Tokyo December 2006 |
The comic strip from Real Life
Adventures that appears in the local 'Sun' newspaper today best
describes a typical exchange between a man and a woman.
The bespectacled
man is seen as saying, “ I don’t understand what’s wrong.” The woman who is seated responds, “ You
never understand what’s wrong.” The man replies, “ That I understand.”
Hilarious.
'Men are from
Mars and Women are from Venus'. We have all heard that before. It is the title of a book written by John Gray and published in 1992. How often I hear
my women friends lament that their husbands have a totally
different mindset. I used to find such characterization objectionable but in
recent years, I have come to acknowledge that men and women somehow function
quite differently. I am a late bloomer, so I tend to be slow in seeing the
obvious.
They are like
that so their mothers say. I
should not place the onus on the mothers since I have never raised a son and
as a mother of two grown up daughters, I raise them as best as I
could but I have absolutely no idea how to bring up a son. A friend feels that
it is time for her twenty-one year old son to start dating. In this friend’s
opinion, girls are different, they cannot date as much as boys. Is this why the
world will never change so long as all these mothers hold the same views as the
women in my parents’ generation? As a rule, all mothers cannot help falling in
love with their babies but somehow sons and daughters are treated differently
as a result, boys grow up expecting their wives to replace their mothers and
take care of their ironing, food and children. There are some mothers who would
go an extra mile to tell their sons to be nice to the fairer sex. A friend once
told me that his mother used to
tell him that he must never make a girl cry. Sweet.
Television
series such as Sex and the City and Mistresses are entertaining, insightful and
clever. They are both about friendship between four women and their lives and
essentially it is about what modern women want. Recently I watched Last Vegas, a film
about friendship between four men who had known each other for several decades.
Last Vegas is a heart warming movie that has great
casts. It tells a story about friendship between four guys in their senior
years and these men are sensitive and protective when come to caring for their
friends from childhood days. If these shows are any representation about the
behaviour of men and women, it illustrates that the tapestry about human
relations and emotional needs is the same for both men and women.
Sunrise Huangshan, China August 2011 |
It is widely
believed that women are more intuitive and more capable of empathy; perhaps it
has to do with upbringing and the expectations that men must succeed hence they are somehow more aggressive, combative, predatory and task oriented generally. While
gender roles in different religions can vary, I believe that gender roles are
largely attributed to stereotyping and social conditioning. Thanks to the
women’s rights movements around the world, women are now able to negotiate
their roles at home and outside home. However, as women are now joining the workforce whether by choice or out
of necessity , the domestic role of some working women has not diminished and
thus they have to constantly juggle their time between their work and their
household duties . These women may have seemingly earned their financial
independence, yet they do not have
the freedom to pursue extra-curricular activities that are not related to their
children or their families. It is important that men and women must respect
that we all possess different attributes and ultimately there should not be
what exactly the male thing is and likewise what the female thing is but what
every individual wants to do with his or her life.
Huangshan 2011 |
I do not like
domestic chores and cannot imagine giving a life to housework, to the daily
routines of washing, polishing,
dusting, vacuuming and cooking. However, I do think that it takes a certain
temperament and great organizational skills for anyone to execute these domestic tasks to
perfection henceforth the term “ homemaker” is certainly timely to replace
“housewife” or “househusband”. It is not euphemism as the new terminology gives
weight to the role and emphasize
its importance. If the homemaker can constantly derive satisfaction from the
order and cleanliness of a house, it would be a bliss for his or her family to
come home to. As there are so many opportunities and experiences awaiting
outside home that both men and women constantly want to venture into the
outside world. It is apparent that the women have more choices these days but I often wonder if indeed we are the ones that have made the choices we have
made and why we have made them. I would like to quote what
the Oracle in the science fiction film 'Matrix'said to Neo, ‘You
have already made the choice. Now you have to understand it.’ and ‘Because you didn’t come here to
make the choice, you’ve already made it. You’re here to try to understand “why
you made it”……………..’
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