Nothing like Father’s Day to show how truly inconsequential men are in this society. We’re little more than props, put there to advance the sale of barbecues, power tools, sporting goods, and neckties. Show Dad you love him. Buy him more power tools to stuff into his already overcrowded workshop. If we were honest with ourselves, we would call the third Sunday in June Canadian Tire Day. Mother’s Day is sentimental to the point of outright mawkishness, but at least there’s a bit of genuine affection there. As for us, we are nothing more than brute factors of economic production, and the sooner we learn that, the better. Once there’s a reliable and relatively inexpensive way to breed without us–and I don’t think that time is far off at all–our days will be numbered.
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Jon Peirce Editorial Services 
2 replies on “Occasional Observation #65”
Wow, so cynical. You are whoever you are. As a man you get a choice to be who you want, a luxury denied to most women. You have chosen not to be defined at all by your kids, society judges me by how my kids cope. And you complain????
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Not really a competition, my friend. The societies where one gender is stereotyped almost invariably stereotype the other, albeit in different ways. The issue of being defined by one’s kids is really a red herring here, though as a matter of fact I was defined, or at least judged harshly, by many for how my kids were coping (or not coping) when they were minors. My partners participated in the defining and judging. But the point of my post is the stereotyping engaged in in those ads, especially the Canadian Tire ones, in which men are portrayed as little more than department store mannequins with wallets and operational credit cards. Gender issues are not in any way a zero-sum game.
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