I owe you several longer replies to some discussion we were having when my week went sideways and my writing and thinking time dissipated, but I wanted to quickly grab this and put it on your thinking slate as well as mine.
“Men want to be valued for who they are, but they are instead valued for what they do.”
Leaving aside the question of who gets to do the valuing, this specific statement is something that feminists have been making all my life, and saying it’s a problem for both men and women. In other words, gender shouldn’t be a factor in a person’s perceived value. Any human should be able to choose a life where they’re valued for what they do.
Women have, for aeons, felt (and sometimes literally been) trapped by the belief that a woman’s value is simply in existing — that a woman’s actions, by extension, can have no value. And yes: it has not always been easy for women, in the thick of that, to perceive that to someone who is told they must constantly be striving in order to have value, the notion that value could be intrinsic to simply existing could seem alluring.
It’s easy for me to see this from the position of being a middle-aged woman; it wasn’t easy for me to see it from both sides when I was younger. What’s the big difference? Now that I’m old and fat and not remotely hot, I do largely get to move in the world as if I must do something in order to have value — I’m invisible to that segment of the population that believes women’s value is as objects, I’ve fulfilled my obligation to bear young, and bla bla bla. And it’s liberating. So I can only imagine that it would be equally liberating for a man to experience feeling value simply for existing, but I personally feel a great sense of antipathy towards that notion and am no help there.
“ It’s like calling Mario misogyny. Sure, Peach is a shallow character who exists only as a reward. But we seem so quick to forget how many freaking worlds Mario has to fight his way through, dying over and over again, for a cake and a kiss.”
Totally. But from Peach’s perspective, it’s like, maybe she’s actually a really interesting person, but this Mario dude who doesn’t even know her is fixated on her to the point of fighting his way through worlds to get to her when she’s basically not even sure why this guy is interested in her. There’s all manner of bizarre relationship crap modeled in there. And just like you’d rather shack up with Daisy, most feminists would rather *be* Daisy than Peach.
It’s like sometimes some men say, but who wouldn’t want to be Peach? and the answer is, well, how many times have you been playing Mario and thought “Oooh, I wish I could be Peach?” FFS, she’s often not even a playable character. Who wants to be an unplayable character?
[cue the folks in the wings waiting to point out I’m a bad feminist, or too old, or something, but hopefully you get what I mean]
TL,DR: you’re assuming it’s good (or more fortunate, or getting off easy) to be perceived as having value simply for existing. The truth is it’s often a cage.
