chabot@amber.DEC (Lisa Chabot) (06/04/84)
The point of fish and bicycles is that fish can get along just fine without bicycles: they don't need them to get from one end of the lake to the other, they don't need them for speed, they don't need them to be just fish. But that's not to say that the lives of fish and bicycles don't intersect: here in the Hub, I've walked along the Charles River and seen more that one submerged bicycle with a school of minnows hanging around it. As with many analogies, this one falls apart if you stretch it past the point of "fish are fish with or without bicycles". For instance, here are a lot of things I wouldn't want to imply by the statement. Women are smarter than men, since fish think more than bicycles. (Or at least, fish have brains, and bikes don't.) Women reproduce by spawning, but you get men from a store. A group of women need 1 man for protection (just like the minnows hiding out in the Charles River). [Also, although there is a strong correlation between the minnows growing larger and the bicycle rusting, I doubt that much can be determined from this to predict human behavior.] Men are totally unsuitable for women, since fish can't reach the pedals of most bicycles. Women and men perform their proper functions (sin, tan, or whatever) in separate environments, since most fish can't breathe without being in water and most bicycles don't operate well unless on land. A fish isn't just half a fish if it doesn't have a bicycle, and a woman isn't less of a person because she isn't attached to a man. This silly little sentence, "A woman without a man is like a fish without a bicycle", is actually pretty uplifting to women, because it ridicules prejudices about "spinsters" and widows and divorcees. You could switch the order of "woman" and "man", and that's okay with me. It's kind of like like the phrase "Black is beautiful": it's not to imply the white isn't beautiful (or that men aren't persons without women), but it is (or was) going against the status quo that ONLY white is beautiful (or that men can be people without women, but women can't be people without men). Got any fours? Lisa Chabot UUCP: ...decwrl!dec-rhea!dec-amber!chabot ARPA: ...chabot%amber.DEC@decwrl.ARPA USFail: DEC, MR03-1/K20, 2 Iron Way, Marlborough, Marshachusetts 01752 shadow: ...decwrl!dec-rhea!dec-avalon!chabot
zben@umcp-cs.UUCP (06/06/84)
The statement "A woman without a man is like a fish without a bicycle" is probably a "good thing" when used to support the idea that women are people too, and just as subject to hubris and all the rest of it. I am disturbed by part of its underlying philosophy... I am speaking to those of roughly my generation (10/11/52 - early "boom"). You know, YUMPies (Young Upwardly-Mobile Professionals). This term quite probably applies to most of us here. We are constantly accused by the media as being the "me" generation. To the extent the statement above implies that one human being does not "need" another, it has the definite danger of being divisive. (Actually that's sort of circular, isn't it?) This *is* still spaceship Earth, and we do still need each other. Then again, if you had been kept barefoot and pregnant for >6000 years, you might want to go out and paint the town red, just once, before accepting your responsibility as a member of society. -- Ben Cranston ...seismo!umcp-cs!zben zben@umd2.ARPA
jss@brunix.UUCP (Judith Schrier) (06/15/84)
Ok, sports fans, here I am with the definitive answer again. Not so very long ago, almost anyone hearing "A woman without a man is like a fish..." would have immediately filled in the "natural" ending "...out of water." The humor of the "new" ending depends, as does most humor, on being unexpected. Once we get past expecting the "natural" ending, and being surprised, we stop being amused and begin to notice all the deep psychological problems, such as women being selfish if they don't need men (!). judith (now a mother-in-law) schrier brunix!jss