The 'market value' of men and women

And now we've reached this point, at least in Norway, where journalists, psychologists, tv personalities and celebrities are now discussing the 'market value' of men and women. But not just any men and women; men and women over a certain age. Over the age of 40, when market value apparently decreases drastically, especially for women. In line with my post from the other day, I am now relating what some of these 'experts' have to say on the matter. But mostly I know what I want to say in response to all of it. One major comment--it should come as no surprise to media honchos that many people are cancelling their newspaper and magazine subscriptions. They simply don't want to be bothered with these types of articles and discussions. 

According to the so-called experts (psychologists and journalists), single women over 40 apparently don't want to get together with men in their 50s and 60s because those men are apparently bombastic, archaic, old-fashioned, domineering, and only interested in women under 40. These women want to be together with men in their 30s and 40s because younger men are apparently less bombastic, archaic, etc., but apparently those men are only interested in women under 40 as well. So what's a woman over 40 to do? Some male psychologists step up to the plate to say that women over 40 are perhaps too picky. They don't want older men, who in turn don't want them. What came first, the chicken or the egg? If older single men find out that women their age don't want them, perhaps they will aim for younger women. Or is it the other way around? Women over 40 have experienced rejection after rejection from men their age, so they aim for younger men, who again aim for younger women. This imbalance is not a problem for most younger people; as I wrote the other day, the majority of young men and women find partners their own age. So what is a single woman or man over 40 (over the hill?) to do? I don't have the answer to that question. I tried to offer some solutions in my recent post, among them not defining yourself in terms of how others view you. Your worth as a human being is not dependent upon what others think of you. But perhaps I am just yelling into the wind. 

I think we have a huge problem in society when we reduce men and women to their 'market value'. What are people now, commodities? Products on a store shelf that have an expiration date? Apparently yes. I don't know who first used this term in connection with describing people, but if I met him or her, I'd tell him or her the following: Take a long walk off a short pier. Why do I care, you ask. Read on. 

We've reached the point of saturation with articles written about this nonsense. I'm tired of reading about what experts think, experts who haven't managed to get their own lives in order. Additionally, expertise is relative. You may perhaps have had something worthwhile to say ten years ago, but not now. We should be looking at the market value of some of these 'professions' that dispense out hip wisdom to their readers/patients. My point is that this is an individual's job here on earth--to prevent garbage in. If we take in a lot of garbage, there will be a lot of garbage going out. We will just pass on the garbage spiel to others, ad nauseam. Do we want to do that? No. 

I envision a world where we ordinary people rise above the new-speak, the hype, the garbage, the trendy, the hip, the fake outrage, the woke mentality, the non-woke mentality. I envision a world where individuals take responsibility for their own intellectual and spiritual evolution. It's hard work, yes it is. But God it's worth it. Because once you've risen above the things that want to keep you down in the muck, you will see these 'experts' for what they are--money-hungry grifters and grubbers, bottom feeders, out to make a buck at our expense. You will not buy their books, watch them on tv, or feed into their PR hype. You will instead tune them out and turn off the tv or social media and promote and prioritize your own life, your own good values, your spouse, your family, your soul. You will realize just how much time is wasted on useless discussions and debates, and you will find something worthwhile to focus on. God knows there are a myriad of projects out there just waiting for you to get involved. And if you're single, you just might meet someone while you're focusing on something worthwhile, rather than wasting your time on dating sites. I know I don't have street cred because I am married and have no idea about these sites, but I do have single women friends, and from what I've heard about these so-called dating sites from them, I surmise that they're mostly a waste of time. If I was single, I wouldn't waste my time on them. I'd be traveling, visiting friends and family, or outdoors biking, in my garden, walking, doing photography, or indoors writing, reading, cooking and trying new recipes. My life is full and I'm grateful for that. Our lives are as empty or as full as we make them. If experts deem that people have a market value or a shelf life, then let the experts live and think that way. Let them debate ad nauseam and stir up a lot of false outrage or write the nth self-help book about it. If the masses feed into it, that's their problem. The way we live our ordinary lives--full of meaning--will give us the strength to rise above the nonsense.  

The Giver of Stars and patriarchal societies

I just finished reading The Giver of Stars by Jojo Moyes, and can highly recommend it. Moyes wrote a fictional novel about a group of women in Depression-era Kentucky who became the Pack Horse librarians—traveling by horse to the rural mountainous areas of Kentucky to deliver books, magazines, comic books and recipes to households wanting to become more literate. The Pack Horse library project was part of the Works Progress Administration (WPA) set into motion by Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt. These women braved bad weather, treacherous conditions, brutal men, ignorant people, and despite these hindrances, pushed on, providing a much-needed service. In the process, they became friends, and that is really the book’s story. It is an empowering book for women, because it presents their daily lives and struggles in ways that any woman could understand. It also presents how the women deal with issues of race, abuse of women, unhappy loveless marriages, patriarchal attitudes toward women, feminism, self-identity, self-esteem, love, and friendship. It is impossible to read this book without becoming involved in the lives of these women; you end up rooting for them, admiring their intelligence, perseverance and cleverness when dealing with the patriarchal attitudes and threats from some of the men living alongside them in their small Kentucky town. You also feel their fears; the threats of rape and violence if they don’t toe the line or do what some of the more ignorant men in the book want them to do. Luckily, Moyes balances the ignorant and often violent men with men who are the opposite—open to learning/changing and empathic. The latter are the men who love these women and who support them, in often non-conventional ways. It is impossible to read this book and not reflect on the damage that patriarchal attitudes have done to relationships between men and women, but also between men and their children (both male and female—many of them cowed into submission to brutal fathers). It made me think about how what my life could have been like at that time. Was it just a toss of the coin that led to your being married to a good man or a bad one? Some of the parents didn’t seem to care one way or another if a man was violent to his spouse; in the book, it is not the husband who was abusive to his wife, but his own father---a powerful man in the town and a truly nasty character that you end up wishing would suffer or die or both. One might have expected that the town’s priest would support the woman rather than her father-in-law, but no, it was her duty to return to that house where she lived with her husband and his father. She does not return after she is battered by her father-in-law, and that leads to all sorts of problems for her and her fellow traveling librarians, one of whom is also a target of this nasty man, because she lives her life on her terms, and that is anathema to a man like him.

Those of you who know me, who read this blog, know that I am no fan of patriarchal societies, families, religions, or workplaces. I cannot now (and was never able to from the time I was a teenager), support policies and laws that are unjust to, exclude or demean women. The one way to guarantee that I will fight for something is for men I have no respect for tell me how women should live, work, think, or otherwise exist. If you want to fire me up, that is the sure-fire way to do it.

Firstly, it is important to mention that I respect a lot of men. I have written many times in this blog about my bosses at my first job in Manhattan and how much they supported and encouraged me in my scientific career. I’ve talked about my father and what a good man he was; he never told me directly that I could not do something in the society I was growing up in because I was a woman. We rarely talked about the difficulties I might face because I was a woman, but when we did I knew that was because he wished to protect me from some of the crap he knew I would eventually face, especially in the work world. So many times I wish he was still alive so that I could talk to him about some of the things that I’ve experienced up through the years. One of the last conversations I had with him shortly before he died was one where he told me that he just wanted me to be happy, and that meant more to me than anything else at that time. He did not say to me that I should follow the written and unwritten rules in society for how women should live and behave, he did not say to me that I should abide by the tenets of my religion when it came to my personal life (nor did my mother). He did not push me to marry or to have children or to do any of the traditional things that women were often expected to do. He left those decisions up to me. He would never have forced me to marry someone I did not love. He was no patriarch. Yes, he could be strict and stubborn at times, but he was both a smart and empathic man. He felt others’ pain, responded to it by trying to alleviate it, often at times when he had his own pain, especially as he got older. One of the nicest memories I have is when he called me at work one day just to tell me he loved me. I was lucky to have him as my father. A lot of men simply cannot hold a candle to him.

The men I don’t respect are the ones who want to run roughshod over you, the ones who dominate you in all conversations with them, who do not acknowledge that you have anything important to say, who bully women verbally and psychologically, who never fail to remind you that nothing you do is good enough for them (and of course they know exactly what you should do to better yourself). You might think that they don’t exist in 2020, but they do. They are the men who know best—ALWAYS. They know what is best for you, what you SHOULD do, who become ill-tempered or directly angry when you don’t agree with them or follow their 'advice'. They are the men who berate you for your opinions, privately or in front of others (preferably in front of others so that they look powerful and you are humiliated). They are the men who compete with you instead of supporting you as mentors. They are the men who will offer support but only when they are interested in you sexually. They are the men who make rude, nasty, or sexually-tinged remarks, the ones who think they are being funny by doing so. They are the powerful men who hold others down, women and men alike. They are the ones who work behind the scenes to keep others down, freeze others out, and destroy others’ careers if they challenge them in any way. They are the ones who pull the strings; others should just dance to their tune like the good puppets they think others are.

I want liberty and justice for all. I don’t want a continual war between the sexes, but I don’t want women to surrender in all situations just to keep the peace and to preserve relationships. Some marriages should end, rightfully so, if women and children are treated badly/abused by their husbands and fathers. There is no point in preserving such marriages, and no reason for society to support abusive patriarchy at all costs. This type of patriarchy destroys lives and costs society a lot—abused children need a lot of support to get past the trauma of their early lives, so that they do not grow up to perpetuate the pattern of abuse. Patriarchy may have served a purpose at one time, although I’m not sure what that was. That was a time when men ruled society and women and children were considered to be their property. In modern Western societies, women and children are no longer the property of men, but some of the subtle patriarchal attitudes remain in the workplace and in personal life. Why are there still discussions and surveys about who does the most housework in the home? If both husband and wife work full-time, they should be sharing the chores equally. That brings me back to my father; after a long day at work and the commute home from Manhattan to the suburbs, he had a nap before dinner, and then his evenings were spent focused on us before we went to bed. He made sure we did our homework, quizzed us for tomorrow’s tests, and helped us with different subjects. By the time we went to bed, he had perhaps an hour to read a good book before he ended up asleep in his chair. That was my dad. He enjoyed spending time with his children; he wasn’t constantly running off to pursue this or that hobby, and he didn’t complain about that, nor did my mother. Many of my friends had fathers who behaved similarly; they know their fathers loved them. So not all men who grew up in patriarchal times behaved the way they were expected to behave; not all of them bought into the hype that success meant sacrificing your family on the altar of money, greed, arrogance and betrayal.

Feeling invisible

I've been reflecting on the dynamics that occur in conversations between men and women, either personal conversations between two people of the opposite sex or in mixed-gender social settings. The personal conversations that I can comment on are those I've had, or those that women friends of mine have had that they have commented on to me. In social settings, I am an active participant in the general conversations about society, politics, and work, but at one recent gathering, I stopped talking toward the end of the evening and just observed the people in the room. It was interesting to intuit the dynamics present in the room. During the early part of the evening, I observed an egalitarian interflow of ideas and comments between men and women, but toward the end of the evening it changed, and I'm not sure why, perhaps because the men let down their guard more? Perhaps because the topics of conversation became more serious? It is this change in dynamics that interested me as an observer and as a woman. The thing that struck me was that the men did not follow up on the women's opinions and thoughts, not in the same way as they did with the men present. Their comments and in-depth talk were mostly aimed at the other men. Perhaps this was the case simply because they felt more comfortable discussing with men because it is a generational thing--most of the men are in their early sixties or older. It can be a generational thing--that men are more preoccupied with impressing (and possibly competing with) the other men in the room as has so often been the case through the centuries, so that listening to women is an afterthought and not a priority. I liked all of the men in the room, so my observations have nothing to do with not liking them. It's just that it felt as though they were accommodating women's opinions without agreeing with or sanctioning them, and they did not follow up on women's comments, or if they did, they did so in a dominating way which is a sure way to end a conversation. In other words, they did not engage further, and it felt as though that was a deliberate choice. It made me wonder if this was because they do not consider women to be as important as they are (generational?). I have never felt that way in conversation with men who are thirty or forty years younger than the men at this gathering. It is a strange way to feel, and the reason I felt that way is because I did not feel comfortable after a while expressing my opinions, and I noticed one other woman give up the fight to be heard as well. What happens is that you open your mouth to comment on a particular topic of interest, and you are suddenly overridden by a man who does not listen to your comments or wait until you finish speaking before he jumps in with his opinion or thought in a dominating overriding fashion. Or you open your mouth and your comment is ignored--essentially, not followed up. The fight to be heard is a question of how to deal with this type of behaviour from some of the men in the room. I noticed that the women were much more likely to listen to the men's comments and to let them finish talking before they commented. It felt strange to me, and at some point, it felt as though women were unwanted, even invisible. I may be overreacting, but the feeling was strong. Some male work colleagues over a certain age also behave in this way, whereas I rarely have that feeling with the women I converse with, which tells me that I have been lucky with my choice of female friends and female work colleagues with whom I converse. It makes me sad that men can dismiss women in this way, even though I know that it has gone on for centuries. It also makes me sad to think that perhaps this is another price that women have to pay for growing older in our society, that they are expected to know their place, take it, and be happy with it (sit down and be quiet). My mother used to say that getting older made her feel invisible. I share her view. But then ask me what she didn't do. The answer is--write in order to become visible.

A quote from Jackson Katz's book The Macho Paradox: Why Some Men Hurt Women and How All Men Can Help

I haven't read Jackson Katz's book The Macho Paradox: Why Some Men Hurt Women and How All Men Can Help, but I am impressed by this quote from his book. It's uncomfortable to read it, and yet, if you are a woman, you learn to do many of these things already when you are quite young. Here is the quote:

“I draw a line down the middle of a chalkboard, sketching a male symbol on one side and a female symbol on the other. Then I ask just the men: What steps do you guys take, on a daily basis, to prevent yourselves from being sexually assaulted? At first there is a kind of awkward silence as the men try to figure out if they've been asked a trick question. The silence gives way to a smattering of nervous laughter. Occasionally, a young guy will raise his hand and say, 'I stay out of prison.' This is typically followed by another moment of laughter, before someone finally raises his hand and soberly states, 'Nothing. I don't think about it.' Then I ask women the same question. What steps do you take on a daily basis to prevent yourselves from being sexually assaulted? Women throughout the audience immediately start raising their hands. As the men sit in stunned silence, the women recount safety precautions they take as part of their daily routine. Here are some of their answers: Hold my keys as a potential weapon. Look in the back seat of the car before getting in. Carry a cell phone. Don't go jogging at night. Lock all the windows when I sleep, even on hot summer nights. Be careful not to drink too much. Don't put my drink down and come back to it; make sure I see it being poured. Own a big dog. Carry Mace or pepper spray. Have an unlisted phone number. Have a man's voice on my answering machine. Park in well-lit areas. Don't use parking garages. Don't get on elevators with only one man, or with a group of men. Vary my route home from work. Watch what I wear. Don't use highway rest areas. Use a home alarm system. Don't wear headphones when jogging. Avoid forests or wooded areas, even in the daytime. Don't take a first-floor apartment. Go out in groups. Own a firearm. Meet men on first dates in public places. Make sure to have a car or cab fare. Don't make eye contact with men on the street. Make assertive eye contact with men on the street.”

― Jackson Katz, The Macho Paradox: Why Some Men Hurt Women and How All Men Can Help


I find it sad that we have come to this point in society, where women cannot really trust men to treat them respectfully. Where women cannot trust men to help them if they are threatened with sexual assault (when the men that could help just stand there and watch as their friends rape a woman). Where women are treated like objects for men's sexual (often violent) proclivities. Where 'no' is always taken as 'yes'. What has brought us to this point? Has hardcore porn played a role? I think it has. But of course that view is poo-pooed by so many people who want so desperately to be liberal in every way. I remember my father, whose view on men was not very promising, to say the least. He would always tell me that a lot of men were just no good and that I should watch out for myself. When I was young, I didn't want to believe that what he was saying was true. But as I got older, I understood. I have met many good men, but I have also met others who were simply the opposite--crude, rude, sexually-aggressive, violent, hate-filled, and envious. Men who think everything is a joke. Men who disrespect women by interrupting them constantly, belittling what they say, overpowering them by yelling, and so on. Men who become angry when told 'no'. Men who abuse women verbally (telling them they're stupid, for example), psychologically, and physically. The list goes on. So if Jackson Katz can teach men how to behave respectfully toward women, kudos to him. He deserves a star in my book.