Thread: Intimidating females....

We may have come along way but I think there is still a majority of women that equate getting married to achieving success as a person and fullfilling their destiny. I know we've had lots of threads on this recently, but the other day I was watching some show where the girls pick out their wedding gowns... and the mothers and the sisters help them choose and the way some of the mothers would carry on like... as if their daughter had just came up with a new vaccine, how they were beeming with pride because their daughter had been chosen to be someones wife... well... it made my stomach turn lol.

I think some moms are more proud of their daughters getting married than they are of them achieving college degrees or becoming successful at work so while that is still the attitude society has... we haven't quite come far enough. Just think of family gatherings ... if there is a single woman, she can talk about how well her school or job is going and no one cares... all the aunts want to know "when are you going to get married?" "let me set you up with this man... or that man".

There is this idea that a woman hasn't made it unless she has a husband, and its pretty sad. But everything you said WC in an earlier post ... if you ask too many questions you're seen as incompetent, if you know too many answers you're seen as a know it all in the work place situations... Nail on head there. Even the nicest woman is seen as a BWord if she is in charge of a situation.

Originally Posted by WildChild

Very perceptive. I am aware of this.
But I don't know that the dynamics are so very different.
My generation experienced it but it a more direct manner. The clear message in childhood, to girls, was that your primary role in life was to marry and have children. As we got older the message changed. You may not be familiar with the old Virginia Slims commercials but they caught it in a nut shell - bring home the bacon, fry it up in a pan and never let him forget he's a man and do it in an evening gown.
If you spend some time and do some reading here you will find a significant number of young women who still buy into the idea that the ring and long white dress should be their primary goals.

You do have the advantage of living through the changes themselves. We were born into them. So the confusion you feel is raw and you can trace the origin of it within your own life experience. We Gen Xers carry around an incoherent and sometimes intractable mishmash of beliefs and prejudices AND we don't know how we GOT THEM! You know how they got there, but we don't have the historical perspective and the first hand experience. We just run around with our own particular version of how the sexes should behave and clash with others that don't line up with us. And then we don't know why we're miserable and not connecting with each other.

Originally Posted by WildChild

Yes I do bear the scars, I've taken some very direct hits for daring to step out of the gender lines and I'm still taking them dealing with men in my age group and dare I say it, some younger. Don't think for a minute that there isn't still some very strong prejudist and even animosity from a good sized segment of Gen X men toward women who step out of the lines. The primary difference I see is that the men no longer feel any shame at expecting a woman to support them financially rather than emotionally and from the home front. My guess would be that you aren't in construction or any other type of 'labor' based work?

Very, very true. Each GenXer has inherited a set of beliefs from both parents and his peers and so each of us is different. Gen X men can be sexist too as a legacy probably from fathers who resented the changes you experienced first hand. And this weird entitlement to have the woman support him is also very strange and anti-masculine as these men probably have no purpose in their lives. But also witness the Gen X man who was raised by his feminist mother to be nice, sensitive, and catering toward women to the point of compromising his innate masculinity. That example of a man has no concept of how to appeal to a woman in a masculine way.

I am not a man who works with his hands, no. Other than computers/typing/writing.

Originally Posted by WildChild

The stats still aren't pretty for women. We actually make less to a man's dollar now than 25 yrs ago, there is still an insignificant percentage of women in top corporate positions, (you can research the law suit brought against some of the big dogs in the financial trade for retaining only men -even when they had poorer performance records - in the aftermath of the financial melt down. The book I recommened here as my must read, "book of the year" deals with the need for more female leadership and what happens when we have it.
Technolgical change comes rapidly, social change is much slower and often traumatic.

It's a sad reality that women are still not taken seriously in the workplace nor paid equally. (There are many progressive companies and organizations out there, though.) There is much room for empathy in the workplace, and the world at large too. Women don't usually wage wars as casually as men do.