Monday, July 7, 2008

Awkward?

When an old friend calls and asks for advice about a guy, and tells you she's asking "because you're a guy."

I protested to no avail that I'm not a typical guy and therefore cannot give her The Standard Guy Response (I know, right?), but it didn't matter. Also, one would think that since this guy's in the military, and I'm me, that would immediately disqualify me from giving advice.... apparently genitalia reign supreme, or something.

It was a good conversation, though, and I feel like I actually said some things that were not totally useless. I hope things work out for her.

7 comments:

Anonymous said...

you didn't get the memo? you're on call this month to represent all of guy-dom.

Dennis said...

Oops - my bad. Apparently I have been forgetting to check my dennis.dugan@patriarchy.com email account. I could have sworn I set that thing up to forward....

B. Zedan said...

The theory among women (at least, as far as they tell me) is something along the lines of penile telepathy. They are kinda like antennae, right?

Glad you had a good convo, though.

Anonymous said...

You guys are pretty funny;>). But haven't you as guys ever asked a female a question because she's "female"? I've had males ask me questions plenty of times before, because I'm female.

Dennis said...

As a general rule, I try not to ask people to represent an entire group. That's just silly, and more than a little offensive - it's not like all woman are going to have the same answer on anything, any more than all white people agree on anything.

Judgement said...

I have women ask me stuff all the time for the same reasons... I'm a guy... and they feel like they can talk to me. I generally don't ask girls anything "just because they are girls" gonna have to agree with Dennis on the whole lumping people together thing... seems like a form of sexism?

Dennis said...

Judgement, it's not a form of sexism. At the least, sexism would claim that one sex is superior to other.

I'd call it some form of biological essentialism or reduction - the idea that all people of one sex are so alike that asking questions of one is just as good as asking them of another person.

Which is clearly ridiculous.

 
Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 United States License.