Gender : Coda
» Gender Follies , » My Inner Life
I realize that I haven’t said anything about Alexandra in some time. It isn’t that I don’t miss her. But confidence in our relationship leaves me much less likely to manufacture superfluous melancholy. The geopolitical tides that pull her out of America are best endured without fuss.
Her absence does make me type more.
My talk of gender likely bores you but I do write to please myself. I feel I should add a few afterthoughts.
I’m rereading a series of highly literary novels collectively known as The Dance to the Music of Time. They aren’t much known in the US.
The Narrator periodically offers comments on the behavior of women. How they react to certain kinds of events. When I was younger that species of generalization often left me feeling as if I’d entered an alien world. Now when I encountered them in something like Dance I relegate them to the inherent sexism of times past.
As a used bookshop owner I sell books offering to solve the man/woman problem.
My ex-lover and I watched many contemporary romantic comedies. They consistently contrasted girl behavior with boy behavior.
So, yeah, I do know sexism persists in this silly world. But I receive these evidences as Europeans once did fabulous tales of the behavior of aboriginals of the New World.
Not that I’m wholly free of it. I like opening doors for Alexandra. But as I’ve said before often she’s obliging me in allowing me to open them.
Nor would I go out of my way to do the same for an unfamiliar women. Rather more than I would for a man. Courtesy has nothing to do with gender.
And in the world I inhabit masculinist behavior could be found condescending.
