Lora - Women

Lora - Women

A friend of mine posted on facebook, a very simple message as a 'status'.

Women get shit done. And I love women.

Just sayin'.

She's lovely, and it seems like such a clear, straightforward message.  Minutes after, a guy posted:

I love women too but men also get shit done. Just sayin'.

I don't know the guy, not friends with him, and obviously don't know the dynamic of the friendship that he and my friend share.  She rebuffed him.  I assume if it was a joke, she was not amused.

In that moment, I saw both sides of this particular conundrum clearly.  She made a declarative statement.  He, through a fairly straightforward logical fallacy assumed she also implied a contrapositive.  Now knowing her, it's pretty unlikely in my mind that she did.  If she did, I suppose I don't know her quite that well then, but I rather doubt she did.

But his assumption of the contrary is not...a particularly long jump in logic to make.  I mean she directly never says anything disparaging towards men.  But he interprets it as such.

Why?

Why does he perceive a gendered celebration as being an attack on his own?

I didn't see it that way, but that's neither here nor there.

Obviously he DID.  But why?  Is there a masculine need for attention?  Was he threatened?  Did he need to be in on it?  Did he think that he was making a joke?  Seems like it might've been in bad taste right?

I don't really know where I'm going with these musings, but I've been thinking a lot lately about how we interact online, and why we saw what we do, and do what we do.

And why.

I mean let's real talk here for a second.  I don't get how her celebration becomes a personal attack on this guy's gender.  I mean I do, but it makes no fucking sense.  By empowering herself and the women around her whom she obviously has a lot of respect for (and I have a lot of respect for), she's somehow attacking masculinity.  Except she's not.  This is the perceived problem with feminism.  Everyone thinks that feminists want more than men.  No.  They want the SAME.

People need to give their heads a shake if they think there's anything else beyond that.  It's the same when we talk about racism.  It's the same when we talk about LGBTQ disparity.  We don't want to rip apart good people, we want the treatment of everyone to be THE SAME.

I'm talking about meritocracy.  I'm talking about people having self-worth, what you get and what you earn are dependent on how hard you go about getting it.  There are incredible hurdles put in front of all of us for reasons we can't control, and let me tell you, as someone who has a lot of fucking hurdles put in front of him all his life, adding more because of things I can't control gets me really riled up.

So I understand, I understand how and why she wants to celebrate her friends. But to take her celebration and make it an attack when it's not?  It's just...Selfish.  Really, really selfish.  Problematically so because the person obviously believes they were in the right to bring it up.  But they're not.  Their highlighting themselves while we point out what's unfair.

If you don't think that's messed up...then I'm not sure why you're still reading.

Rant off.

Thanks.