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https://nypost.com/2017/03/20/why-your-schlubby-hubbys-aging-worse-than-you/
Here's a *classic* case of the sheer wrongness of "reverse sexism" in action.
Imagine that - you pressure women to obsess about their appearance for their whole lives, they end up spending 40 years researching and trying out all kinds of different things in an effort to slow the clock, but give guys a "free pass" in looks and 40 years later they have absolutely no skills in taking care of themselves.
Poor babies. All those decades of women "nagging" their husbands to eat better, to exercise, and to finally give up and attempt dieting and working out on their own since their husbands won't deign to participate in "women's stuff" somehow managed to make 2 entire generations of men "surprised" when their aging catches up with them and their wives are still working their asses off (literally in some cases) to maintain their youthful appearance so as to not lose their jobs or social capital.
When I was a kid, my mom was forever on a diet. She tried aerobics, she tried Weight Watchers, she tried just about everything. But not my dad. No, that's what "women" did. It wasn't any kind of overt, malicious sexism, just that dieting, exercising, and looking youthful was for women. Dad only put on sunscreen when mom nagged him to. Dad only ate healthy when mom cooked (they both worked full time so they shared in the cooking). And then, all that healthy cooking was negated by the GIANT bowl of ice cream every night. Dad did absolutely nothing physical other than simply moving his body to the places where the body needed to be.
Ignoring the extreme end, where men and women are both health and appearance conscious - the average, everyday sort of people still have a strong gender divide where women are expected to care about their appearance and men are not. It is considered "sexy" for a man to be "rugged" and to have a weather-worn appearance and way less of a big deal for men to have a pot belly and sagging jeans than women. But after a few decades, that rugged, weather-worn skin looks a lot different from skin that was taken care of for the same decades.
Women are expected to wake up an hour (or two or three!) earlier than men to "put on their face". Then they have to carve out time in the evening to take off that face and care for the skin underneath all that makeup. Throughout the day, they have to reapply their face, plan and create healthy meals, and exercise. Once or more a week they have to find time to do certain other rituals that might not need to happen daily, like facial scrubs, manicures, etc. From the article itself, "[she] gets massages twice a week, regularly practices yoga and undergoes microdermabrasion, vampire facials, injections, IPL therapy and other skin-care treatments".
In addition to the time investment, this all cost a shit-ton of money. I do none of these things because I just. can't. afford it. So it's really *expensive* to be a woman in this culture.
But this article is framed as though women are somehow *fortunate* to have been "taught" all this diet and exercise and skin-care shit. Like we didn't get brutally teased or bullied for not living up to the expectation, or we don't literally get less sleep to keep up appearances, or we don't spend a small fortune of our smaller paychecks to maintain an appearance that could seriously, legitimately, harm our ability to hold down a job if we didn't.
"Robert" actually thinks it's a "luxury" that women he knows don't work as much as men do and can take the time to workout every day! Yeah, because not having your own independent income is SUCH a luxury! Women who lack their own income stream are NEVER tied to their male partners' income in this way and often trapped in relationships or situations because they can't afford to leave! We're just so FORTUNATE to be dependent on people who think everything we do is silly and meaningless ... until they need that information for themselves.
Like the poor dermatology patients, nobody told them to wear sunscreen! Like, in the last 30 years when the sunscreen market exploded with a million different SPF levels and headline-making "news" reports about the damages of sun and skin cancer rates and probably his wife pestering him for a little while to wear sunscreen until he shut her down for "worrying too much" so she just gave up and only applied it to herself, nobody told them to wear sunscreen! Ever!
And not a one of them had parents who got shriveled and shrunken and leathery and who developed diabetes and arthritis and a slowing of the reflexes and mental acuity! Not one of them had a parent that they watched age to teach them that they probably should do some preemptive work on themselves!
This is not a "side benefit" to sexism - ladies, hate your culture making you feel like shit for how you look? Well, at least you will look better than your husbands when you're 60 and they're struggling to sift through all the diet pamphlets they're bringing home from the doctor! You've spent your entire LIFE reading book after website and trying fad after fad! Aren't you so lucky that you didn't have to wait until you were a senior citizen to start that?!
Guys, diet and exercise are not "women's things". They are important topics for your health. If you wait until you already look and feel like shit, it's too late and the best you can hope for is to slow your already rapid demise. But the fact that women are required by society to study and apply this shit from an early age is not an example of "women's privilege".
This is an example of the Patriarchy backfiring on itself. Women are oppressed by social beauty standards so they start much younger on learning about health and appearance. The fact that men don't figure out the importance of health and appearance until their bodies start falling apart is not a *privilege* of being a woman, it's an unintended consequence of a system that oppresses women via the appearance route while letting men off the hook for the same thing.
Stop pissing on women for the amount of time it takes them to get ready, for wearing makeup (or "too much" or the "wrong" style), for being concerned about things like sun damage, their weight, their appearance, their future. 1) Women need to not be pressured to be changing their appearance to suit someone else; 2) Men need to start caring about their own health, of which appearance is an indicator of some things.
Maybe if sunblock came in a steel container that you had to open by pounding a hole in the top with an awl and hammer, and was named something like MANLY GUN OIL BUT FOR YOUR FACE IN THE SUN, guys would wear it instead of waving it away when their wives offer it to them and then show up at the dermatologist's office 30 years later asking "why didn't anyone tell me I needed sunblock?!"
Sunblock - it's so manly and rugged, it can even withstand THE SUN!
Sunblock - it's like waxing your Camero or your Hummer with weather protectant, but instead of your MANLY CAR, it's your own skin!
Sunblock - It's fucking ARMOR, dude!
Exercise regularly and eat everything in moderation and a variety of things, mostly leafy greens. Stay out of the sun and wear sunblock when you can't. Moisturize. No wonder men have a lower lifespan than women - y'all don't take care of yourselves and then blame it on everyone else for not "telling" you about it until later, when women have been talking about health and appearance the whole time but you just didn't want to hear it because that's "women's stuff".
Boo fucking hoo.
Here's a *classic* case of the sheer wrongness of "reverse sexism" in action.
Imagine that - you pressure women to obsess about their appearance for their whole lives, they end up spending 40 years researching and trying out all kinds of different things in an effort to slow the clock, but give guys a "free pass" in looks and 40 years later they have absolutely no skills in taking care of themselves.
Poor babies. All those decades of women "nagging" their husbands to eat better, to exercise, and to finally give up and attempt dieting and working out on their own since their husbands won't deign to participate in "women's stuff" somehow managed to make 2 entire generations of men "surprised" when their aging catches up with them and their wives are still working their asses off (literally in some cases) to maintain their youthful appearance so as to not lose their jobs or social capital.
When I was a kid, my mom was forever on a diet. She tried aerobics, she tried Weight Watchers, she tried just about everything. But not my dad. No, that's what "women" did. It wasn't any kind of overt, malicious sexism, just that dieting, exercising, and looking youthful was for women. Dad only put on sunscreen when mom nagged him to. Dad only ate healthy when mom cooked (they both worked full time so they shared in the cooking). And then, all that healthy cooking was negated by the GIANT bowl of ice cream every night. Dad did absolutely nothing physical other than simply moving his body to the places where the body needed to be.
Ignoring the extreme end, where men and women are both health and appearance conscious - the average, everyday sort of people still have a strong gender divide where women are expected to care about their appearance and men are not. It is considered "sexy" for a man to be "rugged" and to have a weather-worn appearance and way less of a big deal for men to have a pot belly and sagging jeans than women. But after a few decades, that rugged, weather-worn skin looks a lot different from skin that was taken care of for the same decades.
Women are expected to wake up an hour (or two or three!) earlier than men to "put on their face". Then they have to carve out time in the evening to take off that face and care for the skin underneath all that makeup. Throughout the day, they have to reapply their face, plan and create healthy meals, and exercise. Once or more a week they have to find time to do certain other rituals that might not need to happen daily, like facial scrubs, manicures, etc. From the article itself, "[she] gets massages twice a week, regularly practices yoga and undergoes microdermabrasion, vampire facials, injections, IPL therapy and other skin-care treatments".
In addition to the time investment, this all cost a shit-ton of money. I do none of these things because I just. can't. afford it. So it's really *expensive* to be a woman in this culture.
But this article is framed as though women are somehow *fortunate* to have been "taught" all this diet and exercise and skin-care shit. Like we didn't get brutally teased or bullied for not living up to the expectation, or we don't literally get less sleep to keep up appearances, or we don't spend a small fortune of our smaller paychecks to maintain an appearance that could seriously, legitimately, harm our ability to hold down a job if we didn't.
"Robert" actually thinks it's a "luxury" that women he knows don't work as much as men do and can take the time to workout every day! Yeah, because not having your own independent income is SUCH a luxury! Women who lack their own income stream are NEVER tied to their male partners' income in this way and often trapped in relationships or situations because they can't afford to leave! We're just so FORTUNATE to be dependent on people who think everything we do is silly and meaningless ... until they need that information for themselves.
Like the poor dermatology patients, nobody told them to wear sunscreen! Like, in the last 30 years when the sunscreen market exploded with a million different SPF levels and headline-making "news" reports about the damages of sun and skin cancer rates and probably his wife pestering him for a little while to wear sunscreen until he shut her down for "worrying too much" so she just gave up and only applied it to herself, nobody told them to wear sunscreen! Ever!
And not a one of them had parents who got shriveled and shrunken and leathery and who developed diabetes and arthritis and a slowing of the reflexes and mental acuity! Not one of them had a parent that they watched age to teach them that they probably should do some preemptive work on themselves!
This is not a "side benefit" to sexism - ladies, hate your culture making you feel like shit for how you look? Well, at least you will look better than your husbands when you're 60 and they're struggling to sift through all the diet pamphlets they're bringing home from the doctor! You've spent your entire LIFE reading book after website and trying fad after fad! Aren't you so lucky that you didn't have to wait until you were a senior citizen to start that?!
Guys, diet and exercise are not "women's things". They are important topics for your health. If you wait until you already look and feel like shit, it's too late and the best you can hope for is to slow your already rapid demise. But the fact that women are required by society to study and apply this shit from an early age is not an example of "women's privilege".
This is an example of the Patriarchy backfiring on itself. Women are oppressed by social beauty standards so they start much younger on learning about health and appearance. The fact that men don't figure out the importance of health and appearance until their bodies start falling apart is not a *privilege* of being a woman, it's an unintended consequence of a system that oppresses women via the appearance route while letting men off the hook for the same thing.
Stop pissing on women for the amount of time it takes them to get ready, for wearing makeup (or "too much" or the "wrong" style), for being concerned about things like sun damage, their weight, their appearance, their future. 1) Women need to not be pressured to be changing their appearance to suit someone else; 2) Men need to start caring about their own health, of which appearance is an indicator of some things.
Maybe if sunblock came in a steel container that you had to open by pounding a hole in the top with an awl and hammer, and was named something like MANLY GUN OIL BUT FOR YOUR FACE IN THE SUN, guys would wear it instead of waving it away when their wives offer it to them and then show up at the dermatologist's office 30 years later asking "why didn't anyone tell me I needed sunblock?!"
Sunblock - it's so manly and rugged, it can even withstand THE SUN!
Sunblock - it's like waxing your Camero or your Hummer with weather protectant, but instead of your MANLY CAR, it's your own skin!
Sunblock - It's fucking ARMOR, dude!
Exercise regularly and eat everything in moderation and a variety of things, mostly leafy greens. Stay out of the sun and wear sunblock when you can't. Moisturize. No wonder men have a lower lifespan than women - y'all don't take care of yourselves and then blame it on everyone else for not "telling" you about it until later, when women have been talking about health and appearance the whole time but you just didn't want to hear it because that's "women's stuff".
Boo fucking hoo.
