He's not your girl friend

Camille Paglia posits that the the unhappiness of successful women is unrealistic expectations of men:

Wherever I go to speak, whether it’s Brazil or Italy or Norway, I find that upper-middle-class professional women are very unhappy. This is a global problem! And it’s coming from the fact that women are expecting men to provide them with the same kind of emotional and conversational support and intimacy that they get from their women friends.  And when they don’t get it, they’re full of resentment and bitterness.  It’s tragic!

Women are blaming men for a genuine problem that I say is systemic.  It has to do with the transition from the old, agrarian culture to this urban professional culture, where women don’t have that big support network that they had in the countryside.  All four of my grandparents and my mother were born in Italy.  In the small country towns they came from, the extended family was the rule, and the women were a force unto themselves.  Women had a chatty group solidarity as they did chores all day and took care of children and the elderly.  Men and women never had that much to do with each other over history!  There was the world of men and the world of women.  Now we’re working side-by-side in offices at the same job.  Women want to leave at the end of the day and have a happy marriage at home, but then they put all this pressure on men because they expect them to be exactly like their female friends.  If they feel restlessness or misery or malaise, they automatically blame it on men.  Men are not doing enough; men aren’t sharing enough.  But it’s not the fault of men that we have this crazy and rather neurotic system where women are now functioning like men in the workplace, with all its material rewards.

Of course, having been deprived of their traditional world, men have built a virtual one in which most women are not comfortable. I'm not sure I agree with her, although it would explain why so many women seem determined to transform men into women, as well as why so many of the losers appear willing to oblige.

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