The Importance of Pissing Contests
There are limits to gender equality.
It’s not just
a matter of education and law and business practice,
or sexual attraction and sex behavior,
or physical strength or ability,
or styles of rational thought and emotion.
The prejudices and injustices related to those aspects of life can be dealt with over time. Attitudes and habits can change.
But there is an underlying difference that is often overlooked.
Urination.
Some companies now have gender neutral rest rooms, so the rest room does not become the gathering place for men to discuss and decide important matters without involving women. But even that does not resolve the psychological divide represented by different modes of urination.
Consider the phrase “pissing contest”.
Dictionaries define it as a competition to demonstrate superiority. Literally, boys standing next to one another piss to see who can do so the highest, farthest, longest, or most accurately.
Women are so constructed that they cannot compete with men in such contests. They are excluded by definition.
Boys will always, at some point in their lives, engage in literal pissing contests. And that will metaphorically carry over to other aspects of life, marginalizing women,
- Unless the silliness of this bias is pointed out and discussed.
- Unless men are ridiculed when they metaphorically engage in pissing contests with one another, dismissing women as competitors.
