Women in the world of men

Women are often expected to be ranked lower in the social hierarchy of sexes in the world, often we see women as a house keeper, a material to play tons of roles like mother, sister, daughter, a friend, and every other role that is necessary in the world but not ready to be filled by men. But does this mean that a man and women cannot understand one another’s social and personal role in the society and in their lives?

For our Anthropology class we read a book for our course named Nisa which was written by Marjorie Shostak. She being a woman herself looks at and studied the lives of women in the !Kung society. Looking at what and how the roles of the sexes were divided between societies and how the women were treated in the society. She did this as the movement for women had started in her own society and the hype of equality between women and men was one of the important topics.

 Shostak being a women wrote about female lives in the !Kung society. It may have been much easier for her to write about women being a woman herself. Even though she studied a society much more different than her own she must have been able to relate to things with women. Even with the vast differences Shostak has been able to see the major differences between the women of the two societies and also how they were treated within the society itself.

 However, studying men may be a challenge according to me. It is not the difference in the way the two genders think and work, it the basic fact that one gender cannot truly imagine and feel the way the other gender works. Our concepts may be different, our basic idea of living is different. A women writing about a man and how they think or how they function is truly going to be much more different than what a man will have to say and what a man will write. The feelings and the understanding level may not be the same. Instead of getting answers for our core questions, we may just build up our curiosity. Of course this is supposedly positive, being inquisitive is a good sign however how long is it going take before we are filled with questions and not enough answer. It is simply how we are, we may not be able to truly understand what something means. The priorities may be different between the two sexes, the conception and the perception may be varied therefore this may be a harder task as we may not be able to understand what the other gender says as we don’t feel the same way about the issue, we may simply not be able to grasp the concept that they have put forward or even simply because we don’t see things the same way.

It may not be all true but this is what I feel about the idea of studying about male and masculinity. However, there are pros to this as well, the first one being, if a woman studies about men we may be able to see things differently, reading about en and masculinity through the eyes of a woman may be completely new and may open up a window for more ideas, we may also be able to see things as how a woman feels to what a man says.

 There are many possibilities to this subject and as the world believes we may never be able to truly comprehend what the other sex is trying to make us understand but this shouldn’t fail us from trying to understand.