Manly?

A hot topic of recent conversation is the (not surprising) announcement of Hillary Clinton's 2016 Presidential Campaign. Not only does this mean that I will be registering to vote very soon, but also that if she wins, she will be the first female president in the history of the United States. Obnoxious, sexist things have been said about the possibility of a woman being president- from wondering how she'll manage being a grandma and being president to periods impairing a female president's judgement once every month. Not only is this nowhere even close to reasonable- periods do not impair judgement- and even if they did, Hillary Clinton is in her sixties- she hasn't had a period in about ten years.

I'm talking about this because like the Oval Office, for some reason the woods is seen as a place for men. A "real man" knows how to hunt, catch, skin and gut his own food, and should know how to survive so he can "save the day". Now this is a load of bull and in no way reflects my own opinion, but this is what's enforced when we find survival information on sites with titles that have the word "man" or "manly" somewhere in them. This idea is demonstrated in survival shows on television- almost all of them are exclusively male, except for one in which the participants are naked (Naked and Afraid), and another which features a married couple (Man, Woman, Wild). There are no large survival shows that solely feature female survivalists. According to television, a woman in the wild is accompanied by a man- always.

Let's talk about Naked and Afraid for a second though because the way gender dynamics play out in that show is interesting, and changes episode to episode. Naked and Afraid is a show in which two survivalists, one man and one woman, must survive for 21 days without even the clothes on their backs. The nudity serves another challenge to the survivalists to make them both more vulnerable and is in no way intended to be sexy for the viewers. However I do remember one time when the male contestant, a devout Mormon, was uncomfortable with the idea of sleeping in a smallish cave with a naked woman- even though he had signed up to do the show- because he had a wife, and thereafter was just ungodly rude to his co-contestant.  Throughout the show he would interrupt her, insist that his opinions on what to do were right, even though he was wrong and it cost them two perfectly good meals of snake. Some pairs work better than others, however, and the way their friendship blossoms over the course of those twenty-one days is quite amazing to watch.

Sometimes, too, the men will get sick and the women end up doing all the work for the entire three weeks. One episode the two contestants were on a large island, and the man drank some nasty water, even though the woman told him it probably wasn't worth the risk. He spent the rest of the stay lying in the shelter in agony, red as a lobster from the sun and having to pass diarrhea on the regular. Not only did that woman take care of herself- she took care of that poor, smelly man. I'm by no means saying that women are better survivalists than men, but there are some excellent, highly skilled female survivalists, and they deserve their own shows as well.