Laughter: Carbonated Grace

When we focus on only one side of a goal, we have tunnel vision. Often, a perfectly good goal, if carried out without taking into account the realities of human nature, will have side effects, both positive and negative that no one anticipated.
In the struggle to give women with talents and proclivities other than maternal or domestic a level playing field with men, we created an economy based on two incomes. While this helped free women from abusive or unhappy marriages, it also increased the number of one parent households. Corporations, growing to sizes that have more employees than the governments of many countries, no longer have to be focused on pleasing customers or employees. Instead their priority is on increasing profits by both growing exponentially and maintaining a low minimum wage. This, combined with the other trends, has increased the number of children living below poverty level exponentially. In our small county’s school system there are at least two hundred children without an actual home. Many are living in cars or motel rooms or are in a cycle of moving from one friend’s house to another’s. And every where, women whose talents and personalities are maternal and domestic are not only no longer valued for who they are, but unless married to a wealthy man, cannot afford to stay home to raise their children. Until we recognize the side effects on children and ultimately the culture, getting a reasonable minimum wage will not become a national priority.
In the wake of women taking pride in their bodies and all this involves, such as pregnancy and breasts to feed their newborns, the fashion industry jumped on the bandwagon with styles that leave little to the imagination. Now older women with crinkly necks are looking on Amazon for Muslim clothes shops. This trend doesn’t really help us in our struggle to get respect for physical boundaries. Men and women may be equal under the law, but the reality is that generally we do not have the same reactions to bodily exposure of the opposite sex. When a man with the values of Jimmy Carter admits to looking at women with lust in his heart, it should open women’s eyes to how innate and strong the difference is. (I admit I do enjoy the freedom that the invisibility of being an old lady gives me while waiting in airports. I pass the time comparing the pecs and buns of the young men passing by. But it doesn’t make me want to grope them.)
If women want men to not only actually hear what we say in the board rooms and as teachers, preachers, and leaders, but to respect our physical boundaries, the reality is we need to dress reasonably. Recently, I heard a young woman arguing that women should be free to go shirtless, since men are. I think we are becoming out of touch with the reality that no matter how equal we are, there are some general, though variable in degree, differences between most men and women.
In the beginning of the feminist movement, my hopes were that women would bring the classical Yin/feminine traits, such as nurturing, conserving, subjective relating, unifying, and receptivity into the workplace and government to give balance to the Yang/masculine traits of competing, creating, objective questioning, separating, assertiveness. What I didn’t realize is that taking on the male power structure would require women with more of the Yang traits than traditional Yin ones. I hadn’t even thought about the obvious fact that we all come with different degrees of both. And on top of that, hormonal shifts, relative to age or health, can change us drastically.
It seems to me that the greatly increased acceptance of women as equal to men though not the same, may play a large part in the growing acceptance of the reality of feminine men and masculine women. It has become obvious that there are innumerable variations in combinations and degrees of feminine and masculine traits. And we may can fake ours, but we didn’t get to choose them when we were born. And our dominant ones may not match our exterior bodies. And while many men seem to be threatened by this, most mothers love their children whatever their individual mix may be.
So, as with everything under the sun, every change sets off many side effects, both healing and challenging, that we didn’t expect. And it take open minds and kind hearts balanced by practical reality to increase positive results out of them, while minimizing the negative.