Cracked On Men And Women
Isn’t Cracked supposed to be a humor site? Because I don’t see much funny in this article, but I do recognize several wads of at least partial truth. I guess the funny is supposed to be in the comic exaggeration of the true-ish bits:
5 Ways Modern Men Are Trained to Hate Women
For instance, this. Although I’d have said “many men, much of the time”:
Did you ever watch old cartoons where a character is starving on a desert island, and when another character approaches, he’s so hungry that he imagines the other character as a talking piece of food?
It’s like that for most men, most of the time. We’re starving, and all women are various types of food. Only instead of food, it’s sex. And we’re trying to conduct our everyday business around the fact that we’re trying to renew our driver’s license with a talking pair of boobs. So, from about age 13 on, around 90 percent of our energy and discipline is devoted to overcoming this, to behave like civilized human beings and not like stray dogs in a meat market. One where instead of eating the meat, they want to hump it.
Shorter URL for sharing: http://www.erosblog.com/?p=8011
As a mother, I am so grateful that Cracked printed this – non preachy way to get the message to my sons.
There’s plenty in Wong’s article that’s contestable, but one thing in particular speaks to me.
That one is somehow a character in a story, that the real world is like a fictional world in being not just a set of physical processes but has some sort of moral structure or meaning, is at once a false proposition and one that is astonishingly hard to shake ourselves out of. And it’s one that has caused incalculable amounts of suffering, either because we imagine that somehow we’ll be rewarded for being the “right” kind of character (only to encounter frustration and disappointment in the face of a universe that just doesn’t care) or because we fail to take the right measure of suffering in the world because we falsely imagine it to be part of some larger narrative — “It was part of God’s plan that Little Nell was taken from us.” “It was horrible failing in my career but I grew as a person.” “The poor and the sick are reaping the fruits of their laziness and imprudence.” — and thus respond to suffering insufficiently or inappropriately.
On this point, at least, Wong nailed it.
re: “From birth we’re taught that we’re owed a beautiful girl.”
Yeah, and where’s my swimming pool?
For the great majority of mankind are satisfied with appearances as though they were realities…and are often more influenced by the things that seem, than by those that are. – Machiavelli
When my partner of five years broke up with me, I decided I wanted to be with someone really hot. After a few weeks of thought, I realised that the best way to have a relationship with someone who’s hot is to become the kind of guy a really hot person would want to be with. It’s no guarantee, but it’s going to improve my odds.
I think one of the problems guys face is that we’re told by some people “just be yourself, you’ll find someone”, and by others “you should be to find someone”, when in reality we should be our Best selves, and it won’t by certain that we’ll find someone, but at least we’ll have a good chance of enjoying life in the meantime.
If I spend time enjoying myself and being happy, odds are good other people will notice and want to share that. And hopefully, one of them will be someone I can have a worthwhile relationship with. That should be the story we tell kids and teenagers.
I read the Cracked article too, I was not impressed. It struck me as a series of sweeping generalizations about sexual relations, when the truth is generally a lot more nuanced. I think most people recognize that there is a great gulf fixed between real people and the stories we hear and see in our culture.
I agree with Carol. I suspect the primary target audience for these articles are young men; they respond more to tit jokes than quotes from Machiavelli (no offense meant). The comments implied many of them were disappointed there weren’t more jokes–but they at least got exposed to the ideas in the article. It is easy to armchair it for not being something else, but the take on the rancor around the Limbaugh followers running with the ball of calling the female college student a ‘scum receptacle’ and ‘aids infested whore’ was eye opening for me and more than worth the price of admission.