Anti-rant on my anti-rant yesterday... O_o

Which is a long winded way of saying that a double negative makes a positive. Wait, no. If I ranted, and then I anti-ranted, that negates. But if I have a zero balance and then anti-rant again, that makes it anti-ranting... um. Or, an anti-rant against my anti-rant would flip it on it's head and make it a...

I suck at math.

Okay, this is a rant as a result of my anti-rant yesterday, in my indirect way of saying "Go, men!" and "Why do you suck?" all at the same time. :) Because, I'm a multi-tasker.

Men don't suck. Not inherently. I do think a lot of them are lazy, yet I don't put sole blame on our men. Remember that media thing I talked about yesterday? How men are portrayed as morons, incompetent, lazy, stupid, incapable without their female counterpart (sorry gay men, apparently with this stereotype, the media is cutting you no breaks)?

And I also put that cross-stitched phrase out there: Ignorance does not provide Immunity. Remember that part? These two concepts actually go together and here's how.

Men are portrayed as morons. The repeated exposure to perceived social norms (ie/ society thinks men are morons, therefore men are morons) creates the behavior. It's like those psychology experiments with the blue eyed, brown eyed students. They did this thing in a college level class where the brown eyed student were told how smart they were. They were given privileges, higher grades, extensively flattered, told how attractive and successful they were. Meanwhile the blue eyed ones got treated like dirt. They weren't smart, they were inadequate, they'd never amount to anything, and they served the brown eyed students.

In the experiment, the professor told the class what he was doing, then let the subject drop. The rest of the semester he played it out. He favored the brown eyed student over the blue eyed students. By the end of the semester, the brown eyed students were mocking the blue eyed students, dissension divided the classroom. Blue eyed grades dropped significantly, and the brown eyed students had grown cocky.

Likewise, if the media and our source of information (television, Internet, social norms) announce in every thirty second ad, every thirty minute sitcom, every photo depiction of the incompetent male and the uber-competent female, what do we see?

We see women who work long hours, come home to clean the house, pay the bills, raise the children, help with the homework, cook all the dinners, and fall exhausted into bed with little or no gratitude from her family... especially her mate.

We see men who BELIEVE that not much is expected of them, so they conform to that new ideal. Where their fathers' generation carried a strong sense of responsibility and family (as a whole), the new generation feels that it is perfectly acceptable to see the men conform. Now we have men who sit around on the couch, complain when their wives don't cook fast enough, don't help with housework or child-rearing, and either work low income jobs or don't work at all.

Now, I'm not saying that this doesn't work for some families. I am saying that there has to be a level of gratitude and mutual agreement to the terms in the family. You can't, say, have a wife who prefers a traditional role of mom and a husband who's unemployed and won't lift a finger to GET employed. You can't have a wife who prefers to be the breadwinner and a husband who never assists in the other aspects of the family, and not expect there to be discord.

Ignorance does not provide Immunity.

Just because a man chooses (yes, it's a choice) to be ignorant of what the needs of his family are, does not mean he is immune from the consequences of that choice. For example, higher divorce rates, increased argumentativeness in the marriage, children who are confused about what's expected of them, and finances that fall apart because one partner is overworked and letting things slip while the other can't be bothered to catch the pieces.

Men. I love you. I do. I am horrified by my overall findings in the dating pool. Even from guys I'm not personally dating, but those of friends, or spouses of friends (Mr. Green and Mr. Paulin are excluded from this paragraph and the next). I'm horrified because the men within roughly ten years on either side of my age are lazy.

They want it all. They want to sit on the couch and flip television channels. They want the women in their lives to basically become slaves to their needs, their whims. I've met so very few that didn't have this sense of entitlement.

Now, I will own that I may be meeting the WRONG men, or hearing about the wrong men. I will even admit that my statements are extremely general. But men, you cannot choose ignorance and expect your lives to be trouble free. You just can't. You should certainly expect your spouse to help with all the responsibilities of the family, but you need to man-up a little and contribute. Life is not all about you. It's not all about her either. It's about the two of you and your family making it together. Pull your weight, men of my generation. Put on your big boy panties, adjust your package, let your balls drop into adulthood, and slap the butt print off the couch cushions.

Until then, you just aren't the catch you thought you were.

Okay. Rant over.