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Gender
war
October 27 2003 at
11:27 PM
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Citizen
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from IP address 66.203.184.72 |
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Author unknown
"Say the words "gender
war"to someone these days
and likely you will get one of
two reactions. Either they will
look at you like you have just
said something totally
incomprehensible, as most people
would have before the 1990s, or
they will launch into a personal
perspective on the battle lines,
battlegrounds, and battle tactics
which they have observed from
personal experience. With each
passing day, more people move
from the first category into the
second as they somehow become a
casualty of this incomprehensible
war.
And war it certainly has
become.The older term for the
essential conflicts between the
interests and needs of men and
women - the more benign
"Battle of the Sexes" -
has taken a mean and ugly turn. A
wedge has been driven right down
the middle of the human race
which deprives the combatants of
the only solace available to them
in all other wars: respite from
hostilities in the presence, or
the arms, of someone they love.
As with any war, propaganda is
being used to demonize the enemy.
Men and women, who should be the
most natural of allies because
they have so much to offer each
other that they both need, are
instead seeing their interests as
being mutually exclusive, not
interdependent and complementary.
The tragedy of this is beyond
words.The tragedy is human
loneliness, and the scope is
almost universal.
Men, in general, have been slow
to respond to all the terrible
charges leveled against them.
There have been many reasons for
this. Foremost among these has
been the difficulty which men
have had in believing that so
much of womankind would turn so
thoroughly and viciously against
them. Twenty-five years ago, no
one could have predicted that the
entirety of human history would
be completely re-written by the
time that the newborns of the day
graduated from college. Or that
the actions and lives of so many
men, great and obscure, would be
stripped of every shred of human
decency and generosity and
distorted into a world-wide and
history long conspiracy of and by
men to do nasty things to women -
called "Patriarchy."
Like observers of the events
leading up to each of the world
wars, there were many of us who
expected sanity to re-enter the
dialogue at any time and the
hostility and hatred to cease
rather than continue to grow. In
the end, we turned out to be just
as foolish and naïve as those
who put off joining the world
wars until forced to do so. By
the time we realized that THEY
had declared war on US, it was
too late to avoid it and we were
left with no choice but to fight
for the basic rights and freedoms
in which we believed.
This "barely civil"
civil-war has fragmented our
culture and balkanized interest
groups in a way that will take
years for us to recover - if we
can recover at all. As soldiers
who fought the Japanese in the
early 1940s had a very difficult
time later adjusting to the idea
of Asians as friends and
neighbors, those of us who have
lived out our entire adult lives
in the midst of this war will
likely not be able to heal from
the wounds it has caused and be
able to see our former enemies as
anything other than
enemies."
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