Nature? Nurture!

October 19, 2013 at 1:29 am · Filed under Uncategorized and tagged: equality, feminism, feminist, life lessons, media, men, women, youth

You really never know who you’ve touched in a lifetime of little actions. I went to dinner tonight with old friends, and we started talking about how feminism has lost the presence in the media it had when we were young. When I was a boy, practically every situation comedy sent the message that women were smart and empowered. They showed me how women wanted everything to be equal, how even asking a woman out was an artifact of an old, tired, chauvinist era that was dead and buried. If a woman wanted to go out with you, she would ask YOU out. Now I know that those messages came from a handful of women in the entertainment business and they represented neither most women nor their attitudes, but those messages worked their way deep into me nevertheless.

Well this friend, who spoke often about equality, remembered hitting me on the shoulder playfully and me smacking her back just about as hard as she’d hit me. Well, this surprised her, and to this day, she sees that as a powerful lesson about consequences, the consequences of what you wish for and the consequences of your actions. All I did was mirror her behavior. Isn’t that something? 25 years later?

And 25 years later, I’m still waiting for one of those empowered women.

Comments