Boys vs. Girls

Men from Mars, women from Venus. The battle of the sexes. Boys against girls. It’s as old as time and even at school we actually have to learn about it. Blech...

I think it started with the Greek mythology. The famous Amazon kingdom. A nation build by women, and women only! The Amazons had strict rules against men in their community. In this empire, women were the hunters, the warriors, the rulers. Men on the other hand did the housekeeping, the cleaning, the nursing and they took care of the children. If they even lived in the same society. The other story about the Amazons is that only once a year, the Amazon warriors and the men, the Gargareans, came together. When the women gave birth to the new generation, the boys were send to their fathers and the girls stayed with their mothers. The girls were raised to be amazing warriors on the island where the Amazons lived, the boys lived on the mainland, on the domain of the Gargareans, where they lived as farmers and craftsmen.
Did you knew that one of the great warriors in the Trojan War was a woman? Her name was Penthesilea and she was a daughter of the god of war, Ares. Unfortunately she was killed by Achilles. I think that when a guy says that boys are better in sports and other stuff then girls, he doesn’t know much of the Greek myths. Penthesilea killed hundreds of men and her death was one of the bigger losses towards Troy’s army. Another amazing person was Atalanta. A Greek woman who was furious that men thought they were better than her, even when she hunted way bigger animals. She decided she would marry the one men that could beat her in running. Many men thought they could outrun a girl easily, and many men died because of this.

But that isn’t what we have to learn for Anthropology. If we had to learn this, I actually would be interested. No, we have to learn how in some cultures men are superior to women, as if I didn’t knew that already. And it raised the old fashioned ‘battle of the sexes’ inside the lecture hall, since some boys couldn’t resist saying that boys are better in a lot of things then girls. I think that if one of those guys was sitting in front of me, I would have slapped him at the back of his head with a book. And if you think that is unfair, I would do it again in front of him!