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| What amazing revelations you can have at 2am! Ok, so I might be a little apnea-induced drunk, but take what you can get. I decided my mental exercises needed to be carried out in conversation, even if one-sided; so, here goes. Women hold words over guys' heads. This isn't to say they literally shame us males that they're better with speaking; rather, it is to say that they have a higher capacity for manipulation of language. And, they use it. It's not for one-upmanship, that's too low for civilized people. It's just a fact, I think. I think men all too often resort to violence when they can't get their way because it is a means to an end; albeit not the greatest or most civilized one, it works. Because we know we can overpower women in at leat one arena, we prefer to challenge them there. Women, in civilized society, have had the advantage of language, and the protection of chivalry. This is to say 'civilized' men will not stand for extreme, unprompted abuse of the female kind; in fact, men found culturally guilty of domestic abuse are held in less high a regard as another man who has not trespassed this politically correct boundary. This, I insist, is a necessary requirement of civilized men and should be held sacred. I step back and consider what it is to be 'civilized' in this moment. (Feel free to skip ahead.) Says Word 2003: "Enlighten, educate, advance, develop." Society is not civilized because we are more advanced; nor are we civilized because we are more developed. We are no more 'enlightened' than Copernicus was in his time. There have been no Great Revelations, no theophanies. Instead, what we can attribute our civilization (as verb) on is our education. We recognize that gender results from a flaw in the genetic makeup. Two X’s mean a girl, one Y for a guy. The male genetic chromosome collects more genetic flaws, and consequently will therefore incur the End of Man (and the Rise of Lesbians?). We men have been so educated that women are our equal, in rights to own property, vote, and drink and be merry. This learning has yet since been left untied to how we look at the one last grotesquery of male attitude: savagery in dispute. The task then becomes how to overcome this, and there are several solutions. There is the ostrich principle, and we can forget our worries and our strife; or, we can insist to take another hundred or so years to develop the attitude for change in our attitudes; or, finally, we can take action now and recognize what chivalry once brought us: civility (as in “to advance”). I collect these thoughts at 3:17AM on Wednesday, the 20th of December. I consider my thought experiment only opened, possibly ready for discussion, and definitely nowhere near the end of my contemplation. I hope to dwell more on this at a later time, but aching eyes and promises need to be kept before slumbering. | ||||||
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