Wait, are you telling me that Dave Barry's Complete Guide to Guys addresses women's issues? If "women's issues" include understanding why guys spit, scratch themselves, and give each other noogies, well then this book certainly addresses them!
As for addressing the whole bit about a patriarchal world history, the subjugation of women, and accused responsibility for the Fall of Man, well, you might as well forget it.
Dave Barry might not make you feel better about the stature of women in today's world or the future of the human species, but hopefully you can say this: you're not a guy.
Dave Barry's book reminds me a lot of an episode of Seinfield: it's all about nothing. It tells the reader what guys are thinking(nothing) and what their "deal" is(nothing). While it does pretty much, well, nothing to help understand women or help women understand, the one thing it does do is hold true to the manufacturer's guarantee: you WILL laugh. You will not only laugh, but you will laugh hard. You will laugh hysterically, obnoxiously hard. You will want to share Dave Barry's insight on the male species with everyone you know and every stranger you meet, particularly so if they are women.
Barry's book speaks little about the real reasons as to why males do the things they do and more about the fact that they are just scumbags and idiots. According to Barry, people "make being male sound like a very important activity, as opposed to what it primarily consists of, namely, possessing a set of minor and frequently unreliable organs"(xi). You will become convinced that the title should not be "Complete Guide to Guys," but "More Reasons Why Women Are The Better Sex." In fact, Barry himself seems to support the latter idea through his discussion of "the Punch Reflex," "the Noogie Gene," scientific reasons as to why guys act like jerks, the hidden truth of the Space Shuttle program, and standards. Yes, guys are just mindless idiots who like things that go, "Brrrrrrmmmmmmmmm!" I suppose he would know, though: he is a guy.
It is a well-known fact that our world history is dominated by a tyrannical patriarchy in which the majority of women have been forgotten. Somehow, according to Barry, it is the men who have been forgotten. "Guys have played an important role in history, but this role has not been given the attention it deserves, because nobody wrote it down"(9).
In Kimmel’s essay “’Bros Before Hos’: The Guy Code” he argues that the influence of society on masculinity is equal to or greater than biological influences on masculinity. In the essay, Kimmel uses various surveys and interviews to validate his argument. He points to peers, coaches, and family members as the people most likely to influence the development of a man’s masculinity. When a man has his manliness questioned, he immediately makes the decision never to say or do whatever caused him to be called a wimp, or unmanly. Kimmel’s argument is somewhat effective because the readers get firsthand accounts from the interviewees but the author does not provide any statistics to support his argument.
Gender history would not be possible without the rise of women and their headstrong goal of gaining a place in the history books. Early historians developed a more simple outlook, which simply classified every women be similar in class. As historian developed a more critical analysis, they included many social factors to explain women’s status change. Women created gender history, and now doors are open for other gender issues to be researched.
Since the inception of second-wave feminism in the West, scholars have been concerned with apparent boundaries that separate private and public domains, a concern which was underpinned by a larger ambition to fundamentally rewrite of all History. Scholarship born out of the second wave feminist movement was propelled by a reaction against the androcentric nature of history, and that which had typically been considered historically 'worthy'. In order to combat androcentrism, both women’s historians and gender historians appropriated the ‘separate spheres’ framework, though each in different ways, and to different ends. Those writing women’s history used the separate spheres as an organizing structure, through which to recover and re-interpret the stories of women, incorporating them into a distinctive female past. Contrastingly, gender historians used the separate spheres as structure of binary classification in which to compare male and female, using these definitions to contribute to (what they felt would be) a broader more inclusive understanding of history. Whether their respective accounts were characterized by an acceptance of or a challenge of the separate spheres framework, the appropriation of such a model in both cases is problematic. In their struggle to create a more balanced, comprehensive history, women’s and gender historians adopted a framework which was limited, perfunctory and essentially as androcentric as the types of history which they were compelled to react against originally.
... E Glenn, and Nancy B Sherrod. The psychology of men and masculinity:Research status and future directions. New York: John Wiley and sons, 2001.
History books tend to relegate major credit to “men” for our country’s freedom and independence. There is no disputing that key male figures, like George Washington or Thomas Jefferson, led masses of troops into battle and composed monumental doctrine that has changed our history forever. However, we must recognize that these were not one-gender wars and women played an extremely significant role in the war effort.
Beton discovers men’s anger toward women by glancing through an apparently well-known Professor von X’s book titled The Mental, Moral, and Physical Inferiority of the Female Sex. The mere title makes her angry—outraged that the words could even form the title of a book, which, to Beton, is the natural response to “be[ing] told that one is naturally the inferior of a little man” (32). She does not know at first why men are so critical of women, but she does know that their arguments say more about them than they do about the women they write about. The books “had been written in the red light of emotion,” she says, “and not in the white light of truth” (33), meaning that the men Beton speaks of are responding to something—some feeling or condition that they, as a sex identifying with one another, are sensing, rather than merely expressing a natural fact as their rhetoric seems to suggest.
and their daily lives. This presentation of masculinity can alter how men respect women in the
Barry, an author who frequently uses humor in his writing, makes what seems like a lighthearted jab at the male gender
The feminist perspective of looking at a work of literature includes examining how both sexes are portrayed
Myers mentioned in his article that this generation of young discouraged, angry men feels abandoned with the today’s norms. Male movie stars and athletes have further influenced the masculine norms. In males perspective, liking a feminine color, doing feminine actions, listening to specified girl music is considered to be less manly. These have greatly affected the likes and dislikes of many men. The entertainment industry has created a big gap between what is masculine or feminine. This has caused a big separation and it's getting worse. Male are taught to be man of the house, strong, and powerful, but sometimes they’re belittled by society that they can’t do certain things and all the power is
"Women were denied knowledge of their history, and thus each woman had to argue as though no woman before her had ever thought or written. Women had to use their energy to reinvent the wheel, over and over again, generation after generation. ... thinking women of each generation had to waste their time, energy and talent on constructing their argument anew. Generation after generation, in the face of recurrent discontinuities, women thought their way around and out from under patriarchal thought." (Lerner qtd in Merrim Modern Women xxiii)
“Pain is temporary. It may last a minute, or an hour, or a day, or a year, but eventually it will subside and something else will take its place. If I quit, however, it lasts forever” (Lance Armstrong). Men have given up, making the pain prevalent and everlasting, causing feminine tendencies. The men in this respective novel don’t have any opposition standing in their way, to prove their masculinity. “We 're the middle children of history, man. No purpose or place. We have no Great War. No Great Depression. Our Great War 's a spiritual war... our Great Depression is our lives” (Chuck Palahniuk). Proving your masculinity used to not be a problem. It was simple to prove your manhood by various ways throughout time such as; hunting, joining the
He inspires booklovers to take the other gender's specific way of articulating love, and helps men and women learn how to achieve each other's emotional desires. Arguments quickly slope into hurt feelings about the way a point is being made, rather than its satisfied. It is the heartless sound of the point being made that is hurtful. Mostly when the men do not really care about or they do not see how much their comments might upset the women and. Most arguments start because of something that is worrying a women and when she share this to a men and when she gets that it is not something to worry about. This invalidates her and she gets upset with him. He then gets mad because she seems to be getting angry at him for nothing. Men’s do not usually say sorry for the things that he believes that he haven’t done. So this argument goes on for many days. Mostly men argue because they do not feel admired, encouraged and
Women have always been essential to society. Fifty to seventy years ago, a woman was no more than a house wife, caregiver, and at their husbands beck and call. Women had no personal opinion, no voice, and no freedom. They were suppressed by the sociable beliefs of man. A woman’s respectable place was always behind the masculine frame of a man. In the past a woman’s inferiority was not voluntary but instilled by elder women, and/or force. Many, would like to know why? Why was a woman such a threat to a man? Was it just about man’s ability to control, and overpower a woman, or was there a serious threat? Well, everyone has there own opinion about the cause of the past oppression of woman, it is currently still a popular argument today.
The differences between women and men are not solely biological. Our society’s culture has established a set of unwritten cultural laws of how each gender should act, or in other words society has ascribed a stereotype. Men’s gender identity has been one of masculinity, and masculinity is defined as referring to a man or things described as manly. What does manly mean though? Is a male manly if he is “Mr. Fix-it”, or the jock, or if he sits on the couch on Sunday watching football? This latter statement is a stereotype of men, that has been around for decades, and is current as well, but starting with the 1960’s a man’s role started to change, despite the stereotype not changing to accommodate it. For the past 40 years one can see how men have taken on roles stereotypically ascribed to women, such roles including being the “stay-at-home mom”, which we can find an excellent example of in the 1980’s film “Mr.