This is the beginning of a series of posts on the reasons why so many people today are denying the differences between women and men.
I'll start with what I call "The Entertainer's Temptation."
An artist, whether a film maker or a novelist or just an ordinary person telling a story, must express a truth, but he must also entertain or else no one will pay any attention to that truth.
Ideally, truth and entertainment are one and the same, but usually this is not the case. A film or novel that truly depicts how ordinary women and men behave can be very dull. And so the artist creates extraordinary men and women for his characters.
Ideally, these exceptional people will illuminate some truth about our ordinary selves, but often we learn nothing from them. Often the artist resorts to the extraordinary not to shed light, but simply because the extraordinary can be entertaining. If nothing else, it provides relief to a humdrum reality.
This is especially true when it comes to the sexual desires and behavior of women. Show the audience a woman who approaches men she hardly knows, who initiates sex with them, who is wild in bed, and who expects no commitment or anything else in return--in short, show a woman who seems to feel the way most men do about sex--and she is instantly, highly extraordinary.
Such depictions of women have entertained audiences for centuries. They have long since become dull cliches. Today these depictions continue (and multiply) for very different reasons (the subject of future posts) but originally these depictions provided a simple escape from a reality of difference that could be (and still often is) oppressive.
Out of all of the reasons for denying the differences between women and men, this desire to entertain people weary of that difference is one I sympathize with most. That said, I suspect such entertainments, though harmless enough in themselves, provided the center of the giant snowball of denial that we have to today.
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