A coworker once told me that he was sitting in his livingroom while his wife’s bridge club was playing cards in the adjoining dining room. The women began to talk about the failings - big and small - shared by all men. They were pretty brutal in their assessment of the deficiencies of men. They kept looking at him, snickering and trying to gauge his reaction to their snide remarks. But he was imperturbable. Finally, when they couldn’t take it anymore, they asked him directly what he thought of their remarks. He just smiled.
“When I was growing up,” he said, “my father worked in the mill. The only time I ever saw him, he was asleep on the couch. My mother was a stay-at-home-mom (like all mothers were back then), and she was the only person who talked to me or had anything to do with me. Later, when I went to school, my first teacher was a woman. In fact, all my teachers were women, until the tenth grade, when I had my first male teacher. All my influences - from my youngest years until I was about sixteen years old - came from women. So if you don’t like the way us men turned out, blame the women who made us what we are.”
No comments:
Post a Comment