At present, there are two works in the public eye that deal with gender roles, the first and most prominent being Brokeback Mountain.

Brokeback mountain is a film I will not see. It may be good, it may be great, but I’m just not interested, because it is taken from a short story (I believe) from Annie Prolx’s collection of shorts, “Wyoming stories”.

Annie P. is a great writer, from a technical standpoint, and her other major work, “Shipping News” is a great read. I have enjoyed reading it and re-reading it. There is a problem at it’s core, though, and that is that the narrative is basically the internal dialog of a man, and such a man has never walked the planet. Annie basically wrote about a man who at heart is a woman, because she only has that viewpoint. To write about two ranchhands, she’s going to be stretching, and stretching badly. There’s no doubt that she can write well, but she will never be the man she seems desperate to be.

On the other hand, Norah Vincent did get to be a man, and seems to have learned something, which you can tell by reading excerpts from her book “Self Made Man” in which she masquerades as a man for a year and a half,and reports back on her findings. In various interviews about the books she says things like “I went into this expecting to find that men are needy and less evolved, and that turned out not to be so”. Well, duh. There has always seemed to be a certain faction of the lesbian community hell-bent on declaring men useless and obsolete, it’s interesting to see one of that kind see men in a different light. In an interview for the Sun TImes she states
“Dating women as a man was a lesson in female power, and it made me, of all things, into a momentary misogynist, which, I suppose was the best indicator that my experiment had worked…. I saw my own sex from the other side, and I disliked women irrationally for a while because of it. …”

Another “duh” moment. Look, ladies: We try to grok you, but we don’t. You try to grok us, but you don’t. We are all different, not only as sexes but as individuals. Even identical twins cannot truly know what the other feels. How about we deal with one another as individuals? And for the militant homosexuals trying to remake the world in their image, we don’t really care what you want, as long as you don’t jam it down our throats (sic).

Me, I’m gonna go watch some old John Wayne movies.