Understanding

I consider my sister the most mature woman her age that I've ever met. Between that and the fact that she is family and therefore one of the most important women in my life, it was absolutely critical when I had this conversation with her today that I manage to communicate my concerns effectively. This is actually the real crux of my frustrations that I alluded to in the last post.

It has to do with a certain type of prejudice that in all honesty, I doubt most men are aware they are subject to. It is a well known evil of the modern, advertising based economy that women are deluged with demeaning images which not only reinforce the classic gender roles of society, thereby partially undermining the strides we have made, particularly in the last 90 years toward a more egalitarian gender relationship. I don't dispute that, not at all.

But on the other side of the coin is what I consider a far more insidious stereotyping. It is mainly more insidious because it goes unrecognized so much of the time, but also because of the multiple levels of twistedness that it puts into our self images in this life.

Men, as they are represented in media, are lascivious, disinterested, beer guzzling, football watching, bikini cheering louts. We perceive them as interested exclusively in sex, and in romance only inasmuch as it can get them laid. It's in beer commercials, car commercials, even more subtly in ads telling us what gifts to give for Christmas: "Every kiss begins with [jewelry]" (I refuse to give those bastards free press).

For those of you who are pulling faces and wondering when I'm going to get to the misrepresentation; NEWSFLASH: Men want romance too. Even though many of them are convinced they do not, they WILL NOT be happy without it. Any relationship based exclusively on sex will inevitably become boring to them. Furthermore, WOMEN WANT SEX!!! (ohmigod, he said it! Horrors!)

Ok, so why do I bring all this up? Well, while we were talking today, my sister told me that it makes her uncomfortable when a man addresses his physical attraction to her before spending some time getting to know her on a personal level. She says it makes her think she knows what he's interested in. I know, I know, this sounds perfectly reasonable. The only problem, to me, is that its dishonest. I mean, the very first thing a person has with another person is physical. Even online, you see the way people are in general before you can ever know how they interact with you. This is just basic. Certainly the moment someone looks you in the eye you begin to work on that romantic chemistry, but unless that physical chemistry is there on some level, for whatever reason it's there, whatever physical characteristic it's based on, there's no point in looking for romance with that person.

I really think this is an unhealthy way to approach relationships. Basically it is like asking men to behave like they haven't noticed how beautiful you are until he knows you better. You're expecting him to lie, or at least to behave dishonestly, before you even get to know him. How can you trust a man to be honest in the future if everything begins with a lie?

So, I think this is really about women's insecurities. They are constantly told they're not beautiful enough by advertising, so when a man tells them he thinks she is, her first instinct is that he's deceiving her. It's very twisted. They don't want to feel like they're being lied to, so they want you to lie to them.

I just think we need to be more accepting of sex. This goes for women who are actualized in their sexual drive, as I wrote about in the last post, and for men who are actualized and forthright about their attraction as well. I'm not saying that there doesn't need to be a certain level of respect still, just that respect isn't what's represented when a man pretends he isn't interested in something that is, after all, the real reason we date in the first place. Respectfully acknowledging mutual attraction while exploring the personal connection between two individuals is far healthier than asking those people to deny an entire portion of themselves until a 'socially acceptable' amount of time has passed.