Danny ChaiHow much do you plan to protect your kids? So Abby prefers interacting with older kids. Thing is, oftentimes, said older kids are annoyed by her. At church recently, a couple of the older kids asked Abby to say something that she’s been saying, and when she did, they laughed at her.
She was clueless about it all, just happy to be interacted with and not realizing they were making fun of her. I was pissed. But I didn’t say anything. For one thing, nothing guarantees kids harboring more negative feelings towards another kid than having a parent intervene and tell them to be nice, unless it’s their own kid, and even then it’s touchy. I don’t want to be That Parent for sure. The one who makes sure other kids treats their kid nicely. As kids, me and my friends always hated That Parent. I doubt children today are any different.
But more than that, I dunno. She has to learn at some point that it’s a cruel world, filled with mean boys who want nothing more than to tear out her heart and stomp on it for no reason more than sport. Sooner she realizes it, the better.
I believe in different gender roles. Is that non-PC? I dunno, I just do. I don’t know if it’s possible to observe little kids and not come the conclusion that the different genders are just different, not just physically, but in other ways. You could argue that it’s just cultural. But in a sense, that just kind of begs the question – why are there cultural gender roles? Where did they come from? It can’t just be arbitrary.
That’s not to say that I don’t think women deserve more equal opportunities in roles they’ve traditionally been denied. And it’s true that sometimes gender differences have been wrongly used to justify holding women back. That’s bad, and needs addressing.
But even with those being the case, I’m not willing to go so far as to say that men and women are completely the same, as some commentators try to do. Anna Quindlen did this all the time in Newsweek. Any time anyone even suggested that men or women might be different in some area, she went off. And sometimes she was right. But she always assumed it rather than considering it. I don’t think it’s a universal assured assumption.
I mention this because I’ve been playing a lot of Bejeweled Blitz, and the list of scores higher than mine is dominated by women. I’ll be honest: that bothers me. Aren’t dorky video games supposed to be the domain of men? My friend has suggested that Bejeweled Blitz is all about pattern recognition, something women are better at. Maybe. But still. It’s a dorky video game. Come on.
We men don’t have much. The world already recognizes women as having better fashion sense and being superior dancers. We’ve granted that. You’re really going to take domination of video games from us also? Really?
Anyway, I’ve tried a lot, and I just can’t beat their scores. And a little part of me is dying.