Men, Women…. and so forth…

Down a pound today. Yay! So that makes my net loss now 102 lbs. (at least for today.) I know, I know, you didn’t come here to hear me whine about my weight but it’s MY diary. (please don’t take me off your favorites….)

Anyway, to continue on with yesterday’s subject – and btw, I felt MUCH better after therapy (I have a wonderful therapist) – it’s not that I JUST hate men (which, I don’t really do, I just experience a hateful/angry feeling sometimes, okay?). I also hate women sometimes, because women are just as guilty of putting us in this position. For every man who leers, coerces, and even rapes, there’s a women guilty of manipulating and using her sexuality to get a man to do what she wants. Now, I know she wouldn’t do it if a man wasn’t open to it in the first place, but I’m thinking more like the women who think nothing of using sex to steal a “sister’s” husband or boyfriend; those women who use sex to build their own egos. YOU know who I’m talking about – just because they CAN. Some men are so weak and we, as women, know who the prey are. If we wanted an ego boost, we could steal ‘em. Heck, even when I weighed over 200 lbs, there were men I could have slept with and more if I wanted to jeopardize my marriage and screw over other women just to feed my ego. The women who actually do that set the cause of womanhood back by light years. And what a mess it makes for everybody involved. I think, though, that maybe the same way sex drives men, maybe insecurity drives women. I don’t know – probably all are too vast generalizations to be taken seriously.

You know what felt really good, though? When I was telling my therapist about all those articles and stuff and about how I felt, he interrupted me and said, “You know, I just gotta tell you. Listening to all this make me embarrassed to be a man.” I surprised at how that felt like a huge apology on behalf of the race of men. (I also appreciated Q’s note.) I guess that when I talk to my husband about this stuff, he ends up getting sort of defensive. My therapist’s obvious and immediate sort of taking on of the sins of men really salved so much of my anger right away that I was amazed at how quickly I felt better. What I appreciate about him is how honestly and authentically he’s able to relate back what his emotions are. I really want to be more like that but am so afraid to take risks. In here, you see me taking lots of emotional risks. This is my diary. I rant and rave and get emotional, blah blah blah… but I’m much more calculated in real life about the kinds of emotional risks I take although it doesn’t appear so much that way on the surface. I hide it well. I appear much more spontaneous than I am but I could have been up part of the night before preparing for a seemingly spontaneous conversation that will happen the next day. If I don’t think things through in advance and prepare for various eventualities, I don’t know if I’d have many conversations at all! I’m afraid to be the real me. After so much therapy I’m much more of a risk taker than I used to be, but there are moments that I’m floored by how my therapist is able to just be so honest about how he feels. The nice part is that I DO take that in and then try to emulate that myself (at least now and then).

But, back to the men thing… one of the problems I thought about this morning was that men are so focused on sex that I think they forget that WE aren’t. Sex is not just an aggressive thing to them, it’s also a love thing. When a man loves a woman, to him it’s just a natural expression of love. He wants to share his body with her and he wants to give her what he feels is the greatest thing in the world, sexual pleasure. He’s so wrapped up in the concept of an orgasm being the most wonderful thing in the world he can’t seem to grasp that maybe it isn’t the most wonderful thing in the world to her. I got to thinking about this when I was listening to an old song this morning — I’ll Stop the World and Melt with You. At first I was remembering how romantic I thought that song was. It was in a movie called Valley Girl (which sounds stupid but it was one of Nick Cage’s first movies and was really adorable). Then I got to wondering what, exactly, I thought “melting with you” was. Then I started thinking that it was just sex, after all, but in the song that was the most wonderful thing he could offer her – which was how I got on the thought that men feel they are offering their best when they offer sex.

The same man who is offering his best when he offers sex, however, could have offered that same penis to a girl he picked up a month before when he was feeling horny. That’s the thing, and he could have just gone home the next day with a thank you (or worse) – although with the Nick Cage character in Valley Girl type, you get the feeling that they would be more discriminating. With those kind of characters, the feeling is that when they were first starting out maybe they had one or two shallow encounters but realized that was not for them, they were going to “save” it for the REAL thing… and that is what is supposed to endear them to you and make the sex that the movie is about seem like important sex.

It just always seemed like when I went out that guys were so focused on sex and it used to get me so edgy. Then, to make matters worse, (and oooohhhh how I hated this…) on a number of occasions the guy would casually put his arm around me and say, “Relax…” And it never meant, “relax.” We both knew THAT. It always meant… “Don’t be so uptight. (Yield.) I’ll never get anywhere with you if you are so tense.” Although I’m sure the guy would have never consciously known that was what he meant, THAT was what he meant. And it was always the guys that turned out to be a little sleazy that were the ones that said that… ugh… I shudder now just remembering that. My inner alarms must have gone off causing me to be tense because the guys that were fun and NOT so sex focused never CAUSED me to be tense.

Rather than going through it all again… if you flip back in my diary to two entries dated and entitled the following, you’ll understand a little more about where I’m coming from:

use AND raising children, all the while allowing men to think they’re the smart ones. That’s how they portray us. How many REAL women are portrayed on television these days, even on the so-called reality shows? And all of these super-women not only look incredible and work out on a regular basis, many of them fight better than men, they make a good living, cook, sometimes raise children alone, and have healthy sexual appetites and no issues about having frequent and satisfying sex out of wedlock. THIS is what we’re supposed to aspire to!! Proverbs 31 is a chapter called The Wife of Noble Character and sounds sort of tough until you compare it with the above. At least the Wife of Noble Character doesn’t have to do a daily round of Pilates. I just think, more and more, that the Bible is where we can find true feminism if we just cull it out. Women are so put off by the scripture saying we shouldn’t lead in the church, etc. etc. that they don’t realize the Bible may be playing to our strengths and capitalizing on our differences as opposed to oppressing us. MAN’S incorrect interpretation may oppress us if we’re not careful, but I think it’s time to re-read and re-think some of our initial impressions of what’s written there – of course I’m preaching to myself now because it’s time for ME to re-read and re-think – it’s not that I didn’t or don’t believe… it’s just that I now think it may be more universally applicable than I did before.