A Detente of Separation

     Remembering a night in Edmonton, back in Canada, the guys I’ve known for years are wrestling each other on the floor. Who can dominate the other ones with cut downs and sheer physical strength - important things for guys in Edmonton. A few of us are together, this is rare, my friends wives allow them occasionally to watch sporting events with their old friends – tonight’s is UFC.  I don’t even like UFC, but I have to grab the opportunity to see my old friends. The setting is that you have guys down stairs watching guy’s things, talking about guy’s things, doing guy’s things while the girls sit up stairs doing girl’s things, talking about girl’s things. Thirty plus years of life and this is the advancement of the gender relations – an agreed detente of separation.

     

      I remember coming back from Europe five years ago and making the comment after three months back: why aren’t there more mixed guy/girl groups in Canada? I said this because I’d been living in Amsterdam for so long to me it was just the norm. Almost never did I go out with just the guys when I was there. Always there were girls with us – our friends. I remembered it bothered me to no end. I like having female friends. I like hanging with the guys, and talking our usual shit..., but I think mixed group conversations overall are more fun. Especially with open, say anything types... there’s a little battle of the sexes, but always in jest.

   

    In Denmark, things are in line with Amsterdam. Girls are cool here, there isn’t such a separation between the genders. When the gender divide is up and running both sexes will inherently stereotype and objectify the other sex.  I figure the central difference is that in Northern Europe each gender moves closer to each other in terms of the masculine and feminine. Guys are more feminine and girls are more masculine. Without such a stark divide of socially induced difference people are allowed to be more freely themselves as opposed to acting within the walls of gender expectation. There’s no need to or reason for considering a girl or boy via the litany of smoke screens that exist otherwise. What I mean by that is the whole idea of woman as sex objects and men as status objects. Both of those points of view devalue each gender, are the engine of insecurities for both parties, and ultimately lead to shallow, inherently incorrect, points of view about the opposite gender. Time they went out with the bathwater I say...

   

      It has been nice being here in Copenhagen and having extremely attractive girls just talk to me and actually ask me questions. At the end of the day it’s conversation not a contest of worthiness of being in the same level or class to talk to someone else. Further, with openness that way so much of the seediness, conniving, and objectification that women, often correctly, place on men dissipates away. The sexual tension is reduced as the elephant in the room is talked and laughed about freely. Screw this detente of separation, I always hated it anyway, let’s just have everyone come together, get along, and show their true selves freely and with fun. I want to have girls around at other times then when I’m trying to have sex with them. I like the company, I like the difference in view and position... it’s the way it’s suppose to be.