I read therefore I am

One of the changes in my life is the lack of TV, newspapers, and my radio. So in the last 4 weeks have read 5 books, good going for me, and storing up interesting bits to discuss. However this quote from an english male writer was too good to wait, so if you want to read this :

Where he had once believed, or thought that he ought to believe that men and women were, beyond all the obvious physical differences essentially the same, he now suspected that one of their many distinguishing features was precisely their attitudes to change.

Past a certain age men froze into place, they tended to believe that even in adversity, they were somehow at one with their fates. They were, who they thought they were.

Despite what they said, men believed in what they did, and stuck at it. This was a weakness and a strength.Whether they were scrambling out of trenches to be killed in their thousands, or doing the firing themselves. or putting the final touches to a cycle of symphonies, it only rarely occurred to them, or only occurred to the rare ones among them, that they might just as well be doing something else.

To women this thought was a premise. It was a constant torment or comfort, no matter how successful they were in their own or other people’s eyes. It was also a weakness and a strength. Committed motherhood denied professional fulfillment.A professional life on men.s terms eroded maternal care.Attempting both was to risk annihilation through fatigue. It was not easy to persist, when you could not believe that you were entirely the thing that you did, when you thought you could find yourself, or another part of yourself, expressed through some other endeavor

Consequently they were not taken in so easily by jobs, and hierarchies, uniforms and medals,Against the faith men had in the institutions they, and not women had shaped. women upheld some principles of selfhood in which being, surpassed doing.

Long ago men had noticed something unruly in this. Women simply enclosed a space which men longed to penetrate. The men’s hostility was aroused

Well that was the quote. I wish I could put ideas over so succinctly. I would say that men are defined by the world in terms of what they do, workwise. Perhaps the new generation of working supermums now define themselves by how well they do everything, not feeling that they have the choice to work or not work. Mostly women do not have a choice if they want to pay the mortgage.

I also think that the male work ethic is more strongly adhered to in particular western cultures, British and American, to name two. Recently there was an attempt by a new female french minister, who had spent several years in the USA, to persuade the french to work harder, give up some of their holidays, and work a 37 hour week. The backlash came from men who felt they worked very hard, but  that they also had families whom they wanted to spend more time with, and other hobbies, other goals. Any reactions to any of this?