Tuesday, May 04, 2010

Think like a man

Here's a few lyrics from a song I recently heard:
Stick my foot in my mouth and just run away,
Turn off my cell, I ain't got nothing to say
Disappear and not give a damn
I should think like a man

Ignore my emotions, emotions are dumb
The channels, still my senses are numb
Shorten my attention span,
I should think like a man
Okay, so there's no prizes to be won for clever lyricism here, but that's not the point. Is there an "other side of the coin" song you could write and release and not expect to get lambasted for?

Stand-up comedians have a special license to be able to make fun of gender-based stereotyped behavior, but that special license seems to apply consistently only for them. If some male wrote a song that was just as bitter-sounding and not-trying-to-be-funny as this one, making fun of women needing to go shopping all the time, being ditzy and unable to focus on anything important, or being emotionally unstable, they'd get roasted. Even if they took a far more "I'm just joking" tone than this song does, they'd still get criticized.

All these stereotypes are not wholly true and not wholly false. I understand that the world is coming out of thousands of years of oppression and there's a need for a certain amount of backlash; we have to swing the pendulum back too far before we can center it. Malekind has earned a certain amount of slamming, even if I personally didn't. But if it's true that we have to accept some of this happening as part of the process, at the same time, me complaining about it and pointing out the double standard is also something we have to accept happening as part of the process.

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