i don’t want to achieve equality by sinking to men’s level, i want them to get on ours! why should i have to unlearn the conversational art of waiting my turn, unlearn sexual self-restraint, unlearn trust in others’ good intentions, unlearn the impulse to cater to others’ needs, just to have a chance at success among savages? why can’t the men learn some fucking manners so we can all conduct our affairs in a civilized manner? i shouldn’t have to stop saying sorry, you say sorry!
In the 80s when I was in my freshman year in college, they still had entirely separate mens and women’s dorms. I was in class waiting for a final to start and one of the guys was telling someone about how he had had to go into a women’s dorm to drop something off, and he was startled to see posters on the walls, flowers, curtains, etc. He said his men’s dorm had holes in the walls, things on fire, fights, guys walking around with open wounds and he just didn’t understand why they had to live like this. He said, “I want to live with the women, in civilization.”
Am reading Sisterhood of Spies, about women working for the OSS during WWII. One of the stories mentions that the women in London had a male visitor who would eat in their mess hall once a month. He was married and wasn’t interested in hitting on any of the women; he just wanted to eat in an atmosphere where people said “Please pass the butter,” instead of “PASS THE GODDAMNED GREASE”
I dated a guy who brought me along on group activities (movies, video game night, etc.) with four or five other male friends. Once I mentioned to one of the other guys that I hoped I wasn’t intruding on their “guy time” or some such. He got this sort of rueful look and said, “The truth is, I really like it when you’re here because it gives us a reason to act better. When it’s just guys, we all have to try to outdo each other with how vile we are.”
So the moral of these stories are men don’t even treat each other like human beings.
I remember in high school there was a big uproar for awhile because the boys bathroom doors were locked open during the day, had broken stall doors, the soap dispensers didn’t work right, they had no mirrors and were just overall a mess, while the girls bathrooms could keep the doors shut, had mirrors and nothing was broken and were generally nice. The guys tried to complain that the school was sexist and only giving the girls nice things until our (male) principal was like listen up you little fuckers every time we fix something you guys break and/or vandalize it in less than a week, you don’t get nice things until you stop acting like animals…. okay he didn’t put it just like that, but that was the general tone.
Girls sports also fundraised to set up our own weight room (which the guys didn’t have to do but that’s a rant for another time) and the guys were mad that ours was kept so much nicer and didn’t smell like there’s did and we were just like that’s because we pick up after ourselves asshole!
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