Oversimplifying Life dabbling in generalizations about men and women

[mitchellmckain 0]

Notice how people come along and say things like "its all about power"?

 

Ever seen the movie "Donnie Darko"? If you haven't, you have got to! Anyway in the movie there is this pseuo-religious group that reduce all of human experience into a spectrum ranging from fear to love. I think the reduction of human activity to the quest for power is just as ridiculous, a lot like Marx's reduction of human activity to economics. One can with equal absurdity reduce everything to just about any facet of human experience like parenting, education, communication, sharing, sex (Freud), ecetera.... There is always a two bit ideological group putting forth a flattening of human experience into a simple line that can fit into their little minds.

 

My favorite is entertainment. No one cares if what you do is right or wrong as long as it has enertainment value. All of science, politics and culture derives from human efforts to combat boredom.

 

Or how about this one: All of human society and culture ultimately derives from the human males' effort to make himself feel more important because of an innate feeling of inferiority.

 

His wife smiled in her sleep.

Why?

She's immortal. She has a son.

Your son too!

But what father every really believes it? He carries no burden, he feels no pain. What man, like woman, lies down in darkness and gets up with child? The gentle, smiling ones own secret. Oh, what strange wonderful clocks women are. They nest in Time. They make the flesh that holds fast and binds eternity. They live inside the gift, know power, accept, and need not mention it. Why speak of Time when you are Time, and shape the universal moments as they pass, into warmth and action? How men envy and often hate these warm clocks, these wives, who know they will live forever. So what do we do? We men turn terribly mean, because we can't hold to the world ourselves or anything. We are blind to continuity, all breaks down, falls, melts, stops, rots, or runs away. So since we cannot shape Time, where does that leave men? Sleepless. Staring.

 

"What about females? Are they immune to this?"

 

Being male myself, I wouldn't presume to speak for females. But while the females have the babies and feed them, the males have to do something to seem useful and make the females take notice of them. If the really useful stuff like food or jobs are in scarce supply then they have to think up a good "story" to take their place.

 

But for pete's sake don't take this theory too seriously. After all it was introduced as an example of how we can oversimplify our perception of things, and no matter how profound the such a perspective may be it is still oversimplifying. (As a matter of fact: I hate stereotypes and spend just much time feeding my baby son as my wife does)

 

Generalizations are as reliable as politicians and you can ignore them most of the time but that doesn't make them any less real or any less annoying.