What is your attitude towards your gender?

I am a woman and I love being a woman, I don't have children as I never felt the urge to have children but that does not mean to say I don't know how to be maternal, I love working and I love my life....the only frustrating thing I find about being a woman is in the work place.....I don't get paid the same or career advanced as my male colleagues do.

thanks for the considered answer.

wow, wow, wow.

except for the watching some sports (I don't watch any) that post could have been mine.

kiwichick
The comments about how the world preceives you, as far as in the workplace, etc.....how does that effect the essence of who you are inside? I can see how it might cause someone to think, "I'm not treated as well....I am a woman....ergo women are not treated as well"
I don't buy into that. If that were the case, if a man wasn't treated well, he would feel like a woman.

<bookmark> I'll think and get back to this.

T
K
O

I don't consider myself a "dude" guy--I can't stand sports bars (though I do like sports, except the ones where the explicit goal is for the participants to assail each other physically), I don't know anything about cars except how to drive them, etc. Until recently the majority of my closest friends have been female.

On the other hand, when compared to the missus (who by her own admission is somewhere between a girl and a girly girl) I often feel like a textbook guy. I'd like to think I am attuned to people's feelings but when push comes to shove I resort to logic when the missus resorts to emotion, and when I ask her if something is wrong and she says "no," even if I know she is not being totally honest I stubbornly believe the onus is on her to tell me so rather than on me to ferret out the truth.

Part of me attributes this more to being a Scorpio than to being a guy.

I always thought you were a female.

I'm sure that in your place I'd have been fascinated too - I don't have much experience with transvestites, transexuals, or gender dysmorphic kids.

On Chai's question about feeling like a woman, I don't "feel" like one, I am one. I'm clear on that.

I have always had an interesting attitude towards my own gender. At times I've felt like I can only relate to other men, while other times I feel strange around them.

In terms of sexuality, I've never exhibited much of the predatory behaviors I perceived in my male peers. I've never been much into sports although in my youth I did martial arts and I was a pretty fierce fighter.

From an early age, I excelled in art and music. This made me closer with my female classmates. It wasn't until college that I had many close male friends. It dramatically changed my relationship with my own gender. But it was a swing of the pendulum. Now I find things to be the opposite. I better relate and associate with men.

I guess I've always found myself immersed in a environment that is dominated by one or the other, and I've always acclimated to one or the other.

I currently work in a very male dominated engineering world, so take a guess.

T
K
O

On a related note...



Do I feel like a man? I know I don't feel like some caricature of what pop media says a man is, that is for sure.

T
K
O

....pisses me off

Something to think about.

I think that one of the best things for women has been that the discussion on sexuality, gender and expression have become more common place and as topics are treated less and less as taboo or queer.

For men, the dialog on sexuality ends at sex. Sexuality is larger than that though. It's in how we express ourselves. It's the beer we drink, the clothes we wear. I don't think most men are as comfortable talking about sexual expression outside of things hanky panky.

T
K
O

See? I told you I was in touch with my feminine side. 8)

I am very, very pleased and satisfied
that my gender was and is male.

As to other members of my gender,
without consciously considering it,
I deem them others such as myself.





David

As a female I must say I completely agree with this!

Communication is difficult enough between any 2 human beings; when honesty isn't a part of it, it totally fails.

I believe both genders are ultimately responsible for stating their true feelings, should they want those feelings to be known.

SO FUNNY!

2 of my 6 co-workers (all female, like me) say they "Don't Like Women." None of their friends are female.

WTF? Is this some kind of trend?

I like women! How could I NOT, when I AM one?

Oh, and when I replied to one of these female co-workers,

"Well, I'm a woman, and you seem to like me well enough," she said,

"Well you're not 'Really' a woman."

What does THAT mean???

I wear dresses; I wear makeup (lately). I'm even married (to a male, no less). I don't get it!

I didn't like women much for a few years when I was a teen. We lived at my aunt's house, quite far away from where I went to school in the school year, and I had only one friend whom I saw perhaps once every two weeks over the summer. This was before I turned sixteen and got a job (all year, full time in summer) and wasn't so all-all-alone. My mother and aunt didn't work then. We were poor (long story), so not much money for entertainment. My life as I saw it was a round of going to the grocery store, going to the laundramat, going to the Slenderella shaking leatherette parlor (a weightloss treatment), talking about what to make for dinner, doing the dishes, talking about their horrible brothers, my uncles (family grudge). The highlight was going to the library, where I took out as many books as they'd let me.
I arranged all my aunt's collected buttons, did the newspaper crossword puzzles, stared into space, read my deceased uncle's books (Wyatt Earp, Zane Grey), got a start on the Dickens' books. I was so bored I even read the sports pages, which started me on a life of reading about sports.

In my seventeenth summer (now there was a book, by Maureen Daly), I was spirited away on a trip with my father and three guys to shoot footage for an industrial film for Armour & Co.. about a feed additive. This was part of my not going in the convent that year, as I got a crush on one of the crew. Anyway, my point is, I loved the conversations... so different from being with my mother and aunt. I suddenly felt alive, and not just re having an adolescent crush.

I pulled out of that bias for male talk fairly soon in that I got to know female friends who I liked talking with too... now I'm interested in good talk from any quarter. But I remember my strong urge to get away from my mother and aunt and laundry and grocery conversation.

Adds -

I had a secondary manifestation of this kind of ennui when I got sick and tired (sick and tired!) of what I thought of as hair and nails conversations when I first got interest in art. But a lot of the artists I got to know were women and were interested in more than their nails, so that wasn't entirely gender related. Besides, while I never got all that interested in hair and nails again, I still liked style as something to follow, so there was some conversation related to that which wouldn't put me into a sleep zone.