Who’s got it tougher, men or women?
Fausta has written a new riff in an attempt to answer that ancient question: is it a man’s world, or is it a women’s? Who’s got the better right to sing the blues?
In the end, though, I consider the question truly unanswerable. Unquantifiable, unmeasurable, and unknowable.
My own take on the matter? Everybody Hurts (click on the link and scroll down, then click on “Watch” under “Everybody Hurts.” Enjoy a good cry.)
My mother always said that the human race would die out if the men had to carry the babies….
Generally speaking, men are stronger, women more durable…it’s a tie.
I’m glad I was born a man instead of a woman.
karrde, makes the salient point for me.
I assisted in the delivery room at the birth of both my children. Both times I wanted to fall to my knees and thank God, that I was born a male. The other remarkable thing was that the experience was accompanied by amnesia. I suppose if it wasn’t every child would be an only child.
Neo, thanks for the link to the R.E.M. video. It was very affecting.
Karrde,
Camile Paglia says that we would still live in grass huts if women had been in charge all along.
Well, think about this, if the ring of the lieutenant whistle was blasting in your ear, and your sore, cold body was climbing up a trench to a wasted plain of low-lying smoke and impact craters with flashing lights on the horizon — you might wish you were a woman safe at home with a baby at ye niple — eeeek — I would rather be a man.
Actually I do not think it really matters. We are what we are and we ought to be happy with our being.
I like being a man and I like women who like being women. Hey it is a good thing to be.
Nothing keeps us from being all we can be if we desire it except talent, ability and the perserverance to excellence within ourselves. We are self limiting.
Maybe one day we will reach the point of wisdom when we find that we have so much to give each other and that we were meant to be interdependent for the vast majority of our lives.
We are difference precisely because that makes us better.
Only by excreting a watermelon from my rectum could I identify with the pain of a woman in childbirth. No thanks.
Men and women are two different but overlapping species of human. Of the top mathematicians, physicists, and mathematical engineers and computer scientists, there are 100 men for every woman. That’s the small margin that’s driving the rush to the singularity. That’s why Nancy Hopkins fainted and Larry Summers got fired. Not because Summers lied, but because he told the truth.
That’s like asking does your left arm have it better than your right arm. Does your leftarm suffer because you are right handed and have more strength in the right? Does your right arm suffer because you use it to the exclusion of the left?
Meaningless, really.
Which would be better, losing your right foot or losing your left foot? Losing the leftpart of your brain or the right part of your brain?
All I can figure out of this, is that God in His wisdom made two different sexes for different tasks and instilled in them exactly these traits that are nessesary and sufficient to do their respective jobs properly. And we must accept this setting in humility, because no one can improve it without spoiling it.
Of the top mathematicians, physicists, and mathematical engineers and computer scientists, there are 100 men for every woman.
I should point out that there used to be a better male/female ratio in those fields until feminism came along and told women (over and over, and is still telling them) that they couldn’t wouldn’t succeed in these fields … women went “Oh, well best not waste my energy there”.
Man by nature really gets tougher if the situation requires to regardless of their sexes. I think the battle between men and women has long been forgotten. Talking about gender sensitivity!
I think Y has it right. We would fail as a species without our other half. It has been my experience that only those who are insecure get into these he/she is better wastes of time.
We have allowed feminism to make us see the negatives in each of us instead of seeing the overabundence of positives we bring to each other.
“Men don’t talk about their feelings.”
Let’s rephrase that.
“Men don’t talk about their feelings as much as women want them to.”
Aha! And why would that be?
Because in general, women don’t just want men to “talk about their feelings.” No, women want men to describe in detail the feelings that the woman wants the man to be having.
This isn’t intimacy, it’s a pop quiz.
Most men know this instinctively. The rest of us eventually learn it by trial and error.
Some men are good enough liars to tell women what they want to hear and not get caught. The rest of us just clam up.