GVSB

Being all depressed-like for the past week or so means I've already caught up on the last two Project Runway episodes I slept through and don't have any 'worthwhile' teevee headed my way until 10 (when, no doubt, I will be sleeping). Good news is that this gives me more time to read, which is great because I've been engrossed in the Ian McEwan novel I started Monday, The Child in Time, ever since I picked it up (although admittedly I'm still only 1/3rd of the way through--don't tell me if that last 2/3rds sucks ass).

I've dog-eared a couple striking passages thus far and today's Unfogged posts kinda had the issue of differences between the sexes at the forefront of my mind so I give you this (p. 54-55):

"Such faith in endless mutability, in re-making yourself as you came to understand more, or changed your version, he had come to see as an aspect of her femininity. Where once he had believed, or thought 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 they 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 occurred only 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 so 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 find another part of yourself, expressed through some other endeavour. 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 other principle of selfhood in which being surpassed doing. Long ago men had noted something unruly in this. Women simply enclosed the space which men longed to penetrate. The men's hostility was aroused."

Having read a couple other McEwan books I do think he truly believes this himself. I'd argue (weakly, for I am a woman) the part about it rarely occurring to men that "they might just as well be doing something else," but I do think men certainly have a stronger ingrained sense of duty to non-familial institutions. In general though I agree with the premise, at least insofar as I've experienced/observed trends as a twenty-something, and tend to think people who would refute the claim are doing so because they think they "ought to believe" otherwise.

This is the part where I would suggest that you provide your own insight in the comments because I know you, yes you anonymous lurker who, last time they were drunk at the Bistro/in my backyard/elsewhere, admitted they check out this blog, are reading this. If that request is for naught though, then I'd just say Ray, I hope you'll let me know what you think.