阅读教程 - 图文(8)

Topics for research and presentation

1. Traditional adult ceremony in China 2. Responsibilities of fatherhood

3. Single-parent family and its influence on the growth of children

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Unit 3

Introduction

Text A is written by Frederic Hayward, a Jewish father and Executive Director of Men‘s Rights, Inc. After analyzing the rampant male-bashing practice in American society, the writer holds that it is high time that people should curb this trend for the health of future male-female relationships. Text B is written by Judy Syfers, a strong supporter of women‘s liberation. Described as a ―classic piece of feminist humor‖, this essay talks in great detail about what many husbands see as a wife‘s role. Syfer wants to change what she believes to be unfair in the responsibilities of men and women.

Text A Male-Bashing

By far, ―male-Bashing‖ is the most popular topic in my current talk shows and interviews. Reporters and televisions crews have come to me from as far away as Denmark, Australia, and Germany to investigate this American phenomenon. What is going on? They ask. Why do women want it? Why do men allow it? The trend is particularly rampant in advertising. In a survey of 1,000 random advertisements, one hundred percent of the jerks singled out in male-female relationships were male. There were no exceptions. That is, whenever there was a husband-wife or boyfriend interaction the one who was dumped on was the male. One hundred percent of the ignorant ones were male. One hundred percent of the incompetent ones were male. One hundred percent of the ones who lost a contest were male. One hundred percent of the ones who smelled bad (mouthwash and detergent commercials) were male. One hundred percent who were put down without retribution were male.（Sometimes, the male would insult the female, but she was always sure to get him back in spades before the commercial ended.） In entertainment, the trend is similarly raging. Some television shows are little more than a bunch of anti-male jokes strung together. Deciding to count the phenomenon during one episode of ―Golden Girls‖1, I found thirty-one women‘s insults of men compared to two men‘s insults of women. Family sitcoms2 like ―The Cosby Show‖ 3or ―Family Ties‖ 4 have an unwritten rule that mothers are never to be the butt of jokes or made to look foolish. As to literature, just glance through the recent best-seller lists. There is no anti-female literature that matches the tone of Smart women, Foolish Choices, Women Who Love Too much, Men Who Can’t Love, Men Who Hate Women and the Women Who Love Them. Two authors told

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me about pressure from their editors to create anti-male titles as a way of increasing sales. The closest thing to a female flaw that one can publicly acknowledge is that women tend to ―love too much‖. Products also reflect the popularity of hating men. One owner of a greeting card store reported that male-bashing cards are her biggest-selling line. 3M5 sells a variety of Post-it notes such as, ?The more I know about men, the more I like my dog,‘ and ―There are only two things wrong with men ? everything they say and everything they do.‖ A 3M spokesperson added that they have no intention of selling similarly anti-female products. Walk through any T-shirt store and compare the number of anti-female slogans to the number of anti-male slogans. Women might take offense at sexual innuendos, but there is a qualitative difference between something that is interpreted as insulting and something that is intended to be insulting. With news coverage and school curricula fanning the flames, it is no surprise that judges and legislators also punish men. Most people seem to buy the common assumption that the man is always wrong. For example, I have had almost identical discussions with several people recently. Each person first told me that divorce laws should be harsher toward men for, they maintained, it is too easy for men to abandon their families. Statistics would imply, however, that if divorce is too easy on anyone, it is too easy on women. When I informed them that it is women who currently initiate the overwhelming majority of divorces, they revised their logic: Each one of them concluded that men are so bad that women

must leave a marriage in order to liberate themselves from these ―oppressive men.‖ In other words,

no matter who leaves whom, the conclusion will be always that the man is at fault. The result is that we encourage women not to improve themselves. So-called ―self-help‖ books simply ?help‘ women adjust to an inferior pool of men. When every problem can be blamed on male inadequacy, women lose the motivation to examine critically their own patterns of behavior. As a result, women lose out on one of the most rewarding experiences of human life: genuine self-improvement. Very few women have ever been aware of what female Chauvinism6 is, let alone made any progress toward overcoming it. Articles telling women that they are communicative, more empathetic7, more prepared to be intimate and committed, more liberated, etc., than men, combined with the still common assumption that a man is not eligible unless he is even older, wiser, taller, more successful and wealthier than a woman, have produced an aura8 of fear in woman. A spate of 9articles on a mythical ―shortage of eligible men‖ graces current literature. Unfortunately, sexism teaches us to think of men as one giant organism that has been dominant for thousands of years, and that can handle (or even deserves) a generation or two of abuse. The reality is that men have the same human insecurities as women, and the generation of abuse has already had dire10 consequences for male mental health. Boys, struggling with maturation and never knowing anything but the current age of abuse, suffer e …… 此处隐藏：7083字，全部文档内容请下载后查看。喜欢就下载吧 ……