Gender Inequality

I can’t tell you how many single girls my age have talked to me in the last month about their deep and urgent fears of ending up alone for the rest of their lives. There have been a lot of them.

It’s very difficult when everyone around you is voicing those fears, to not embody those fears yourself. And then you feel like you’re walking around checking every single man’s hand for a ring and wondering desperately what’s wrong with all of you.

Interestingly (I mean, it’s really not that interesting, but sure, that seems like I nice segue), dudes don’t seem to feel the same way. They seem not to have a care in the world about finding their match and settling down. They don’t notice the tick-tick-tick of the clocks that seem to be piling up in the heads of women all around them. Unfortunately, this creates this really awkward inequality between the sexes – with men casually looking around for whatever they can get, and women desperately wanting to snag a man by whatever means possible.

Is it biological? Are we so programmed by nature to make babies that we can’t resist this crazed desire to find a partner and get to work? Is it societal? Has everyone been sending us secret messages over the years telling us that by age 30 we’d better have caught our man and started our families or else something is terribly wrong with us? I’m not sure. Probably both. And throw some other factors in there too, I’m sure. Culture, history, peer pressure, etc.

Or do women just have a stronger desire to pair off and find stability than men?

I think of the single men I know, and I can’t help but notice that they all seem much more keen on playing the field than anything else. I recently had a guy flat out ask me if we’d ever sleep together (come to think of it, there have been two that have asked me that just in the last month), even though everyone knows this guy has been flirting with one of my good friends for months. WTF?! What is wrong with you men? What gives you the audacity and the nerve to think that you can just run around flirting with girls and trying to randomly sleep with us?

More importantly, why on earth do dudes WANT to live that way? Don’t you want to find a partner to go through life with? Someone you can lean on and count on, someone who can help you through the hard times and help you make tough decisions, someone who will raptly listen to you talk about the most mundane and ordinary things in your life... Why don’t men  want that? What is wrong with dudes these days??? 

The Trouble with Lawyers

Lawyers are often super inefficient, because they chose to do a lot of research and muddle around trying to figure things out for themselves instead of simply asking someone who already knows the answer. Why do they engage in this labor intensive, stress-inducing, clusterfuck of a work methodology to find the answer themselves? Well, I'm glad you asked. I don't believe this comes from an innate desire in all lawyers to learn things on their own and do it the hard way, or any such nonsense. And just to clarify, I'm also not talking about attorney work product that can't just be taken from someone else. No, I have a fun little psychological theory on this idiocy we engage in. 

Fear. The reason we don't ask for help is because we fear asking for help, partly because it means admitting our own inadequacies (is it really an inadequacy to not have the fire code memorized?), but mostly because of our past experiences with asking for help. Maybe this is unique to lawyers, but this is where my experience is generally limited, so this is what I'm addressing. (Although, I did work for two years in a college admissions office, and I feel I can honestly say that when I asked for help or answers or information in that job, I cannot remember once ever feeling dismissed or belittled in my colleague's response.) Too many times, when a lawyer or law student asks a "superior" for help or information, they are readily dismissed. It's as though your supervising attorney, your professor, or that 3L you sort of know is saying, "It's like THIS. How do you not know that? Everyone knows that? What a dumb question. You're wasting my time." 

As I write this, I am remembering moments in class where professors have dismissed a gunner's attempted arguments in an oh-so-hasty fashion, and while we generally tend to revel in those moments (ugh, gunners, be quiet!), perhaps that's not always the best method. I find myself wondering, as a rising 3L, if I treated my classmates this way over the past year. Did I? I'm not sure. All I know for sure is this: I went to an attorney a few days back, to ask a question and get some clarity on a factual situation for a project I was working on, and he replied in such a terse and dismissive manner that I really never want to ask him another question ever again. This isn't this first time this has happened. Not with this particular attorney, nor with any number of other attorneys and law professors I've encountered. And certainly, it will not be the last. 

Perhaps some of you will think I am just being too sensitive, and that quickly getting past false assumptions or incorrect conclusions is merely a fact of business which helps us move along at a more efficient pace. Perhaps you're right. But I for one am rather disappointed. I had hoped to gain more from my law school experiences than a deeper fear of asking questions and being made to feel a fool, but so far.... no such luck. 

It's not you, it's Nebraska.

This was always meant to be a blog where I updated people on my life, but, in reality, it’s more like the blog where I go to vent, or to tell you about something really great that happened to me. Let me try my best to honor the original intention, if only for a few lines. 


UPDATE: It’s summer. I’ve finished my second year of law school. I’ve passed all my classes thus far (woo hoo!). I’m clerking (interning) at a law firm in downtown Lincoln for the summer (yay for jobs!). I’m house sitting for my professor and her hubby while they are out of town this summer (hot tub, baby!). I’m moving back in with my parents in the fall to save money (boo loans).


 I’m enjoying my job for the most part. There’s lots of research and I wish I was getting some experience doing other things, but I just got word yesterday that I might get to (have to?) argue a motion to dismiss, so that’s not too shabby, eh? I’m enjoying the summer for the most part, too. I’m having a ton of fun house sitting for my professor, although the dry weather is making all the plants very wilty.


I’m pretty excited for my third year of law school to start, although I’m really crazy nervous for it too. There are a lot of things I need to get done in the coming year (apply for jobs, study for and take the MPRE, apply for jobs, survive my fall classes, apply for jobs, register for a bar review course, figure out spring classes, apply for jobs, survive spring classes, graduate, apply for jobs, take the bar review course, apply for jobs, take the bar, apply for jobs, pass the bar, apply for jobs). But there are lots of things to look forward to as well (the back to school party, Husker football, tailgating, law prom, the end of semester party, one last long Christmas break, the spring back to school party, being done with school, the end of year party, graduation parties, the post-bar exam party). Basically my life over the next year will consist of the job application process combined with regularly scheduled parties, and occasional other activities that will barely be mentioned. Awesome. (If you can't tell if that is a genuine awesome or a sarcastic awesome, don't feel bad. I'm not entirely sure myself.)


And in other news…


I was recently told that I’ll never find a dude in Lincoln.


I’m sure you’re reading that, wondering – what insensitive creep told you that?


 Well, I hope that’s what you’re thinking anyway, because that’s what I think when I write it down.


But it really doesn’t matter who said it. The person who said it was actually trying to be reassuring. I hear this sentiment repeated pretty frequently, mostly from people not in the state, but from Nebraskans, too. It’s like they’re trying to say, “you haven’t found anyone yet because you’re living in effing Lincoln, Nebraska, yo!” Which, I suppose is nice. I’m sure it's supposed to mean something about dudes in Lincoln being lame bros or douchey losers or just generally being not good enough (or it’s a testament to how freakishly awesome I am), but here’s what I take away from the statement:


1. You need to leave.
Okay, maybe not right this second or anything, but you’re never going to get what you want here, so you better peace out, and quick. That’s awesome! The only way I can find a suitable partner is if I leave all of my friends and family? Good to know. I’m really looking forward to making that decision soon! Hurrah!


2. Something is wrong with you that you can’t tie a dude down here.
I hate when people say that someone isn’t good enough for you and that’s why you’re not with them. Or maybe they mean that’s why it’s good that you’re not with them, but what you hear is the first sentence I wrote. By the principles of the distributive property (see this for an explanation) ), this feels like a blanket assertion that covers me in relation to all men. Not just, “he’s not good enough for you,” but rather, “none of them are good enough for you, so don’t worry about it, boo.” Yeah, yeah, yeah. But, as we all know, deep in our heart of hearts, if we really were too good for the dude, we’d be with the dude (remember Clueless?). That’s how it works. If someone is genuinely not good enough for you, but nothing else is wrong, you’d be able to score them (check out my list of priors for reference – BURN!). The real issue here is that there is something wrong with you that people don’t like. I suppose it could be regional, but I highly doubt it.


And that’s just my two cents on someone else’s two cents that, you know, I wouldn’t have broken the bank to go without.