I have got to stop listening to other people's conversations. It's creepy. But you get so much great material when you do. This morning I saw this young couple--the usual model nowadays: overweight pretty big-mouthed woman and skinny, spotty-faced, grumpy, quiet, staring-out-of-window male--they were sitting on the bus staring into a big buggy that obviously contained a really new baby and discussing what they should call her. "Winifred!" the male said in a rare moment of involvement in the conversation. It was like watching a fish break the surface of a river and then dive back in. "We certainly will not call her Winifred!" the female insisted. Then they started talking about something else. I couldn't hear what the man was saying because he spoke in a whisper. Either he remembered they were on a bus (at least one of them did), or he'd adjusted the level of his voice since getting together with the woman to let the windows and doors settle back on their hinges after she'd finished her latest peroration.(You see it so often in male/ female relationship politics now.) But in response to one of his comments she boomed out, "Well, you can't help that, you've got a short attention span!" "No I haven't," he said, embarrassed into audibility. "Yes you have," she insisted. "You can't keep your mind on anything for more than a few minutes." "Yes I can," he said. And then he lost interest in discussing it and turned his face to the window.
For the rest of the journey I was trying to concentrate on something other than the size of her stomach. It's fascinating how being massively overweight doesn't seem to affect the confidence of some of these women in the way it would have done thirty, twenty, even ten years ago. And a good thing too, although everybody--woman, man or beast--should know when to shut their trap occasionally and give everybody else in the room a chance.
3 comments:
You see these young lasses around in mulitudes these days, Britain or Spain, America or Mexico, Australia or the moon.
They're highly dominant, highly confident and don't give two stuffs about those around them. They are in control, they don't care what you think. And congratulations to them.
Unfortunately and somewhat coincidently, the balance of the genders have tipped in favour of women. The so called feminists won. No, they didn't want equality, for what they burned their bras for and protested for. Power. Dominance. Control.
Now you see hapless father's giving up in the courts the right to have equal care and say in their offspring's life. One bad move and they'd be falsely incriminated and punished for things they didn't do. A woman wouldn't lie right? Men are evil. Women are saints.
Oh how society has changed. Sometimes I wish upon a star I grew up in the early 20th century. Life seemed so normal then.
I think you're right. It IS a good thing that feminism won, since no one would want to see women subjected and abused (at least, not unless it was between consenting partners with the curtains drawn). But what did they win? That woman on the bus was just a loudmouth, and she had nothing--or so it appeared--to be gobbing off about. At one point she instigated a conversation about the genealogy of a family on the British soap "Emmerdale".
Maybe, however, she isn't the best example of emancipated womanhood.
I blame it on the Eighties. You might say I blame everything on the Eighties, but that message people like Madonna sent--that a woman could be emancipated AND sexy--while being a hundred percent true, has been subverted or has decayed now to the point where a lot of women imagine themselves emancipated if they stand up and declare proudly that they want exactly what their poor beaten-down grannies wanted. Like Sarah-Jessica Parker's character in "Sex And The City": a big wardrobe payed for by a charismatic boyfriend. "I'll have a date with your single friend," the standard cry goes out." How much money does he have?"
Why should that matter, I wonder? Bring back proper, educated, politically-conscious feminism, I say. Those women were fun to be around. I still can't look at a woman's breasts bouncing up and down as she runs across the road to catch a bus because of the indoctrination I had from feminists about looking at women as sex objects.
Yes, and it's purely okay for us women to look at men as sex objects. I know I sure do.
:D
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