A Hymn To Them

For the record, if the miniscule amount of people who read this blog didn't know, I am a woman. Call this an early or pre-St. Valentine's Day post.

I was having a conversation with a friend (also a woman) earlier today about the said upcoming Hallmark/marketing-driven day. I know it is a commercialized opportunity for various companies to get many people to buy things that, for the most part, are transient.
That fact aside, my friend and I agreed that if we were entirely, brutally honest with ourselves, we would be offended if our significant others did not get us anything for St. Valentine's Day. It is a dangerous thing, to admit the obvious, but in the spirit of drawing men and women closer together (as opposed to driving the sexes apart, which seems to be the goal of far too many people nowadays), as a woman, this is what (some) women think about February 14th. We don't want men to make a big deal out of it. But we do want something out of it. One nice gift. But we don't want to have to tell our husbands/boyfriends what we want. Here's the kicker:

We want them to know what we want without us actually telling them what we want. And if we don't get it, we become upset. Because, after all, if we bluntly told them what we wanted and then got it, it wouldn't be a surprise. Make sense? If not, you're probably a man. Or you don't like surprises.

My friend and I discussed this very point, which caused me to say: "I feel sorry for my boyfriend, and we haven't even gotten to Valentine's Day yet!"

It's not fair to him to expect him to read my mind. What do women expect, a mind-reader? Hmmm, maybe Stephenie Meyer was on to something. But that's fantasy. And deserving of another post.

Women, on the whole, do not give men near the credit they deserve. They have to put up with our impossible standards. Women (in Western civilization) can whine about how hard life is. Men are not only expected to ingest this incessant complaining, they are compelled to listen to our society's message that Men are stupid and Women are smart. They are also compelled to go along with that message. Here's a question: in modern culture, men constantly continue the refrain that they are Neanderthals (with few exceptions). When was the last time you heard a woman in popular culture say something like, "You know what, girls? We DON'T have all the answers. In fact, sometimes we are more deserving of ridicule than reverence."

Imagine Oprah saying that. To an audience of women. Now wouldn't that be speaking truth to power?

While pondering my conversation with my friend, the words from a song from My Fair Lady kept running through my head. The song is "A Hymn To Him".

Women are irrational, that's all there is to that!
Their heads are full of cotton, hay and rags!
They're nothing but exasperating, irritating, vascillating, calculating, agitating, maddening and infuriating hags!

The joke is that the song is making fun of men's propensity to think highly of themselves, and their gender on the whole. But it wouldn't be so funny if there wasn't truth in it about women's behavior.