Reply #36: very well

[kaffiria]

I get along with the men in my life very well. I have healthy heterosexual relationships. (yeah yeah, I know how that sounds. Not implying that homosexual relationships are unhealthy).

I have a few friends that think as I do and we are all minority females that have much closer roots to patriarchial culture in terms of generational distance. My vietnamese friend has a granfather with 3 wives (at the same time). Another friend is from Uzbekestan and I am from India, which has made great strides but it still more gender biased than the west.

Let me put it to you this way. My grandmother has a third grade education. My mother has a graduate level education. This is a lot of improvement over one generation. Now my male cousin and his wife both have engineering degrees in India. I went to their house and as is culturally expected, the wife stands beside the table and serves the men and children dinner. She holds the spoons in her hand and just stands there waiting to be told to spoon out food or get drinks. The women then eat what is leftover and clean up afterwards. My cousin had lived in california for a few years and it just didnt occur to him that this was not the way someone should be treated.

Being that I do not respect my own partially backward culture, I told my cousin's wife- its uncomfortbale for me to sit there while she stands and serves like this. If I were raised in India, I would not sit there, I would probably go make myself useful in the kitchen, but since I am American and dont know to deal with an Indian kitchen (which has stone grinders and stuff), I end up sitting at the table. My father says nothing even though he has been in the US for 25 years and has a German wife. My cousin says nothing. Even though his wife invented the wireless surveillance camera, she never thought that she should have the self respect not to serve people like this. I told her she should and immediately, she wanted things to change. She does not want her daughter to serve at the table like she does as my mother raised me not to serve at the table like she once did.

When I try to make my family change, the women listen, the men fight. They dont vote against womens rights or anything. My father even performed an abortion once, but they dont have the kind of sensitivity to women's dignity than other women do.

I think that 99% of men would be the enemy to women unless society takes great pains to raise them otherwise. That is what I have seen.