News flash! Men and women are different!
Well… anybody with any sense at all knows.
As we explain in this weeks 3BY podcast, meeting the challenges of mastering our differences is a critical part to thriving both everyday and if the SHTF.
Who knew?The general attitude of much of the prepper community can be summed up in this one picture:
The fellow in this picture is a mature male “Silverback” gorilla.
Women face some particular challenges due to prepping’s history of arising out of an especially masculine community; and men who (like us at 3BY) want Everyone to prep and thrive have their own aspect of these challenges to face. So what are these issues?
First and foremost, to be preppers, women have to deal with ‘Mansplaining’. For those who haven’t heard, when a man jumps in to provide an unneeded, unwanted, and pompous ‘explanation’ to a woman (usually because he just assumes he knows better), that’s ‘mansplaining’. When a friend of mine (who happens to be an industrial engineer) had a random guy step up and try to explain to her the proper use of a torque wrench, he was mansplaining. He lived; which is a credit to her self-restraint. Being mansplained to is maddening.
As much of prepping involves traditionally masculine domains such as self-defense, a lot of mansplaining tends to go on when a woman shows up. The challenge here is for women not to turn off and walk out, leaving the idea of prepping in their dust. The challenge for men is to, Please, Not Be That Guy.
That brings up the second challenge: Wading through the poop. There are times when someone who is annoying and condescending is just the best source for what you need to know. There are places filled with a community that isn’t woman-friendly that have great prepping resources. (I will refrain from mentioning a couple of gun shops I went to *once*. I had better options so didn’t have to go back; but I would’ve if they’d been the only good source.) Sometimes we just have to recognize it’s their problem and take care of business.
Truth is though, there are some differences on average between female and male approaches to prepping. Let’s be clear: These are just averages, and don’t predict how individual people can or should approach being prepared. I don’t want to make too much of it as it might perpetuate some really annoying and counterproductive stereotypes, but it’s also silly to pretend the differences don’t exist. So we come to the third challenge and its opportunity: Accepting different approaches.
The biggest difference I see, on average, is that men tend to focus more on protection in the overt sense: You will do no harm to my people! I will keep them safe and fed. Obviously very important things here. Women might shift the focus a bit to more caring for people’s well-being overall. Hard to argue that having your people well and happy is important, too, isn’t it? So both approaches have a lot of value … but it’s easy to think someone with a different focus ‘isn’t doing it right’ and is not spending enough attention on ‘the important stuff’. Rather than generate friction over it, perhaps we should value each aspect. That’s the opportunity.
The last challenge is the most glorious. See that silverback gorilla in the intro picture? He clearly feels the master of all he surveys. He is the strongest and most dominant gorilla in the troop. Here’s the thing, though. The females of the troop, and the other males … they’re still gorillas. They don’t have all of his strengths, but they bring a lot of their own strengths to the table and are a force to be reckoned with. We as a prepping community will do best if we can get the best out of All of our members. The podcast closes with some ideas on how to make that happen.
