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Is it really a man’s world?
Well, is it really a man’s world? James Brown once sang; “This is a man's world, but it wouldn't be nothing, nothing without a woman or a girl.” I think he’s got an almost perfect analysis on what our world is like, as the song continues he sings; “You see man made the car, to take us over the road, man made the train, to carry the heavy load”. When analyzing the lyrics I find a connection to the saying; “Behind every great man, there is a woman.” There is some problems with that saying, there is no counterpart for women, I can’t find a saying that says there’s great women or that they can be great, an other issue is that she stand behind him, not besides as would be more politically correct, she is wise, but she may not make her man look bad so therefore she has to give her man advice and guidance without the public watching them.
Even though our world is designed and ruled by men, it would instantly fall apart if the women would disappear. But on the other hand it doesn’t pass a day without hearing that the women in our society is oppressed and inferior to men. The truth, from my point of view isn’t as simple though, men and women rule different areas of life. Men rule the political and financial world whilst the women dominate the family life and the healthcare, and other areas where you don’t make any money but are just as important as the political and financial world, I would like to think that they are even more important since without these parts our society wouldn’t work at all. Women have to take the dirty and boring work that men in general don’t want to do, due to the unfair competition on the labor market.
Of course there’s always room for improvement, and that is what the biggest problem is, the old men who are C.E.O.’s for companies don’t want to take the risk that their power will be reduced due to a woman. And that is because women and men approach problems with different point of views and also has different solutions to the problems.
I have a theory of how and why men came to rule almost all prominent societies on Earth; men are born stronger because while we still were primates it was the men who fought and defended their flock against other groups of primitive apes and predators such as lions, tigers and different forms of wild dogs.
The women had the role of a babysitter; they took care of the children and made sure they survived, and therefore ensured the survival of the species.
Consequently men are born with about 33% more muscles than women, and also, the hormone that stimulates growth of muscles is the male hormone, testosterone, which of course men have in a greater extent than women. As a result of that men have a huge advantage when fighting for the power; since women are physically inferior to men they have to surrender so that the species doesn’t go extinct.
But when our predecessors learned how to speak, they also started to think about more complex things than how to find food and shelter. For instance they probably started to wonder how they got here, what the meaning of life is and other similar questions about our “to be or not to be”. With those questions religion was born to explain all the things they couldn’t understand such as, what our conscious is, how they got there and what everything consisted of.
All religions worship different objects, personalities or gender. Some Viking tribes for example worshipped women and had the Aesir Freya, the Norse fertility goddess, as their most important god. Freya was female, which led to that these tribes were ruled by a woman. And the women in general were sacred and one of the most important, if not the most important, celebration was when a child was about to get born. Then the entire village would participate in the naming of the child and the feast that comes thereafter.
Almost every other known religion has a male god as role model and females are just seen as something annoying but necessary. Christianity has a male god and most of the prophets, if not all of them (I don’t know for sure) are men e.g. Jesus, Moses and Abraham. For that reason men are considered to be holy in a different way than females. We also have the problem with Adam and Eve and the Garden of Eden, where Eve was the one who at first became a victim to the temptation and therefore got the blame for the fact that humans walk on earth and instead of living in the Garden of Eden.
This mentality lies in our subconscious and does not express itself so clearly, it is just something that we live with and we tend not to think about it so much except when some reporter points out that only about 10-20% of the people in the boards are women, which is a horribly low figure regarding that Sweden is considered to be the worlds most equal country. This mentality is so drummed into us that no one really thinks about it, that it actually is our religion that is the problem; it is our religion that has imprinted into us that women are inferior to men. Many people don’t think about it because they consider themselves to be atheists and therefore have completely abandoned the thought of them being influenced of an old religion and the church.
This is not a problem that will be solved in a year, a mentality takes decades if not centuries or some drastic change in the environment to change and we will probably continue on the same road as we are traveling on right now, a slow but quite steady march against a more equal and fair society.
In my life as a man I have not really experienced any of these prejudice beliefs myself, because most of these thoughts take time to get imprinted and one child to another doesn’t have any prejudice thought about the other that it hasn’t got from an adult, and they aren’t so many at early age, but they fast become a large part of your way of looking at life.
I myself have only met the prejudice adults who treat boys and girls different because they have their stereotypic image of what a boy is and what a girl is. But these ways of group people and things together is necessary for the simple reason that our brains would suffer from a severe meltdown at a very young age because of the immense amount of unnecessary information that has to be remembered.
I have actually only met the unfair school system that favors girls incredibly much, since the students are expected to take own responsibility for their studies when they are relatively young. This is girls better at since they mature faster, whilst boys don’t reach the same level of matureness until about three to four years later, and then the girls are even more mature. But still I haven’t experienced this so very much either since I grew up relatively fast compared to most of my classmates, I have always have had easy to remember things, plan ahead and approach problems with patience and the belief that I will eventually solve it and understand it. Though some teachers tend not to pay as much attention to boys who are good at a young age as they do with girls, especially in the grades 4-6, where the differences between boys and girls are as most prominent, some girls are very mature and handle most of their studies by themselves, while many boys still are as immature as they where when they were 8 years old.
Back to my original question “Is it really a man’s world?”; from my point of view our society is unequal on different levels, women and girls have an advantage in school, which give them a better education, but they can’t make use of it because; men has an even more unfair advantage when applying for a job, it’s more probable that a company hires a man than a woman, at least if it is a man who has the job to choose who the company will employ next. Also men tend to have easier to get a raise than women because it’s more likely that their superior is a man than a woman, and it’s easier to give a high salary to someone of the same sex, than it is to give it to a person of opposite sex. Women also tend to get the jobs that are not as well paid, for example in health care and other jobs, often in the public sector.
Women have due to the fact that men make more money often the power over the family and most often take the most responsibility for the raising of the children and their education. This is both an advantage and a disadvantage since women who are home with their children can’t have a successful working career, but they get close bonds with their children and the children gets a happy childhood.
So I suppose I say that it is a humans world and depending on what you evaluate the most it is either a man’s or a woman’s world.
You're awesome!
