)
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Here's just one response from the man's perspective. It also happens to be mine.
Men are assholes. They're competitive, egomaniacal, shallow, etc., etc., ad nauseum - or so the theory goes. I believe stereotypes exist for a reason. People seem to remember only the negative qualities of a group of people and never everything else. So that being said, let's examine the man's perspective.
When it all begins the man goes out searching for a woman, for whatever misguided reason is jammed between the ideas that he needs to be successful and a bigger fishing boat would be nice. And so the chase begins. Making the phone call at exactly the right time, learning and remembering her favorite foods, colors, and clothiers, plus having a compelling story of who he is, where he is going, and what are his views of the world. In other words, being a well-rounded man. Seems to be that from the women's perspective most men fail miserably at this, yet somehow they manage to woe the woman into marrying him. Perhaps it's all just a show anyhow.
Unfortunately women are the ones driving the charade. They primp and preen, always smile, and go to great lengths to prove that they have power and are independent, and to top it all off they aren't a complete bimbo looking to put their legs in the air and score a Mansion and Yacht on the back end of things.
So in the land of Let's Pretend, we get married and the reality of the situation comes to bear. He fails to remember her most sacred day - her birthday, she on the other hand chooses to make his life hell for it. She gives him crap about his watching his favorite sport team(s) on TV like it's a religion with scantily clad priestesses , but then she turns around to watch her evening dramas where the wife is bonking the shirtless stud lawnkeeper and whining to get a bigger house. She'll rant and rave about his longboat sized shoes in the middle of the floor, but never once will listen that perhaps he's not fond of her having 100 bottles of "product" in the shower, let alone having every square in of medicine cabinet and under-sink space cluttered with yet more "product". He's quite content to have four or five bottles that will get him through every event conceivable from now till, and through, Armageddon.
She's busy putting out fires around the home, like three dust bunnies hiding behind the sofa, while he's off doing the completely selfish activity of "achieving greater satisfaction". Despite his fevered requests for her to leave the back of the sofa alone, "sofa's have backs?" he thinks, she'll spend three hours moving furniture while he builds a model plane, reads a sport magazine, scratches himself seven times, mows the lawn, watches all 93 games on TV, and still finds time to move his feet when the vacuum comes by.
While the rampant inequalities of work effort around the house are completely obvious to her while doing laundry and cooking dinner, he's just being a total lunkhead while leisurely hanging from the ladder precariously perched against the house to clean the gutters. Sometimes he even has the audacity to relax on the garage floor in a puddle of old motor oil due to his selfish desires to fix her car because taking it to the service station was such an inconvenience when the engine light came on while running between the salon searching for Organic Tofu Yogurt. I thought going to the salon was supposed to be satisfying?
After squeegeeing off excess motor oil, he mindlessly ambles down to the auto store and hangs out with the collective men and bitches about how his wife is nagging him to go see the latest George Balanchine production - who the hell is this guy anyway? The guys dressed in similar array all look at him like he's a stuck pig having to go to something like that. He tells his friends that he's tired of it, she hasn't exactly been what she promised, sometimes it's just not worth the effort anymore. She bitches about how he cleans the house, and "is he really going to wear that in public?". Meanwhile she's added 6 dress sizes and is quite comfortable walking around the house in a sweat suit so baggy it might as well be a burka. He'll surprise her with flowers occassionally or perhaps even jewelry, but he can't remember the last time she surprised him with tickets to the ballgame. Hell, he can't even remember the last time she came down in some skimpy lingerie, and we all know men never forget that kind of stuff.
Eventually he just gives in and says to hell with it. Not only does she not reciprocate, she holds him to a different standard, and she's quite content to blame him for all her dissatisfaction. So, "in search of greater satisfaction", she throws the husband out with the bathwater.
Labels: Battle of the Sexes, Opinions, Rants
