Women, what are 5 things you wish men knew about you?

The innate differences between us are overblown and overhyped. I won’t pretend to believe that the physical differences between men and women are insignificant, but they’re not as significant as they’re made out to be. In a society that didn’t raise its male and female children so differently, and didn’t have the media throwing completely contradictory messages at us, we could understand each other a lot better.

It is extremely dismissive and off-putting when you make jokes about “woman logic” or imply that women are not as sound of mind as men due to emotions. Emotions are valid, and most men have them just as strongly as most of us do, they’re just not socialized to share them. This is a problem that harms both men and women.

Outside of certain extremist groups, feminism has as its goal equal, not special, treatment of women. Like my example above: changing the discourse around expression of emotion will help women by getting men to stop seeing us as “illogical,” and it will help men by making it more socially acceptable for them to express emotion. Reasonable feminists do not hate you or want to take away your rights. The extremists are loud but few.

There is a certain vulnerable feeling to being physically small that men are less likely to understand. You can’t be as trusting when you know you’re only alive because nobody has wanted or had the opportunity to hurt you, because if they did, your chances of defending yourself successfully are slim. This creates a need for extra precaution, which can influence your decisions, because even though your know that the vast, vast majority of men do not want to hurt you, you have to keep yourself safe from the ones that do.

We receive a stunning amount of mixed messages all the time. Be confident in your appearance. Cover up your flaws with make up. Have some self-respect, don’t put out on the first date. We don’t live in the Puritan era anymore, have sex when you want to. Don’t go out alone or someone might attack you. That guy was just being nice, why’d you act so distrustful? Lose some weight, fat is unattractive. Real women have curves. Be independent. When are you going to find a boyfriend? Stand up for yourself. Don’t be rude. These messages muddle up our views of reality, making it hard to make good decisions. How do you use the information you know about the world in order to make a decision when that information contradicts itself? This leads to a lot of mistakes, but for the most part, we are just regular people trying to do the right thing, just like you.

What she said ^ ^ ^. Eloquently.

@Mariah – I want to disagree with something you wrote on the last paragraph, which seems self-contradictory.

You wrote “Don’t have sex on the first date” but then you write “have sex when you want to”. And then you write “stand up for yourself”.

I think that the essence of feminism and female autonomy is not to have rules like “don’t have sex on the first date” – that’s a straitjacket .

The attitude should be “have sex when you want to, and it that’s on the first date, then it’s my intelligent choice to do so”.

It’s about autonomy and self-decision. Not following other peoples’ rules.

@elbanditoroso: I think you’re missing the point of the last paragraph, which is that we are bombarded with mixed messages all the time.

^ Yes. That was supposed to be contradictory. I was giving examples of contradictory messages women are exposed to all the time.

(That said, I of course agree with you about autonomy. The pernicious issue that remains even once we agree that we should let people do as they want, is that what they want is influenced by the messages they’ve been exposed to all their life, and so spreading these messages in the media, especially to impressionable young people, becomes another way of controlling and influencing people to put themselves into that straightjacket.)

they should now their place.
as a subordinate.
as a slave.