The estrogened crusade continues
The points he raised use to counter mine are so obviously ill-thought and hold no logic and fact. He has advertised clearly that he does not read women's literature but spout senselessly his views which he picked up from his upbringing. His ignorance on the advance made by women is glaring.
In another letter Equal but different by Fighter Pilot (Nov 5), he writes that women are not better fighter pilots than men. Lay the evidence then. He is again saying that a women should not behave like a man, thus subscribing to the manufactured masculinity-femininity concept. Is he implying that jet fighting is for men only? That anything outdoor are for men and a woman who indulges in those activities is behaving like a man?
So what are women activities? Sewing and cooking? He writes too that he would not be proud if his sister or daughter remains single. He should use the word 'happy' instead of 'proud'. Just imagine, that if she was a confident girl surrounded by a sea of Chinamen who didn't want her to jump around and talk loudly? Would she have to compromise herself just to get married to that goon? No way. I would rather stay single than marry a man who is narrow-minded and not willing to allow a woman to fully bloom as a human being.
Men say they do not mind women being equal but they continuously stress the difference. As a woman, because of this current status where she is not expected to be as superior as a man, she is demeaned in many other ways. She is discriminated at work, she has to put up with comments like "she's a woman driver".
She has to worry if her husband will always find her pretty, because for a woman, it is her looks which are her female hallmarks. She has to stand in the sidelines and sit back and support her husband. And if one is expected to quit a steady job, it is always the woman. This is the difference, and it is all very well for men like CT Wong and Fighter Pilot, and very smart of them to pretend to understand the female dilemma.
CT Wong asked a lot of questions all in the similar vein: can women afford to have less sexual partners then men, can they sire children with more than one man, can they afford to neglect their looks, are they pressured to marry? What utter rubbish is this? To answer all his questions, women can do all those.
Perhaps the women Mr Wong has been dating are submissive, partially uneducated and frail women who have nothing else but their looks and of course sex to offer. Then, yes, to put it bluntly, the woman could not do all those. She wouldn't even have the confidence too.
But take a woman with a good education, brought up confidently, plays active sport and reads Noam Chomsky on the side. You think she can't do these? You think she can't have random sexual partners if she chooses too?
You think Sex and the City is fiction? You think she would even date a man like CT Wong who thinks in his bygone way? In fact, she has lots to choose from.
CT Wong even resorted to asking if a woman could sit alone in a pub or restaurant without the same comfortable level as a man? Look around you. All the women I showed his article to were appalled by his inane remarks. I sit alone all the time, without giving it a second thought. It's a practical thing to do during your busy days or when you sit in a coffee bar and read a book.
CT Wong wants to believe that men and women are not equal. Funnily, over the centuries, every time a woman liberation wave appears, there will be a group of men who stand in the way, trying hard to maintain male dominance. Over the years, it was men who determined what women could do, it was they who determined medically what was hazardous to a woman. Studies in leading universities have proven otherwise.
Before women ventured into the academic world, men all around proclaimed that men were born with the bigger brain compared to women, but this ridiculous myth has now been shattered with the advent and onslaught of intelligent women making new discoveries and breakthroughs.
The most ground-breaking study recently is the revolutionary discovery that men are not stronger than women. Men excel more in physical activities not due to their gender as studies show, but due to practice. Imagine a four-year-old boy and girl. If the little boy was to throw a ball lamely, his father would snort "he's throwing like a girl", and make him correct it. But if his daughter did it, he'd go "Never mind, she's a girl" and he wouldn't push it.
With this kind of conditioning, it's no wonder men outperform women in the physical arena. Boys are spoken to more aggressively, made to practice more and have more opportunities for sports. Women are spoken to gently, expectations are lower on them and opportunities arise less.
These are the reason why men tend to outperform women in sports. They were not born more superior. Indeed, women are outrunning men in marathons and other sports. I don't expect CT Wong to take my word for this, so I suggest he reads The Frailty Myth by Colette Dowling.
In another insane statement Mr Wong says "when a woman plays dumb, it is not as co-conspirator inequality just to reinforce the men's conditioned expectations of demureness or femininity", he goes on to say, a woman plays dumb to assess a man. Is Mr Wong saying a woman has to play dumb to capture the obviously egoed man? Can the man be turned off if the woman happens to be outspoken and gregarious in speech? Do women have to be of a certain way to attract men? I would think to attract someone like Mr CT Wong, one has to have the criteria of submission, subordination, possesses less knowledge than him and earns less than him. What a lucky woman to get him!
And further, masculinity and femininity are manufactured concepts. We are not born possessing either. It is a totally human made concept. Femininity is not about being weak and frail. This all dates back to the Victorian period where women were the frailest. While men went riding and hunting, women took walks round their gardens under frilly parasols ... you see men helping women from carriages, and it was considered being gentlemanly, but when you think about it, it was because men of that time considered women so frail, they needed help.
Just like you helping a sick cancer patient from a cab or helping the invalid with her book. So, opening doors, calling a cab and all that gallantry nonsense is out the window. Men do it to because women were considered frail. It was men who deemed women to limit themselves to such activities as not to overburden themselves. It was men doctors who claimed all sort of ailments would befall a woman if she frolicked about.
Not surprisingly, in all the centuries, women of the Victorian age were the most prone to sickness. Only when women started becoming doctors and possessing the medical knowledge did they begin to see how absurd this men doctors were and what they were doing to limit the women form.
Because of this so-called 'femininity', women actually make themselves weak and frail to appear more alluring to the opposite sex. I mentioned in my earlier letter that women have been conditioned to be weak in order to appear feminine where Mr CT Wong gave a long winded rebuttal which was lame: women did this to assess men as potential mates. He did this in commendable flowery language.
Let me make this very clear. I did not say that on the top of my mouth. That statement was made from a study I read, an intellectual study which was conducted from reliable institutions. I'd like to hear the lecturers and psychologists of that study respond to CT Wong's excuse of a woman acting feminine in hope of assessing a man. Feminist philosopher Sandra Lee Bartky writes, "It's femininity training that makes women cultivate being small and narrow, harmless." And this is true, women today strive to be size 4 to achieve the perfect supposedly dress size. By attempting to be too small is also unknowingly attempting to be physically weak and frail.
As early as in the 1970s, assessment tools were created to establish where on a supposed masculinity-femininity continuum, a given individual lies. But these tools were worked from prior gender assumptions and their validity became questioned. Over 40 percent of men scored above the median on traits considered feminine and over 40 percent of women scored above the median on traits considered masculine, a very substantial overlap if one is looking for attributes to define femininity and masculinity.
It was later revealed by Anne Beall, a Yale psychologist, that the scales were constructed by scholars of gender difference. By selecting questions that men and women responded to differently, they made up a scale accordingly. The responses that males gave were called masculine and the responses females gave were called feminine. By revealing this, Anne Beall was blowing the whistle on scale makers who had been creating the difference. Nineteenth century concepts of 'masculine' and 'feminine' remained entrenched in the 20th, she explains, because investigators never questioned the "theoretical justification for such traits and just assumed the existence of masculinity and femininity, even though many of the scales were not quantitatively reliable".
Strength, courage and ability to take risks became unfeminine. Frailty becomes feminine. A medical male writer in the 1800s advised adolescent girls to avoid exercise altogether. Sufficient strength could be gained in the kitchen, the washroom and the gardens. See how men were determining what was supposedly best for women?
If women really did acquaint themselves with such activities, by adulthood they would need every ounce of energy they could muster for the 'homely gymnastics'. The girls' immature tissues and organs were considered peculiarly unstable and vulnerable to injury. Fatigue of any part of the body could lead to fatigue of the whole. Should bones grow ahead of muscles, strain could open. Should heart growth lag, girls could weaken and suffer fainting spells.
It was also said by a male health educator (hah!) that excessive exercise for women would have a negative effect on everything, and not least the genital organs, for they tend to decay. Not surprisingly, girls retreated to drawing rooms and needlework for fear of 'genital decay'. Yet, when girls were asked to quit their running and jumping, Victorian girls began to show signs of constitutional weakness and medicine did an about-face. Sickness began to haunt pubescent girls in large prevalence.
I suppose I cannot blame CT Wong for his way of thinking. He was conditioned to think that way, but I will fault him if he refuses to change just to maintain his male dominance. Whatever a man does, a woman can indeed do, it's as simple as that! What's popular isn't always right and what's right isn't always popular. Any man who does not want to see it that way in the remotest light is obviously intimidated and has the ego the size of Jupiter.
