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Notes -
For years as a younger man I considered myself allied with feminist causes. In undergrad back in the day I marched in a Take Back the Night rally, I took at least two women's studies courses in grad school (one about language and sex differences, which was interesting, though my professor marked me down I believe for a write-up of a conversation I had recorded in which I suggested the female actually seemed to have the power, another I can't even remember the name of the class but what it taught me, what I learned from taking it, was no doubt not at all what I was supposed to have learned. I learned the women in it were mostly self-entitled princesses. Yes I was the only male in the class.)
I am not remotely at the level of misogyny one at times seems displayed in these pages (I use that word to mean essentially "woman hating," not in any esoteric or typically progressive sense) but my views on the fragility and vulnerability of women and the horribleness of men have, let's say, altered.
I'm still pretty moored to how I was raised in my perspective, but how I was raised in a way conflicted with the approach of seeing women as tough-girl badasses that was dinned into me over the years of my younger self. Living in Japan, and perhaps having witnessed the situation of women in places like Thailand, I have to say many of the tropes about paygaps and women not being taken seriously and extremely limited options for women are very true, or at least much, much more true than in, say, the US, which strikes me as a demented zoo when it comes to what seem to me to be mainstream views on men and women (I am not even getting into trans).
None of this is very specific but my bus is arriving so I am ending in typical abrupt fashion.
Edit because this is infuriating word salad: My mistake was buying into the idea that Women Are Wonderful. But even with this mistake in mind I still like women, just not in the same dewy-eyed, trusting way. No. More in a stern-eyed, doubting way.
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