Men and Women
My brother came to visit us with my little niece a few days ago. He mentioned, among other things, that their son, Vova, took some boxing classes recently to help with a problem he had, and that it worked out great. He said: “Vova was being hassled by some punks in school, and he had a problem - he was just really afraid of getting hit, and they sensed it. So I told him: you have to deal with it, man! I took him to boxing classes. And it worked like charm! Nowadays, I get called to school because of his fights!”
And I was just so happy for me nephew, and so envious! Why, why did nobody do the same for me when I was a kid?! I had a lot of problems of this kind in school. I was Russian, and the 90’s were a bad time to be a Russian in an Israeli school; in addition, I studied really well. So the other kids just loved to harass me - it was of one of their favorite pastimes. Some of them beat me up. Others just cursed me and threw stuff at me and laughed at me… like a pack of hyenas. And the thing is: it’s not that my parents, or the teachers, or the school psychological advisor, or even the principal didn’t take the matter seriously. They did. My parents regularly went to school to complain; the teachers called the parents of the boys to school, the advisor had long talks with them… the usual deal, you know. I got a lot of useful advice, ranging from how to ignore the kids and not let their actions hurt me, to how to become the leader of their pack, the “cool kid”. But nobody, nobody ever told me: “Will you stop being such a f%@king pussy? Learn some self defense and use it! Kick their ass!
Oh, if I only discovered Gracie Jiu Jitsu sooner! Damn it, I could have been a purple belt by now! Argh!..
But of course, we know why Vova and I got such different advice. I was a girl. Girls are supposed to be all sweet and timid, you see. We’re not supposed to kick ass. It’s wrong. It’s not feminine.
But think about how the whole concept of femininity changed over the last 100 years. Once, people thought that driving was not feminine. Or wearing pants. Or wearing short hair. Or, for that matter, having college education and a real job. Or voting. All these things were considered exclusively masculine. And the thing is: the people who were against giving women voting rights 50 years ago, who claimed that it would make women less feminine - in a sense, they were right. It did make women less feminine - by their definitions of femininity. If these people could see our society today, they would doubtlessly mourn the fact that women stopped being women. But the men nowadays don’t think so! Many men nowadays find Kyra Gracie very attractive:
The definition of femininity changed over the years. It doesn’t include helplessness and stupidity anymore. It includes timidity and shyness to a much lesser extent than it used to. And the thing is - everybody wins from this. The men also win from this. Because it’s not that all women stopped being this and became that. No. Now, variety is possible. It’s not that women stopped wearing skirts! Some of them wear skirts, and others wear pants (and others vary). But now, men can enjoy sexy pants on women as well as sexy skirts. It’s a win-win. If someone finds helplessness attractive, he’ll still find plenty of it around! But now, someone who finds ability and intelligence attractive will also be able to find it. Some women are still sweet and timid, and some kick ass. And some are usually sweet and timid, but will kick your ass if provoked :-)
And I often wonder what society would look like if we really stopped raising girls as girls and boys as boys. If we really treated all kids the same. How many of the perceived differences between the sexes are just social constructs? Yeah, I know it’s a big question, and volumes were written on it (I got some great pointers recently, and from what I read so far, the answer seems to be “nearly all of them”).
There is a great short story about this -- “Changes” by Neil Gaiman. In this story, a scientist develops a pill that allows everyone to change their gender at will. After taking the pill, you fall asleep and your body “reboots”: in a few hours, you change - you wake up with the body of the opposite gender. It is completely reversible - you could just take another pill and change back anytime. No negative side effects - actually, the change itself was an unexpected side effect to the original intent of the pill - which was to cure most known kinds of cancer. But soon, of course, the side effect became the main cause of usage… The story describes how society would look like if such pill were available. (Well, actually, it’s a short story, so it just offers glimpses here and there and lets the reader connect the dots.) In the end, there is a very powerful scene, where Rajit, the scientist who invented the pill, is old and dying from cancer, and he is standing on the beach of Copacabana looking at the people:
They are golden and beautiful. Some of them are asleep on the sand. Most of them are naked, or they wear the kind of bathing attire that emphasizes and punctuates their nakedness.
Rajit knows them, then.
Later, much later, they made another biopic. In the final sequence the old man falls to his knees on the beach, as he did in real life, and the blood trickles from the open flap of his pajama bottoms, soaking the faded cotton and puddling darkly onto the soft sand. He stares at them all, looking from one to another with awe upon his face, like a man who has finally learned how to stare at the sun.
He said one word only as he died, surrounded by the golden people, who were not men, who were not women.
He said, “Angels.”
And the people watching the biopic, as beautiful, as golden, as changed as the people on the beach, knew that that was the end of it all.
And in any way that Rajit would have understood, it was.