The Boxer And The Pram
How times have changed. Whereas in the early Nineties I was told that having hair on my chest demonstrated that I was “less evolved” than female acquaintances because “closer to the apes”, I can now hear young women claiming to be feminists but nevertheless expressing themselves critically about individual women or groups thereof. This used to be forbidden.
Not so long ago I chatted with a law student who was voluptuous on the outside and a tomboy on the inside; her sport was boxing and I am sure she could break me in half. If she wanted to, but I felt totally confident that she would never want to.
For in many conversations about everything under the sun, sometimes quite intimate (in a sibling-esque style), I never detected the slightest trace of the female chauvinism with which I grew up. On the contrary, she echoed what I had heard from a much older generation, that she preferred the company of men for being more straightforward and less given to backbiting. Imagine my surprise, therefore, when she launched into a tirade against those women who thought that motherhood gave them a magical device entitling them to push in wherever they wanted to go, a device that you could also stick into the road to stop the traffic. It was called a pram – buggy to Americans. Well, there are probably downsides to this magic. Neither of us had children; I am not going to but she might yet, so the last word had not been spoken. But I was still startled.
(Fiddle date-stamp to November 1, 2014)
In: PARENTAL STATUS TECHNOLOGY, PST Miscellaneous
