Not sure what to call the rule here. This is about men not hearing women, or maybe it's not believing women. This past Monday morning I bicycled the Boston Marathon route back and forth with a group of friends. We rode the 26 miles from Boston to Hopkinton, the starting point for the race. While standing around taking a short break before heading back into Boston, I overheard one of the bicyclists, a woman, telling a couple of guys that "mice don't co-habit with rats." Apparently one of the guys had discovered mice in his house and she was trying to look at the positive side. If you've got mice, you don't have rats. Lesser of two evils and all that. These two guys didn't believe her. I don't know why. I came over and said, "mice don't co-habit with rats" and the guys say, "oh" as in oh, I didn't know that and thanks for telling me. They believed me. They know this woman better than they know me. And she then says, "why don't guys ever believe women? I just told you the same thing and you didn't believe me and then he [me] comes along and says the same thing and you believe him." This woman is a doctor. She's an athlete. She's not crazy. There's no reason for them not to believe her.
Now, this resonated with me because I've heard the same complaint from my wife about me. And it's true. She has made some statements that I think are preposterous and I say, "come on, that can't be true," but then if I see that same thing written the next day in a newspaper, I believe it.
Is this just a couple of random cases of guys not believing women or is this more of a cultural issue? I'm curious. I'm also guilty. So I need to change something here.
It is without doubt cultural as we know that there is no difference in the mental capacity of men and women. But what is also true is that men are more adapt at believing women when it comes to issues like raising children, for example. I wonder if this is altogether wise.
If there were more men taking active roles in the rearing of children across all racial, ethnic and cultural lines, we might see a difference in the balancing of children educationally and socially. The opinions of men are most important, the way in which women lead, equally as so.
Men I believe sometimes trust other men in that they perhaps try to strip the answer of emotionalism to get to the basis of the argument. This disregard is perhaps not purposeful, or mean-spirited.
Men perhaps may be fully aware that women (by nature or nuture) will often dominate conversations and households, being usually the more vocal ones if allowed but not necessarily the right one all the time, though her speech may clearly defy this. (I have had to check myself on more than one occassion.) Our allowance of this or that by this person or the other is always an issue in the long run. This is what I'm referring here.
These are just thoughts, though I think there is a grain of truth therein.
Posted by: Judith Ellis | April 29, 2008 at 06:26 PM