Forgive me for this one, I am just wandering with a thought as I write it, there is no purpose but to think out loud. Everything is arguable…

So, let’s say I am a woman, I’m not and don’t claim to be, but let’s imagine I am, just long enough to examine a theory. Can a woman win in a world so long built, and ruled, by men? I think this is an important question, one that might drive our path to making it so if the answer turns out to be no. I am not a feminist because I am not a woman, and I don’t pretend to know what is best for any woman, but I do believe that pursuing any modern foolishness that may arise is not the answer to the questions on equality.

I refer to the recent reparations meted out by Birmingham council, who seem to offer no argument that a refuse worker might have a harder physical employment than a classroom assistant. I find this to be unhelpful, but then I am not the beneficiary of that award, I’m sure they would disagree. The issue that jumps into my thinking is that someone then has to pay for that perceived historical injustice being now corrected, and it will be to the detriment of every other service that that council subsequently fails to provide. What of the community centre that now closes because of lack of funding? What can look like a victory can be mere optics, and did those winners wish for victory at this cost?

Ok, so I am still a woman, bear with. If I go to the gym I may be doing so to get healthier, but I might also be doing what I am to look good, that is to other people as well as myself, and if I wish to look good to them, I must then wish those other people to look at me and appreciate what they see in the efforts I have made. The reward, in terms of looking good, is that people then pay attention to me in some way. That I have become, by my own volition, enhanced in the eyes of others. The paradox in this is that I may only wish to be then noticed, as far as attractiveness, by those that I would choose to be noticed by, and that is something I cannot control, or is it?

It seems to be something that women wish to be able to control, you can see this in their offense when it is not so, in their appeal to be not looked at, and their revulsion at being treated as objects of desire. Though one may wonder why such careful attention is paid by them in preparing their look for the gym, and by even choosing to gym in the public gaze and at peak times when they could invest less money to do so privately in their own homes. No, this one I am not buying any more than you are. I’m not saying that they are not correct to point out that they have the right to not be treated in a certain way, but do they have the right to not be desired? Deciding how others will act is okay, we call this law if it is codified, or norm if it is societal, but deciding what people can think about you is thought crime, and therefore ridiculous.

In terms of being thought to have made efforts toward my appearance as a health intervention, and therefore myself in an investment type assessment, I may wish to be thought of as a woman of reliable regularity and commitment to my own personal longevity and ability to function without fault in a high paced pressure environment. This would serve the purpose of making others assured about me, what would follow would be that they would take me seriously and offer responsibility. It is in this point where we see why healthy looking women seem to do better in business and marketing, and life in general, than their counterparts. It is true that people will judge, and that cannot be helped, and while power lies predominantly in the hands of men, then the appearance presented by a woman will be a criterion. Where we see sloth and weightiness we are compelled to imagine laziness and a lack of self worth, whereas where we see trim we imagine attention to detail. There is no point in being upset about that as I cannot change this, and I did not make it that way.

Let us keep in mind that history has been wrong at every turn concerning women, that incorrectness is captured in writing and science and media. The world, and all the history of it has been written predominantly by men, who made a lot of suppositions.

“Mrs Garrett, what male would not trade our small superiority of intellect to possess that gift of intuition so bountifully bestowed on the lesser sex?” – E.B. Farnum, mayor of Deadwood (TV series).

It’s not in every way that the man has historically seen the woman as inferior, often there is a jealousy that they are not as likely to fall to brutishness and angry thoughts. Perhaps the correctly surmised thought that they, women folk, being less in physicality than their counterpart, are forced by that fact to find more cerebral ways to achieve goals. This does not necessarily mean that a woman will always be smarter in their thinking, just that they are more likely to employ smart thinking in the first place. The same could be said for the physically weaker male I suppose, that guile is the weapon of choice against the brute. But here again we could fall into error by assigning wisdom where it may not be or intellectual capital where it may be absent also. To assume that physical weakness means intellectual strength would be to think that strength in some fashion was desired or within capability. I have known women that just wanted a strong man to tell them what to do, in that case this conversation is moot, but we are not talking about submissive types here.

Where women may have an obvious advantage is in evolution, only an idiot would not recognise that males who are attracted to certain types of women are more willing to attend to the desires of those women, even if those desires happen to be ambition. Enablement is a power, it must have a discerning criteria, a measurable thing, conscious or otherwise, that allows for choices between one person and another, where otherwise they might seem to be equal. I had a boss once who, rumour had it, had a jealous wife, so he only ever employed persons he felt that she might accept as unattractive. I’ve had a boss that seemed to favour shrinking violets with weak self worth and demonstrably low intellect, thus avoiding the strength of character and intellectual abilities of the ones that might challenge his own deficiencies. I had another boss that would only employ women that had grown up children, so he didn’t have the bother of maternity leave to contend with. In all these cases the men of power had chosen the employment of the women by criteria they would likely, or definitely in some cases, not have used with men.

This is of course discriminatory, but could they have helped it? If some power dictates that weather girls must be attractive, and another power says that using that criteria is discriminatory, then the first power merely changes the wording from “attractive” to “presentable”, and continues on the same path with impunity. Weather girls, regardless of credential, remain attractive, but the reasoning behind their position is not that. What was a criteria, stops being the criteria, but it still happens to be true because it is an externality of another criteria. In this way we reveal what remains true, yet we get to pretend that it isn’t.

Our evaluation as men cannot exclude components of our own values, it is almost impossible to not be prejudiced by what we think. So there are two solutions that immediately spring to mind… The first is to balance the distribution of power so as to heavily include women in the process that evaluates and enables all persons toward rewards for their efforts, but would that not fall to the same failure for similar reasons? The second is to create a blindness to the process, to pull a veil over the information that might fulfil the criteria of prejudice, but would that not be logistically impossible? I suspect so.

My radical solutions is this… let’s let women take over and see what happens…

Paul S Wilson

This was of course written by a man, from the perspective of a man. It will be wildly wrong for reasons I cannot understand, both because I am not an expert on the subject, and I am not a woman. Apologies for errors and omissions, and as always, feel free to correct me where I am wrong…