The culture of over 'celebrating' women is patronising and thankfully in the past

I’m not sure women need or even want to be ‘celebrated’; they simply want to be respected and treated as equal to men. Would you ever run a competition entitled ‘Celebrating Men’? I doubt it. Men don’t appreciate being pandered to in this way and I don’t think today’s women do either. Why single out females for this specific patronisation anyway, why not simply have a competition entitled ‘Celebrating humans’? Sounds stupid doesn’t it?

At last over sentimentality and gushing compliments, which lets face it, tend to be seen as mainly female traits, are very much out of fashion. In my social group I see more and more women flinching when complimented, normally by other women. As if to say; ‘Why are you complimenting me? Do I appear needy or like I am seeking you’re approval?’ And, if we are honest with ourselves, when do we tend to give compliments during social situations? Perhaps in an effort to endear people to us or because we deem another person in need of an ego boost (who are we to be so presumptuous?) or perhaps because we feel insecure and are sub consciously seeking a compliment in return. Whatever the reason it’s clearly dodgy territory and I believe we’d all be a lot more comfortable with the straight forward approach that men tend to adopt i.e. to just not to give many compliments in the first place. I mean, how often do you hear a man saying to another man, ‘nice hair mate’ or ‘you’re looking really well’? Barely ever I bet. And on the odd occasion a compliment is given you tend to know that it’s from the heart.

To run a competition entitled ‘Celebrating women’ is basically asking for people to ‘Compliment women’. Yet we are past the days when women need or want to be either ‘celebrated’ or ‘complimented’. Women just want to get on with their lives and have honest and open relationships with other human beings.

Posted 01:05 PM on Mon Jun 21 2010

By Freak

1271 views, 3 Comments