How we view the other.

So lately I have become obsessed with Thought Catalog and have been reading old postings when I'm really bored. During one of those nights I came across these two gems; both written by the opposite cisgender and both only explore what it means to be male and act masculine and be female and act feminine but regardless of the hetero filled stereotype it is till interesting and deserves to be dissected.

"If I were a Boy" written by Kat George, starts out with the mockery of modern day masculinity. The double standards of fucking everything and anything, of being allowed to think with a "dick" and looking "good" without really trying too. But then we get to the end of her rant and we plunge deeper into modern day masculinity. 

If I were a boy I’d have trouble dealing with my emotions. Not because I didn’t have them, but because they felt awkward to me. Because people will have always told me to ‘be a man.’ I’d get confused when I wanted to cry and maybe I’d punch the wall instead.

Here masculinity is stripped down to its core problem. Emotions. Not just emotions but the controlling, identifying and dialogue around those emotions. It is wonderful that she pointed out the false hood of "be a man" how can that make any sense. It is insane to think that someone can go through life without acknoldegeing their emotions and learning to control them. Therefore she concludes her post by saying 

I would shoulder the burden of the mistakes of the men before me, and persist in my relationships even though everyone expected me to hurt them. I’d be tarred with the same dirty brush of those that came before me even though I wouldn’t deserve to be. I’d hope that if one day I had a son, he’d be a better man than me.

Then we see the same trope when we read "If I were a Girl". The beginning is filled with awful stereotypes but then we dive into the deeper meaning of  these sometimes true events. 

As a woman, I would just be so conditioned to feel bad about myself. Magazines would put me down, TV shows would sling insults at me, and my boss would pay me less money to do the same job as a man. 

And here the sad part might be that Ryan O'Connell uses this to describe why women stay in verbally abusive relationships. With the mindset that, "What’s the harm in another person putting me down? At least this one would kiss me hard on the mouth after he insulted me. I like to kiss." While I might not agree entirely with Ryan I do look at this as an interesting argument. And honestly that wasn't the point of me beginning this post so lets not dive into Ryan's argument but instead realize that both of these posts have one thing in common. They honestly critique society for harming the other gender. While most of my friends can say "duh", it is so critical that this type of honesty happened on Thought Catalog the blog for 20-30's hipster and young professionals. 

This type of dialog needs to occur in the hip blog community because sadly that is what my generation is reading. We are no longer reading scholarly journals or newspaper articles instead we are giving more credence towards individuals with witty writing.