“Raising children is an incredibly hard and risky business in which no cumulative wisdom is gained: each generation repeats the mistakes the previous one made.” –Bill Cosby
Here’s a topic that I’ve been dying to discuss. Truth is, I discuss it all the time, I just never took the time to share my thoughts with everyone. I know this problem has heightened, particularly in my age group (18-22), because my friends talk about it more and more. But why? Why talk about it and no one changes? Why talk about it and continue to become upset? You know those phrases “boys are stupid”, “women are crazy”, and “men ain’t worth nothing”? Somehow, they continue to come out of the mouths of tons of people through generations. Who are the people that continue to spread these false lies? When will we realize that WE ARE the problem? Us. Yes. Us. We are the issue. Bear with me.
Like all things we learn in life, we learn most of them from our parents. Nurture comes before nature. Our parents are our first teachers and what do they teach us? Great question. They tell their sons that it’s okay to have a girlfriend when they’re ten years old and threaten their daughters to be burned at stake, if they’re caught dead with a guy. Which parent emphasizes on this the most? You guessed it. I don’t even have to say it because you already know. You may be thinking “well isn’t that something.” Yes it is. There have always been double standards in families. I’m just waiting on the family that will break the chain. Since these double standards are prevalent in families so much, it leads me to my next question: who is creating the monster? Is it the parents’ fault? Or the children? Will a boy get the same chastisement for coming in the house with a hickey, than a girl? Of course he won’t. That’s not real. So we have to sit back and analyze how this affects them in the long run.
Like all of my articles, I like to use my friends for example. They fit almost every demographic so it’s easy to use them for examples. I got a phone call from one of my friends over Thanksgiving break. He called to ask me one question that he had been dying to get an opinion on. He asked “are girls more mature than guys? I don’t know what it is. Or does it just seem that way?” I wanted to know immediately in what terms was he talking about.
–Relationships. Should have known.
I responded by telling him what I thought, based on what me and another friend previously discussed. I had been talking to one of my female friends a while before, about that very topic. We were talking about the standards that we had as far as choosing a boyfriend. We noticed that if we waited patiently for this “magical” guy to appear, we’d probably have a higher chance of hitting triple sevens on the slot machine.
“But that’s not true.”
It isn’t? Fine. I won’t make a generalization about every guy in this age group, but I will make whatever lies right beneath generalization. In my eyes, it’s like this. People live in this fantasy world where you’re supposed to go to high school, date a few people, graduate, go to college, fool around, “experience the world” (aka be in your twenties), then settle down, get married, have children, whatever. I think that’s all crap. I tell my best friend all the time, “what if you just so happened to run into this ‘person’ that you’re meant to be, with while you’re younger? With that mindset, you’d throw it all away because you think there’s this person you’re destined to meet when you’re twenty-seven at a New Year’s Eve party.” How can you place an age on being serious with someone? How do you do that? I didn’t know that there was a set age that someone should be in love.
“And honestly at twenty-three, I would probably love my work more than I did she” -Jay-Z
Guess there is.
Now, back to the little girl and boy who told their parents about their boyfriend and girlfriend.
If their parents continue to raise them this way, offering their son more sexual freedom than their daughter, their son is going to grow up thinking that his actions are appropriate. That it’s okay for him to express his sexuality at a young age, therefore, his actions at the teenage level should be accepted as well. Their daughter will grow up thinking that she has to hide her sexuality from people, because it wasn’t accepted by her parents. That she’s supposed to be discrete, monogamous, and respect herself, as well as her body. Her sexual freedom should be expressed when she’s married and not a time before. Meanwhile, her brother is out doing whoever and whatever. So, she grows up wanting a boyfriend because having a boyfriend is one step closer to having a husband. She grows up wanting to fall in love with the Prince Charming she reads about in her Disney Princess books. This is the problem. This is where the take-off occurs. Here it is. This is when she becomes “more mature” than he is. This is why she plans for the future. This is why she set an age that she wanted to be married and wanted to have kids. This is why she wants KC and Jo-Jo’s “All My Life” to play at her wedding. She’s been planning it her whole life. This is why when she was in middle school, she’d ceremoniously take her boyfriend’s last name and scribble it at the end of her first. That’s why.
Nowadays, there are girls who embrace rebelliousness. In my eyes, these are the girls who are tired of getting their feelings hurt. They’re tired of guys being how they are and think “why can’t I be that way too?” Why can’t you? On the very first episode of Sex and the City, Carrie declares that she’s going to start “having sex like a man”, meaning, no emotional attachment, and basically in it for herself. Drake, a popular R&B singer/rapper, borrowed a lyric in his song “Trust Issues” from Lil’ Wayne (a mentor of his) that said “women wanna f*** like they’re me and I’m them.” Where does he get off? Who told him that his sexual freedom was exclusive to men only? Don’t answer, I’ll just ask those two ten year olds what they think. They might know.
Now don’t get me wrong. I don’t want it to seem like guys are all bad. I just think they’re raised differently, which affects their actions when they’re older. I won’t say that guys don’t want all the same things, I’m just saying they want those things at different ages. Guys know that one day they’re going to be married. One day they’re going to have children. They know that. Some of them don’t want to (but that’s another story for another time). I’ve always felt that girls took relationships a little more seriously than guys, and when they fell apart, she learned a lot from the relationship and used the things she learned to prepare herself for the next one. That sounds about reasonable right? You’d be surprised at how many people don’t do it. I think people should practice being a good boyfriend or girlfriend when they’re younger in a relationship because, as silly as it sounds, when they get older, they don’t know how to be one. That whole period of “growing up” and becoming “more mature” could be dodged, if you learned the importance at an early age. In a way, our parent’s methods worked inversely. Allowing their sons to express their childhood curiosity and interest in girls, somehow, made them unfit for relationships. Their daughters on the other hand, were guarded from having relationships, and turned out to care about them more. Hmm. Strange.
So where am I going with all of this?
*sigh* Sadly, I don’t know. I don’t have the answer to this problem. I can only tell you what I think and hope I spark some thought in yourself. Once again, this is not hundred stabs for guys. I’ll reiterate that I don’t think all guys are like this, I’m simply going off of what I see and hear. I just hope that when you get older and you have a family, you teach your children the truth. You break this chain of patriarchy and double standards in your family. Like I said in the beginning, why continue to talk about it and get upset? Why continue to talk about it and no one changes? Be the change that you want to see. Shift your generation in the right direction, because I don’t know where we’re headed. We’re all responsible though. All of us. If we choose to not change, we’re adding to the problem. If you think there is another solution, then spread it. I can only tell you what I think. I hope this was helpful. Strong deuce.