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A Round Hole With a Square Peg
My father, brother and I were on the tarmac getting his Cessna 180 ready for take-off, and I was carrying the sectionals and the headsets. I was maybe 10, 11. My father was talking to a mechanic who had just finished the engine overhaul, and when I got close, the mechanic said, jokingly: "so you're the boy in the family, eh?"
I was watching a men's slow-pitch softball game, and one of the players yelled out to his teammate: "Hey Tom! You throw like a girl!!" Then, realizing I was close enough to listen, he apologized. "That's okay," I said, "I don't throw like a girl, either."
At work recently I was idly complaining that the maid seemed to have quit at our house, since the dishes weren't done and the laundry wasn't washed. A co-worker shot back that actually what I needed was a wife.
Now, Havard professor Harvey C. Mansfield, apparently trying to live up to his last name, has written the definitive book on Manliness. And so that everyone gets the point, he's titled it: Manliness. The cover page is suitably black and white, since the subject is so obvious, and he's just point ed out what everyone knows already: there's men, and they should be a certain way because of their sex, and there's women, and they should be a certain way because of their sex, except for Margaret Thatcher, who is naturally manly. Everyone else, stay in your places.
Now I don't put too much stock in what comes out of Harvard anymore, ever since they insisted on sending my deceased father-in-law (so deceased, I never even met him) invitations to join Harvard University Band every year, despite my increasingly sarcastic letters back to the alumni association asking them to cease using my mailbox as a portal to the mythical. So I'm not too worried about the actual validity of this tired claim about classified behavior between the sexes. But I do know that, in my personal experience, attempts to classify my own behavior according to which planet women live on have come out wide of the mark, and while I increasingly suspect I am in the minority in a great many of these areas, it still illustrates the fallacy in trying to neatly box the populace. Some of us don't like boxes. Some of us especially mischevious ones will change just to get out of the box.
I find it hard to believe that, not only are people discussing this tired
old horse of an argument, but someone has actually gone to the lengths of
writing a book about it. Of course, it will be a best-seller because there
are still plenty of Mysogynists out there who will take it as gospel, and
an equal number of critics who will buy up the book to poke holes in his
theories. Overall, a good business decision for the author. But a
terrible idea, nonetheless.
I think you should accept the invitation, on your father-in-law's behalf,
to join the band, but on the condition that he will only play the harp.
I had to threaten to fill out form 1500 from the post office, which would
prohibit Harvard from sending me any mail based on the pornographic nature
of its contents (the US Post Office does not presume to know what you think
is obscene) to get them to take him off their mailing list.