What I've Learned from Men

Have you as a woman ever noticed that it is almost realistically impossible for us to get along with men? It seems like no matter how hard we try or how hard we try to pretend we understand them, we always seem to come off as stupid and sometimes crazy to them. I believe most women view some men as unclassy, selfish human beings who lack the ability to give respect or acknowledge the fact that women are not there to take care of them. In some ways, men are sometimes seen as the term that women use often: animals. However, that would be an immoral judgment. In Barbara Ehrenreich’s short essay, “What I’ve learned from Men,” she describes and bases her essay on things women can learn from men. In this essay, she proves that men influence women to become tough because of all the battles and arguments between the genders which make women realize they are too ladylike to “put out” in front of men simply because they are not mentally strong enough.

I believe the author is trying to get her point out to all women and tell them to stand up for themselves in front of men and that we should stop doing all the work. “In conversations with men, we do almost all the work: sociologists have observed that in male-female social interactions it’s the woman who throws out leading questions and verbal encouragements (“So how did you feel about that?” and so on) while the man, typically, says “Hmmmm.”” (Ehrenreich 196). This quote shows how women obviously have enough intelligence to actually carry on a conversation. Ehrenreich responds to this with advice and suggests that we should withhold any unnecessary information in conversations to prevent the vague responses from the male gender.

In the beginning of this essay, the author starts with the fact that most women are raised to be ladylike but in her view, ladylike is simply another word for nice. “The essence of ladylikeness is a persistent servility masked as “niceness.” For example, we (women) tend to assume that it is our responsibility to keep everything “nice” even when the person we are with is rude, aggressive, or emotionally AWOL. (In the above example, I was so busy taking responsibility for preserving the veneer of “niceness” that I almost forgot to take responsibility for myself)” (Ehrenreich 196). In this quote, it proves that no matter how bad a person’s attitude or manners are, women still treat them with respect. This is one thing a woman might argue about with a man: getting the respect back. From personal experiences, my x-step-dad was very much like this at times when he and my mother would argue. He was a selfish pig who thought he did everything