ken and barbie

One of the earliest forms of bullshit is believing in an ideal man and an ideal woman. It’s still going strong after all these years. What’s bullshit about it, you never asked?

I can only imagine that the common threads in the ideal man and woman originated from observations of their sexual relationship. A man is hard and rigid, always dominating. A woman is warm and receptive, always submitting. Because as we all know, a penis has never stayed limp and a vagina has never been an impenetrable brick wall. A man has never been on his back and a woman has never pushed back for her own pleasure. Freudian criticism aside, there are commonalities between the personality, if not the physicality, of the ideal man and woman throughout history. And they make no sense.

The personality we assign to each ideal couldn’t be fully realized without a lot of pain and suffering in all directions. We tend to value a woman who puts her emotions, and empathy for others emotions, first. But imagine dealing with a person who never sidestepped emotions. They’d always let you know how they felt, and wonder how you felt, constantly. It would be like reading a “blog”, only in real life. Likewise, the ideal man is often pictured as being solely concerned with results, and never considering empathy or emotional dilemmas. Imagine a person like that(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carl_Panzram).

The physical side of things is equally nonsense because it’s always in flux depending on time and location. At one point in history, in one place, the ideal man had a small penis, was soft and flabby, pale, and had a curly head of hair. The ideal woman was fat, pale, with hips as wide as Texas. If you believe everything you hear on the TV, the standards now are just the opposite. But the standards are not, and never have been, either of these extremes. Time and time again, cross-cultural studies show that on average men do not prefer rail thin women, or fat women. And women do not prefer rock hard muscley men, or flabby men. They usually pick something in between. And there’s always some who prefer either extreme regardless of what time period and/or culture they’re in.

If everyone, in every gender, lived up to these ideals, we would have no cool-headed girlfriends, no caring fathers, no women with wide shoulders, no men with soft hands. The world would be stratified into 2 extremes that aren’t really that attractive to begin with. Next time you are concerned that you are not living up to what your randomly chosen chromosome expects of you, remember what a pretty feminine looking and acting man told you to take a deep breath and remember that like most things, gender roles should be ignored.