There's a lot of different aspects to this issue, of course.  Any you're right, this impossible pursuit of perfection, perhaps a function of our media fixation, has skewed a lot of peoples' sense of reality.  Afterall, don't we all deserve to date a supermodel?

But I was also thinking as I wrote about two companies that I worked for (and others friends have since told me about since) where there is such an anti-male hostility that the men are afraid to talk to the women except in the strictest definition of work.  They have been threatened with policies written by the legal staff, indoctrinated with endless sexual harassment seminars and reached the only rational conclusion- contact with women is dangerous to your health and career.

These were headquarters of companies you all know.  In one of them, an opportunistic entry level analyst set-up her boss for a deliberate sexual harassment pay day.  My secretary was her best friend, and she told me months in advance of what was happening.  This woman got a new car and $55,000 from her employer, and of course, her executive level boss got fired.  She laughed all the way to Seattle where she "reinvented" herself.  I just don't consider this progress, especially compared to some of the positive work environments I'd experienced in the past.

The Feminist movement got side tracked by it's own success, as equality and opportunity for all women was replaced with a more radical agenda that was hard-edged and anti-male.  It was an agenda of the new lesbian powerbase that became the dominante faction in the movement.   In it, men are not necessary for marriage, happiness, families, or parenting.  The underlying reasons for "coupling" are viewed as demeanig to women and a form of male domination.

I know these attitudes are not shared equally by all age cohorts, nor are they evenly distributed geographically.  But they have had a powerful influence in shaping attitudes because of their influence in the media.  But on a more personal level, these attitudes have also had a very damaging effect on the average person struggling to achieve relationship happiness because many of the elements necessary for relationship success have been  framed in the context of weakness, domination, exploitation etc.  As a result, like all radical agendas, they are devisive and have contributed further to the factionalization of society at the most basic level- the interaction between men and women.  If men and women in the same society can't come together, how can geo-political or religious differences ever be reconciled?



 


-- Modified on 11/15/2001 12:56:53 AM