I have to eat my words and eat humble pie at the same time for having a biasedness against the males.I've assumed that since Asian females do most of the household chores in a family that Asian males are helpless and hopeless at shopping,cleaning,cooking or looking after children.Our fathers,husbands and sons played the role that we expected-taking care of the bread and butter issues while we became domestic goddess,they took care of finances,taxes and expenses ,we mended,sewed,marketed,cleaned,tidied,changedthe nappies,fed the kids,cooked and gossiped on trivialities.
So my specs of prejudice dropped when I met guys who are spotless in cleaning,interior decorated their homes to stylish modes,male florists who know their blooms as well as me or cooked like a gourmet like Toshi and Nicholas Tse that I realised of my stereotypical view of the Asian male was unfair and prejudiced on my part.
A funny article by Anne Richardson Rolphe
I once married a man I thought was totally unlike my father and I imagined a whole new world of freedom emerging.Five years later,it was clear even to me-floating face down in a wash of despair-that I had simply chosen a replica of my handsome daddy-true.The updated version spoke English like an angel but-good God!-underneath he was my father exactly:wonderful,but not the right man for me.
Most people I know have at one time or another been fouled up by their childhood experiences.Patterns tend to sink into the unconscious only to reappear,disguised,unseen,like marionette strings,pulling us this way or that.Whatever ails people-keeps them up at night-tossing and turning-also ails movements no matter how historically huge or politically important.The women's movement cannot remake consciousness,or reshape the future,without acknowledging and shedding all the unnecessary and ugly baggage of the past.It's easy ehough now to see where men have kept us out of clubs,graduate schools;it's easy enough to recognize the hidden directions that limit Sis to cake baking and Brother to bridge building;and it's now possible for even Miss America herself to identify what they have done to us,and of course they have and they did and they are....But along the way we also develop our own hidden prejudices,class assumptions and an anti male humour and collection of expectations that gave us,like all oppressed groups,a secret sense of superiority(coexisting with a poor self image.)
Why are there laws insisting on alimony and child support? Well,everyone knows that men don't have an instinct to protect their young and given half a chance,with the moon in the right phase,thy will run off and disappear.Everyone assumes a mother will not let her child starve,yet it is necessary to legislate that a father must not do so.We are taught to accept the idea that men are less than decent;their charms may be manifold but their characters are riddled with faults.To this day I never blink if I hear that a man has gone to find his fortune in South America,having left his pregnant wife,his blind mother and taken the family car.I still gasp in horror when I hear of a woman leaving her asthmatic infant for a rock group in Taos because I can't seem to avoid the assumption that men are naturally callous heels and women the ordained carriers of what little is moral in our dubious civilization.
A better style of life may develop from an assumption that men are as human as we.Why not ask the child's father if he would like to bring up the child?Why not share the decisions,when possible,with the male? If we cut them out,assuming an old style indifference on their part,we perpetrate the ugly divisiveness that has characterised relations between the sexes so far.
Hard as it is for many of us to believe,women are not really superior to men in intelligence or humanity-they are only equal.
As my kids in class pointed out in a debate half of woman is man,half of female is male.Point taken at their unbiased perceptions.So we do not assume that old age confers the person a sense of wisdom as sometimes there is no fool like an old fool.
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