When I grabbed lunch with a friend the other day, I was of out of sorts. It had already been a long morning, and it was, admittedly, nice to take a break from making decisions and providing answers to an endless stream of questions.
I was looking forward to a mindless break and let my mind relax. I should have known better, though, as this friend is always playfully antagonizing in my company. He was on a roll and I was nowhere near my sharpest. By the end of the lunch hour, he was making jokes about how hard it must be to be a woman, and it's a good thing he was around so that he could make decisions and explain things to me.
I used a number of expletives (remember, I wasn't on my game) and shook my head at his comments. We were both grinning, however, because this was obviously a joke. My intelligence, ability and know-how were never
really in question.
It's strange to think about how much has changed in gender relations over the mere past few decades. I'm not going to blabber on about women's rights and roles in the world at the moment. I brought this story up to illustrate how such thoughts are joke-worthy in today's world (at least, that is, in
my world), and it wasn't too long ago that men
actually believed such things. Truthfully, both genders were guilty of such beliefs. So much so, that marketers capitalized on (what we know see as) the demeaning roles of women.
