Dinner with girlfriends
Last night, I had dinner with friends and realized something – women are awesome!
Here I was sitting with a friend going through some troubles, a friend celebrating her survival of troubles, and another who cooked for us and brought us together. Women are supportive, funny, nurturing, and never boring. Obama was on the television set fielding questions about the stimulus package but our eyes and ears were geared to what was going on at our table – love, lovers, exes, relationships – you know the usual stuff that stimulates girl talk.
More importantly, we talked about gender. I forgot who said a woman is not born, she is made, but one thing we know for certain there is no one trait that signifies you are a woman. The women we are and know are made up of contradictions – looks like a boy, acts like a girl; looks like a girl, acts like a boy; looks like both a boy and girl, acts like both a boy and girl. All girl. All boy. And slice and dice that so many different ways and you still come up scratching your head trying to determine just what is feminine and what is masculine.
Take this I Love You, Man movie – Paul Rudd is a man who loves women-stuff, but he is man. Poor men, they are stuck with the same stereo types women are. I have known so many men who were married to powerful women and their role had no benchmark against the usual male traits – successful, rich, powerful – but they embodied a more enlightened consciousness and yet I have been guilty in the past of associating their feminine traits with weakness.
We’re all stuck with these blanket gender roles – male, female – and neither is 100% for any person. I am both in many ways but mainly I’m a woman who has strong male tendencies.
Feminine is about receiving, Masculine is about driving. All of us at any given time might embody these dual forces, but society makes an art of categorizing us as one or the other, as if they are mutually exclusive. And Western society has made it de facto that all things feminine are less than, not equal to masculine.