I know I’m going to get into trouble for this, but in for a penny, in for a pound . . .
Yes, it is a joke based on an offensive stereotype, and it is probably offensive to a number of people. I still find it funny, though. Humour is an odd thing, and my sense of humour is quite possibly odder than most.
To be fair to the (stereotype) gentler sex, I can well imagine how those hopes and dreams get crushed when you look at the available male specimens and think to yourself “I have to sleep with that?”
The crux of the joke, and its ability to deliver a meaningful twist, is that women are, stereotypically, perceived to be more emotionally labile than men.
I can’t say that I have the largest data set in the world to work with but, in my anecdotal experience, this is certainly true at least once a month.
It’s not just a stereotype that is held by misogynistic old farts like me, though. Men, for some time now, have been told to “get in touch with your feelings” and that life would be, somehow, better if we could “express our emotions” more often. What is this other than an explicit recognition of the general stereotype that men are more ‘rationality’ driven and women are more ‘emotion’ driven?
A guy who had a hard day at work might phone his mate up and meet up in the pub. The conversation might play out along these lines :
A : you’re looking a bit fed up
B : yeah, I had a shit day at work
A : boss playing up again?
B : yeah, he was being a dick
A: he’s a real cunt that one. Did you see that awesome goal Messi scored last night?
Job done.
Modern day psychologists will be horrified at this and immediately send ‘B’ off to group therapy sessions where he can emote and cry and get group hugs from other similarly afflicted males.
I’m not knocking group therapy sessions - if you’ve got a serious problem that can’t be magicked away with the recollection of a Messi goal, then they can be of great benefit.
In general, however, for a lot of day to day emotions men are quite good at feeling them, but often do not see the need to express them, or to agonise over them, and can compartmentalise them.
This isn’t always a good thing. If you let negative emotions build up too much, if you bottle them up too well, then it can all explode a bit later on.
Men tend to have this inbuilt stoicism when it comes to emotions. Whether this is ‘socially constructed’ or influenced by evolution is hotly debated. I suspect the latter has played a significant part here. Behaviourally speaking you don’t really want messy emotions to get in the way of performance effectiveness when you’re chasing down that bison for tonight’s dinner.
My own personal view is that we’re all influenced by evolution when it comes to our behaviours and emotions a lot more than most would care to admit. Influenced - not programmed. Very important difference.
This does not sit well with certain strands of feminist thought which posits that the behavioural differences between men and women are entirely socially constructed. This dogma can even extend into biological differences. A little while back there was a group of students who had a collective hissy fit, an ideological meltdown, when the lecturer talked about height differences between men and women.
Yes, some of them really are that stupid.
Unfortunately, evolution didn’t go on any Diversity, Inclusion and Equity training course.
It has operated, throughout the millennia, without any kind of reference to the way it should have been acting had it only spent 3 years pursuing a gender studies degree.
For millions of years evolution has been blissfully unaware that sex is, in fact, a spectrum.
Evolution, in typical rabid right wing fashion, has firmly stuck to the model that sex is all about reproduction.
It has never, for example, had to work with a model of sex that finds fulfilment in shoving all manner of battery-operated plastic devices up one’s rear end.
I recommend that evolution pops down to the library at the local school where it can find all manner of helpful books explaining this.
For millions of years evolution has worked very well with its old-fashioned right wing model that the purpose of sex is to produce babies and that body thing A hooks up with body thing B to produce new little body things (a or b, which, in the fullness of time will become A or B, respectively).
Humans, however, have evolved to think, to create, and in the 20th and 21st centuries we’ve succeeded in decoupling sex from procreation. A hundred years or so is nowhere near long enough for evolution to have received the memo.
All our evolutionary wiring (tends to) screams at us - meet, shag, babies, nurture - repeat as necessary. How terribly old-fashioned.
Evolution most certainly hasn’t caught up with swipe right, meet up, stick odd shaped thing up each other’s arse - repeat until everyone is swiping left on your profile.
Evolution, then, prepares us for sex. It prepares our bodies for procreation. If you’re a man you’re the poker. If you’re a woman you’re the pokee.
Evolution, historically, has operated on this crude, regressive, view of the world.
We spend a bit of time learning stuff, how to walk, how not to shit our pants, that kind of thing, and then one day biology takes over and starts to really prep us for getting on with the business of producing the next generation.
Puberty hits.
It’s the great transition of life - in readiness for the next generation of life.
I might be wrong, because never having actually been a girl I’ve never experienced what it’s like, but I think puberty is a bit more consequential, and potentially distressing, for girls than it is for guys.
Guys get tougher, harder, and start to look like the guy on the left in the picture above (these days it’s more like the guy on the right, but you get the idea). It’s not overly distressing.
Girls, however, are being biologically prepared for motherhood. Hips, breasts, emotions, all start to change - not to mention the arrival of the dreaded monthly.
And to top all that off, little Johnny, who they used to really like, is starting to look at them a bit funny. Johnny, why do you keep staring at my chest? And what the fuck is that? What the hell have you got in your pocket?
Christ on a bike - I’m glad I didn’t have to put up with that.
It’s no wonder, then, that girls might get somewhat more apprehensive about the whole thing than boys do. Many cultures adopt the practice that this is a time for celebration - and I think that’s a wholesome cultural way to alleviate some of the apprehension.
But with the modern trend that has devalued motherhood, that has elevated sex as a goal in and of itself, I think we have lost touch a bit with that sense of celebration.
If you then give a girl approaching puberty a hand-held device where she can view the plumber and his assistant spit-roast the bored housewife on the kitchen table, you’re really not making things any better are you?
Holy shit, I have to do that? Is this what sex is about? Is there any way I can stop this puberty nonsense?
It isn’t any surprise to me that an increasing number of girls will want to ‘opt out’ of this perceived horrific future - especially when they’re told it’s easy to do so - and that with a few judicious scalpel swishes, they can be the poker and not the pokee.
This mismatch between our biologically-driven reproductive imperative and our society-driven glorification of sexual pleasure as an end in itself, coupled with the devaluing of motherhood and the family, is causing all sorts of conflict that we’re just not evolutionarily adapted for.
Training courses for evolution take hundreds of thousands of years.
Meanwhile, a whole generation of our youth, our most precious thing, are watching other people stick weird objects up each other’s arse.
I very much doubt it’s doing them any good.
The coming of age for both boys and girls used to be a time of celebration, a welcoming into a more adult role, and a preparation for the establishment of the next generation. These days it’s just about mindlessly coming to all sorts of weird shit.
We’re making a bit of a mockery of what should be one of life’s great transitions.
Riggery
Did you emphatically, not empathetically, but some will say pathetically say (I mean type), women are more emotional. Period?
Don’t worry about getting into trouble. Your wisdom and sense of humour may yet save us.
How dare you!?! (Throws drink into your face and bursts into tears, then demands “why aren’t you hugging me?”)
Ok, I’ve recovered and am definitely not holding a grudge. There’s no way I’ll bring this up in a decade as part of a long list of your transgressions. The fact is that you are correct about female puberty. While one would think that modern technology (I refer specifically to tampons, ibuprofen, the widespread availability of cheap chocolate, and— forgive me, gents— period panties) would make the transition easier, we now have teenage girls creating their own barbaric coming of age rites. Cutting, eating disorders, breast binding, taking drugs to grow facial hair and deepen one’s voice— are these really superior to squatting over a hole in the ground for a few days?
Maybe the message that what makes girls special is that they can be just as powerful and badass as men isn’t working. It’s not that women can’t be powerful and badass, it’s just that it’s not what makes us special. What makes us special is obviously our inability to back up the minivan in a straight line or remain rational within earshot of an argument that offends us. (Or a joke.)