In a post a while back, I wrote about Norah Vincent's book Self-Made Man. One of the conclusions the author came to in her book was that "the patriarchy" is a rather nebulous concept, and certainly not the omnipotent monolith it's often thought of as. One example of the daily helplessness of males is the fact that they are almost to a man at the mercy of women's sexual and social attention. Men do the propositioning, and women do the picking and choosing that makes or breaks a man's spirit.
Today at The Job, I played some of my kid-friendly rock CD mixes and the children (aged three to five) spontaneously started dancing in pairs.
And damned if the girls weren't completely in charge of who was dancing with whom.
The girls bartered their partners with each other ("I'll dance with him and you dance with him") without the briefest attempt at asking the boys what they thought or wanted. The girls refused offers of dances from the boys, and even told one boy that he couldn't dance with someone (and the pair obeyed). The boys accepted all this with perfect equanimity, as if it were totally natural that the girls should utterly control this realm.
And maybe it is natural.
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