Wow, talk about different cultures. I grew up in Naval housing in San Diego, California, USA during the Vietnam war.
I was a teen ager before I ever learned about funerals that did NOT have a flag on the casket.
I did not know ANY,
ANY women who had died until I was an adult.
But during my youth, I knew hundreds of men who had died. Wayne's father, Lee's father, Walter's father, Becky's father, and on and on. As I got older it was also friend's brothers who died. The kids who as teenagers helped us in bowling and baseball, that we tried to tag around after.
These were all people I could put a face to, not people I only heard about but people I had MET, talked with, been yelled at by and all those other things that make a person
real, not mere statistics
Originally posted by TOC:
[QUOTE]to put it more bluntly: I don't want to be comforted by stories about the death of a woman. And it troubles me - yes, it does - if others are ready to be comforted by stories of the deaths of (good) women, but not by stories of the deaths of (good) men.
I don't know what you read besides Lois & Clark but I think perhaps the selection is skewed in some way. I never saw "Love Story" and was not fond of the book or it's sequel (required reading for a class in my youth).
I also managed to give Titanic a pass, being married for decades does get you out of some movies, there in the guy dies. But he dies in the approved manner, dying to save others.
Perhaps the problem is you read books aimed at women. Women who often times in our culture are made to feel like interchangeable parts.
We live in a culture where men get bored with old wife and trade her in for new wife because new wife is younger, sexier and much more eager to please the man.
It has been so since bible times;
Malachi 2:14) “. . .On this account, that Jehovah himself has borne witness between you and the wife of your youth, with whom you yourself have dealt treacherously. . .”
Proverbs 5:18) “. . .rejoice with the wife of your youth,”
Many of these stories are likely an attempt to explore just how important the wife is to the husband. To prove to their, largely female, readers that she wasn't some replaceable part off an assembly line.
There are entire genre where the men die "good deaths' and the women only die if the man screws up.
