Mariann Lumsargis
The Paw Print
Sweat glistened off her brow. The steaming pots of bubbling and boiling food, her restaurant customers, and the baby all simultaneously screamed at her. Dirty laundry and dirty dishes piled up like colossal skyscrapers, blocking out the light. The phone began to shriek like a disturbed banshee. When she finally managed to find a moment to pick up the phone, it bore no good news. With silvery tears running down her faded work-worn cheeks, she pleadingly looked up.
“Mi amor, my love, Carlos was just arrested, please would you go pick him up? I have to cook for the customers.”
The man she addressed looked like a customer too. He slouched over a plush couch, cigarette smoke curling around him in luxuriant folds, while on his T.V. semi-clad women pranced around a stage. He snorted in indignation. Oozing insulted pride, he heaved himself up and asked her how she could insult him by asking him to do so much work.
Modern women’s equality is often thought of in the United States as already achieved. In the public’s mind, woman work and that means equality has been reached. In fact, modern women’s “liberation” can make many peoples lives even harder than they were before.
For boys, modern equality first becomes an issue in school. Feminists insist on teaching children of both genders in the exact same way, with the same environment and materials. For girls, this insistence can be negative, for boys it can be detrimental. With the exception of the sciences, school is structured more for the female than the male learning-style – quiet voices, sitting still for long periods of time, and a quiet subservience to the teacher. While this is not optimal for girls, for boys it is often impossible.
Many studies have shown that boys need to be physically active during early childhood and adolescence. When they are told to sit still all the time, it creates internal conflict in boys between their need for movement and the teachers need for them to sit still. This conflict leads to classroom disruption, which leads to punishment from authority figures, resulting in more negative classroom behavior. Finally this begets disorders, real or created. It is estimated that for every one girl that is diagnosed with a disability, such as emotional disturbance, there are four boys who are likewise diagnosed. In fact 76% of all diagnosed disabilities are boys. With these unfavorable odds against boys, it is no surprise that the average amount of boys graduating from high school is about 15 percent lower than girls. In college the disparity is even greater. It is estimated that 60% of college degrees are earned by females, while only 40% are earned by males.
Feminist historians tell us that if women are made more important by earning an income, they are allowed to show their talents and are made physically important because they become a breadwinner. Unfortunately, this theory very often backfires. In many countries before this idea was instigated many times the only material difference was the woman’s workload. Mexico is a good example of this. Although woman work and can support themselves, there is a growing problem with women who support men. The men who used to do all the outside work in a family, such as earning income and keeping the house in repair, now often do nothing at all. The women still care for the children, clean the house, cook, wash the laundry, and in addition now earn the family income. Elements such as divorce have augmented this issue because it is still culturally unacceptable to be single; consequently, men can threaten to leave if they are asked to contribute to their family.
When modern “equality” is reinforced to the extreme, another evil that both genders face is inequality of pay. On average the U.S., a man with a college degree is paid 30% more than a woman with a college degree. This inequality is a two pronged evil. Putting fairness aside, it has a negative impact on all of society. When an economy becomes stressed in a country that practices this inequality, the inevitable result is that the higher paid middle and working class men get laid off in favor of the cheaper labor of women. Many times this creates sweat shop conditions for women and resentment in desperate men who cannot find work. This is the problem that plagues places like Guatemala and India. When an economic system makes men irrelevant because it is cheaper to employ women, everyone suffers.
If boys do manage to graduate from school and get a job, they are still handicapped. Experts agree that a large portion of male difficulties in first world countries come from the fact that boys naturally pick up emotional language much slower than girls. Because nothing is done to counter this, men have a difficult time expressing their emotions. In stressful situations because they cannot verbally communicate their feelings, they are much more likely to display inappropriate aggressive outbursts. In turn, this makes men more liable to lose their jobs, often turning men to crime. In fact, over 90% of criminals are male.
Perhaps the greatest evil lies not in that feminists want equal rights for women, but how they push for those rights. Feminists seem to feel that because for years inequality of gender was reinforced by rationalizing that the genders were different, that if it is said that the genders are completely alike, there will be equality. Modern feminists cannot make the world only for girls, so they try to erase the line between the genders by trying to treat both in a way that is not good for either gender. They do not teach boys the skills necessary for succeeding in the modern world, and they teach girls not that they can, but that they must have a career. It is made clear that a woman is being less if she wishes to stay at home to be a mother. After all, cooking, cleaning and childrearing is seen as a waste of talents. There is, however, a vital flaw with this reasoning. If girls are taught that they have to change to something else to be equal, then they are also taught that what they are must be bad. Extreme feminists, in their zeal for women’s rights, are often very chauvinistic in their practices. If women are truly to be equal and men to resolve their identity crises, then what is really needed is not to push girls to be as competitive as boys, or boys to be as feminine as girls, but rather for each to respect themselves. They need to accept the fact that they are different, just as they are equal. Until feminists stop trying to change their whole gender, and by trying to do that, their whole species, nothing will change. All that is needed is for women and men to respect themselves as they are. This lesson is beneficial for everyone, no matter their gender.
What’s Been Said…