The State of Malcontent IV

Today I'd like to discuss the present situation of post-women's lib females (third wave) as they have specifically tough lives, having to absorb a career, negotiations with their common-law hyper-active brats, a mortgage, two holidays a year, living-in boy friends who despite their reprogramming are still very resistant to the call to chores, "fitness" club or other figure-preserving classes, social obligations, dinner parties, beauty parlor and hairdresser sessions, the care of elderly parents (if impossible to off-load on other sibling), etc. etc.

This kind of speed and pressure can only be endured with the aide of mood-enhancers or humor levellers. This turns them into zombies. As they have no moods left to speak of, it has become virtually impossible for them to empathize with others. They're either hard-nosed Hannahs, or so sensitive they get the howls at first provocation that "you have ruined their day" (some boys are also prone to this kind of behaviour).

These women typically inhabit public institutions like doctor's and dentist's practices, apothecaries, banks, post-offices, homes for the elderly, hospitals, day-care centres, kindergartens, schools and the like, where they wield their extraordinary positions of raw power, quite unchecked (see previous instalment on employees). This in turn makes the lives of virtually everybody else rather miserable.

Another curious phenomenon is the younger generations' age in relation to their level of maturity. My own generation at sixteen was ready to marry and leave home. This was of course not encouraged, as much too young. Nowadays it's the other way about. Kids at thirty years of age have to be kicked out by their parents, otherwise they'd still be about by the time they get really middle-aged.
They get sexually active at the age of eight, have done their first binge-drink related violent robbery at nine and at ten are hooked on cannabis. But in the meantime they stay at home with mom and dad, only to get kicked out when mom and dad are moving to a pensioners colony on a tropical island in the other pearl in the crown of narco-economics, the Netherlands Antilles.
I've heard parents refer to their "adolescent" son of twenty-one (honest...) and girls of thirty-five being "just out of their onesies"!
Other curious consequences of the age versus maturity issue is the elevation of former children's fetes to national holidays for all ages (like Saint Nic) and in places where reasonably grown-up people can be expected, you run into a bunch of unhinged adolescents with grey beards and torn jeanswear.

What also surprises me (to use an inappropriate word) is the shifting attitude with regard to crime. Take rape: in my time this was not talked about, and having been raped was seen as almost a fate worse than death; nowadays the reaction surrounding the umpteenth gang-rape is almost one of "ah, boys will be boys"! Even the criminal justice system seems to agree with that attitude (but that's another story altogether!).
Then there is how some flicks not even that old, are at an accelerated pace seen as outdated and "too soft". And that doesn't tell anyone anything?! Sometimes I despair.
To be continued.