"Equality"

My brother and I drank tea together while Rachel Maddow exposed nefarious things far right Republicans are doing to make women barefoot and pregnant.  The topic of relationships between men and women and power was a natural result, and Rachel got muted while Bro and I bemoaned our past and present states of love and lovelessness.

It seems to me that every female needs a brother and every male needs a sister.  Otherwise, how are we supposed to decipher the idiocy of the other gender?  It’s not like you can actually have that kind of honesty with your lover.  He/she thinks stuff that will never be fully understood without a sibling’s explanation.

Bro wanted to know why women ask him questions if they really don’t want to actually know the answer.  Explanation: women are asking leading questions to see what you're going to say.  They want to know if you are serious, reliable, or other desirable traits.  They aren't fact collecting the way men collect facts.  It's a major area for misunderstanding and answering "wrong".

For my part, I told Bro about my ex complaining I “emasculated” him by renovating a house.  My ex overpaid for it, needed to sell it, and we agreed to remodel the attic to get a better price.  Since he was the lazy, that meant I remodeled the house, but in so doing made him feel bad.  Bro’s explanation?  My ex was inferior stock and needed to be weaned from our potential gene pool.  I should be glad I gained useful skills.

I’m not really sure how this helps me in future dating other than being pretty clear that every man in my life needs to know how to use a hammer, but at least it provides me with an achievable goal, and it does give me some insight into the male mind.

The fact is that men and women are different.  I like pink.  I feel like the world tells me I’m not supposed to like pink anymore because that makes me weak, and I don’t understand why anyone else would care about my color preferences.  If men liked pink too, that would make too much pink in the world.  It’s better that they pick something else, so combined, our world becomes more colorful and wonderful.

I’ve always liked the yin/yang symbol.  Separate but equal, two halves of the whole, swimming around each other like matched fish.  Together, they radiate the energy of a sun, which is enough to power a solar system.  It’s the ideal of what relationships and our world can be.

As for politics, the old guys are going to figure out someday that women aren’t going to give up shoes or contraceptives.