My summer job has become a mashed-up schedule of babysitting gigs. One of these gigs is watching the incredibly precocious 3-year old of my old boss. This girl is awesome, quite possibly one of my favorite children EVER; she is also quite possibly more pop-cultured than I can ever hope to be. Anyways, today the two of us were watching The Princess Bride. If you haven't seen this movie, stop reading now and go watch it. Seriously. It's not only epic and amazing, but to have not seen this fantastic film is a crime of stupid-big proportions- a crime with proportions quite possibly larger than those created by the "Who's Harry Potter?" crime. ANYWAYS, she said at one point "I want to be rescued." in response to my explanation of why Wesley was following Vizzini, Inigo Montoya, Fizzik, and Buttercup. My immediate mental response was "Pssh, yeah kid, me too," and her little sentence kind of exploded my thought processes for the rest of the day. Every time I'd be thinking about something, her cute little face would dive bomb through the thought and I'd be back to pondering her not so cute little statement.
The way I see it, there exists a sort of spectrum of women and their roles:
I don't claim to be on either end (obviously). I can and (gasp) like to cook, I do laundry, I'm good with kids. I also call people out on "Women's Work" jokes, find sex jokes hi-larious, like comics, never tire of watching Fightclub and Braveheart. I am comfortable just left of the middle. And I would still like a Morelli or Ranger to come along and sweep me off my feet. So what? This whole Knight in Shining Armor business is not necessarily a bad thing; it's just that bad things tend to arise from sitting around wearing pink and waiting for some boy to gallop by and slay the scary dragon. The biggest issue being the obvious inebriated state of anyone claiming to slay a frichen' dragon. Seriously though, I think it's a crying shame that any woman who obviously wants a strong man in her life is automatically labeled as being weak or- even worse- old fashioned. Ick. Of course there are some who live up to this stereotype; unfortunately, Buttercup doesn't really do anything at all in The Princess Bride except flounce around and whine and threaten to kill herself. But what's even more a crying shame is the other side of the spectrum; if a woman claims she's a feminist, the knee jerk reaction of most everyone is to start looking for a mustache. What type of sick hypocrisy is this? I love being able to vote and go to school and all that jazz, but there are definitely times when I wonder if they didn't have the right idea a couple hundred years ago; at least then they had a clearly defined system.And then there are the in-betweens, which as anyone who has studied population growth (with a bell-curve, of course) knows, is about 90% of the population. I don't really have much to say about us, mostly because there are just too many mixed signals and scenarios to choose from. BUT, from what I know about her parents, this little princess is doomed to be an in-between. I really hope she doesn't get hurt or disenchanted somewhere along the way of growing up.
The way I see it, there exists a sort of spectrum of women and their roles:
I don't claim to be on either end (obviously). I can and (gasp) like to cook, I do laundry, I'm good with kids. I also call people out on "Women's Work" jokes, find sex jokes hi-larious, like comics, never tire of watching Fightclub and Braveheart. I am comfortable just left of the middle. And I would still like a Morelli or Ranger to come along and sweep me off my feet. So what? This whole Knight in Shining Armor business is not necessarily a bad thing; it's just that bad things tend to arise from sitting around wearing pink and waiting for some boy to gallop by and slay the scary dragon. The biggest issue being the obvious inebriated state of anyone claiming to slay a frichen' dragon. Seriously though, I think it's a crying shame that any woman who obviously wants a strong man in her life is automatically labeled as being weak or- even worse- old fashioned. Ick. Of course there are some who live up to this stereotype; unfortunately, Buttercup doesn't really do anything at all in The Princess Bride except flounce around and whine and threaten to kill herself. But what's even more a crying shame is the other side of the spectrum; if a woman claims she's a feminist, the knee jerk reaction of most everyone is to start looking for a mustache. What type of sick hypocrisy is this? I love being able to vote and go to school and all that jazz, but there are definitely times when I wonder if they didn't have the right idea a couple hundred years ago; at least then they had a clearly defined system.And then there are the in-betweens, which as anyone who has studied population growth (with a bell-curve, of course) knows, is about 90% of the population. I don't really have much to say about us, mostly because there are just too many mixed signals and scenarios to choose from. BUT, from what I know about her parents, this little princess is doomed to be an in-between. I really hope she doesn't get hurt or disenchanted somewhere along the way of growing up.
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