{"id":19,"date":"2007-07-19T18:58:38","date_gmt":"2007-07-20T00:58:38","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.elsweb.org\/dasbolt\/2007\/07\/19\/gender-differences\/"},"modified":"2007-07-19T19:02:10","modified_gmt":"2007-07-20T01:02:10","slug":"gender-differences","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.elsweb.org\/dasbolt\/2007\/07\/19\/gender-differences\/","title":{"rendered":"Gender Differences"},"content":{"rendered":"

All the talk about gender in class today reminded me of a book by former LA Times columnist Norah Vincent called Self Made Man: One Woman’s Journey Into Manhood and Back<\/a>. It’s about the 18 months she went undercover as a man named Ned in order to see the difference in how people treated her. It ended when she suffered a nervous breakdown.<\/p>\n

While participating in a bowling league, she had to opportunity to observe the way the guys on her team would treat their sons. She weighed in on the matter during an NPR interview:<\/p>\n

There is a toughening process boys have to go through [where] emotional expression is beaten or laughed or teased out of them…The only emotion left to them is anger.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

I can’t say that’s been my personal experience, but I can see how she might come away with that view. I do think there is truth in the fact that anger is one of the few emotions men can express in public. <\/p>\n

Looking around for other writings she has done, I found some excerpts<\/a> from her book printed in The Guardian. Her observations on how frustrating it was dating women made me smile:<\/p>\n

The women I met wanted a man to be confident. They wanted in many ways to defer to him. I could feel that on many dates, the unspoken desire to be held up and led, whether in conversation or even in physical space…<\/p>\n

Yet as much as these women wanted a take-control man, at the same time they wanted a man who was vulnerable to them, a man who would show his colours and open his doors, someone expressive, intuitive, attuned. This I was in spades, and I always got points for it. But I began to feel very sympathetic toward heterosexual men – the pressure to be a world-bestriding colossus is an immensely heavy burden to bear, and trying to be a sensitive new age guy at the same time is pretty well impossible. Expectation, expectation, expectation was the leitmotif of Ned’s dating life.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

All the talk about gender in class today reminded me of a book by former LA Times columnist Norah Vincent called Self Made Man: One Woman’s Journey Into Manhood and Back. It’s about the 18 months she went undercover as … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":88,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-19","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.elsweb.org\/dasbolt\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/19","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.elsweb.org\/dasbolt\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.elsweb.org\/dasbolt\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.elsweb.org\/dasbolt\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/88"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.elsweb.org\/dasbolt\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=19"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.elsweb.org\/dasbolt\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/19\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.elsweb.org\/dasbolt\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=19"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.elsweb.org\/dasbolt\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=19"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.elsweb.org\/dasbolt\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=19"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}