Working from home today, I found myself listening to a dizzying variety of music – new rock, old rock, Rocky Horror Picture show tunes, dance, electronic, just about everything under the sun. I like a good mix while I’m slaving away at the keyboard.
Halfway through the “set”, Amanda Marshall’s wonderfully smoky voice came on, singing about love. A snippet from one of her songs caught my fancy as I inserted SSIs and declared style classes:
somebody told me love makes you stupid
makes you go crazy, makes you go blind
comes uninvited and leaves when it wants to
calls you at midnight and ties up your line
but it’s oh so sweet when it’s right
and you swear that you won’t but you might
gotta fumble in the dark
if you want to see the light
It got me to thinking about power, and love, and sex, and the difference between the way that men and women both view and conduct themselves in these areas. So many of these songs – and indeed, so many relationships – feature the man in power. We wait for him to call, for him to decide he likes us, for him to pursue whatever level of relationship he feels comfortable with. It’s a buyers’ market with the men doing the buying (active) and the women doing the selling (passive).
It’s really very sad, and is the main reason behind why songs like Amanda’s feature phrases like “love makes you stupid sometimes”. These words ring true to so many women. Read a great book a month or so ago by Sandra Shamas, and in it she mentions that when she falls for a guy, she hands her brain over to the nearest available person – since she obviously won’t be needing it for a while. Any women out there identify with that statement?
Over the past year, I’ve had the luck to experience the gamut of the buyers and sellers market – I’ve done my share of the passive selling, and I’ve also had opportunity to be in a buyer’s position as well. No wonder men like it so much. It’s dizzying, powerful, fearless. Guy #1 not attracted to you? That’s OK… guys number two, three and four aren’t so picky, and they’re handy as well. You just have to choose. And there can many times be just as much fun in the choosing as in the getting. More women should really experience this. And if you’re not sure how, I’ll give you a tip: get yourself into a position where the men outnumber the women. Goes a long way towards tipping the scales and turning a seller into a buyer.
No heavy conclusions to draw here, just some random thoughts during an HTML break. Back to the grind. Cheers.
