Women stuff...

My "other" work, as it were, is in the health care field providing services to seniors in an assisted living setting. It's a largely matriarchal culture and so the odd male working in my field gets some real insight into the lives of women as we spend the greater portion of our day in and among them.

Now I may be getting skewed feedback but it seems like its an emotional, physical, and spiritual minefield out there for the single woman living in this time and place. The need seems to have remained the same over time, to be authentically loved and give love in return. The achieving of that ideal, though, seems ever more elusive because the rules have changed and women seem to be getting the short end of it.

I wonder about the cause of it all sometimes. Is it feminism gone awry? Moral decline leading to an "everyone for themselves" attitude that leaves women more vulnerable? Some other thing that I can't possibly know because I'm a male? I wish I knew for sure.

What seems to be happening, though, at least from my point of view is a kind of "Hugh Hefner has hijacked the women's movement" sort of thing. Let me explain. It seems like today's women have been indoctrinated into the idea that sluttiness is part of being equal with men. Casual sex, with all its potential physical, emotional, and spiritual harms, seems to be part of the required items women must carry in their portfolio. Now please understand that casual sex is dangerous for men as well, but men don't get pregnant, and men give more than they get with women in the STD arena, and let's not even get into heartbreak.

Women are looking for real love but the prevailing cultural ethos of easy sexuality and its demands that women emulate all of their male counterparts worst attributes in this makes war against that basic hunger. Putting out is expected and right now there are millions of women all over the country on their backs hoping that the guy on top of them may the one, or perhaps they've already just given up and hope he's good for whatever they need for the moment. The result always seems to be the same, women growing cynical and bitter about men, the natural and created complement of the genders poisoned by repeated let downs. Women who want to love men and be loved by them start to think of them as jerks looking for nothing more than a place to get off.

We, and especially women, have been lied to. We've been given an image of our sexuality and how we are to relate to each other as men and women that is literally killing us body and soul. The bill of goods we've been sold has not produced what we deeply desire, true love and has given us a hellish oversupply of what we do not need, heartache, loneliness, illness, and just plain messed up lives.

What to do?

At this point I suppose the reader is looking for a brief lecture on a return to Christian values in love and marriage. That would be a good place to get to, the destination of it all. But I think first a revolution is in order, a revolution led by women. Behind the scenes, out of the sex obsessed media's eye there are growing number of women who realize that something is dreadfully wrong and in their pain are having their eyes opened to the great lies of our time. Somewhere along the line those small fires will kindle into a conflagration and more and more women, even if its just for the sake of avoiding disease and emotional destruction, will begin to say "I want love, the real thing, the kind that respects my dignity and reflects more of the great human desire for two souls merging and a whole lot less of our society's vision of two people bumping in the night. I want someone to know me in every real sense before they "know" me in the Biblical one. I want men to see me for everything I am and not just as the life support system for my genitals. And I'm not going to be lied to again."

And when women want, yes even demand something better and refuse to accept anything less men will follow. We may howl and protest at the dying of a falsehood that allowed us easy access to unconditional orgasms via women conditioned to believe that being a whore was being liberated, but we will follow. When women in large numbers demand higher standards from men they will get them.

You see men desire real love as well. We, too, are caught up in the endless cycle of one nighters, victims of the cynicism and jaded reflexes that so characterize the relationships between the sexes. We may not know because we've bought into the whole thing even more then most women have, but somewhere inside of us we know something is really messed up about the way things are and we need some help, your help, finding our way back.