DO GUYS GET JEALOUS?

Jealousy has always been branded as a trait of the fairer sex. I mean, " girls are jealous", is a sentence that all of us must have heard at some point in our life. This is too a large extent true too. Jealousy is a trait that is quite common among girls. Not all girls are jealous though. We can put the ratio of jealous to non jealous as 60:40.

But I have no intentions of talking about girls in this article ( Why do I need to elaborate on cliched sentences?). Do men get jealous? I have grown up in a surrounding where jealousy was always seen as a non-masculine trait. Jealousy is beyond manhood I guess. Why else would I hear sentences like " We are guys, we are never jealous", " You think I am jealous! me! come on now, I am a boy!", " You girls get periods pain cause you have feelings like jealousy, We dont" ( Hello there Mr, You dont get periods pain cause you DONT have periods, or ehmmm......are you an exception? :P )

We have master pieces like Othello, which throws light on the fact that even men do get jealous. Freud speaks about Oedipus complex , which in a way implies jealousy to one's father. We can see that often in a professional environment men act more jealously than women do. Sometimes they get so jealous that, it stresses the hell out of them and often, all their hair goes grey with jealousy even when they are eighteen or nineteen. Why then do our culture have difficulty in accepting the fact that men just like women, can also posses feelings that may not be really positive?

I think this inability to accept humane flaws in a man is an aftermath of the glorification of patriarchy. There had always been an attempt to elevate the stronger sex into a cluster of super human beings. Luckily this has changed, if not fully, over a period of time. Society is opening up, and men are gradually welcoming their fairer counterpart into their arena. I must say, that at every point of my life I have been lucky to have associated with at least one man who has encouraged and supported me and urged me to achieve my potential. The problem lies in the fact that the number of such men are relatively less. May be even substantially less. Even to this day there are men who have difficulty in accepting women as their equals. They feel irritated and annoyed when a women out performs them in their field. Be it a classmate answering the teacher's question before they could, or a colleague submitting a project before they did or an opponent defeating them in an election, they just cant take it. They would rather have another man outshining them than a woman. A small defeat, or a small step ahead by a woman is taken as a ruthless stamp on their manhood. Sometimes men are more jealous of women than they are of other men. How can they forget the fact that it was from a woman's womb that they came, I wonder! I feel that such narrow minded men are an insult to the manhood of the whole universe. They insult men who are good and broad minded.

All human beings share similar emotions. Man or woman, we feel joy, sorrow, anger, regret, jealousy, lust and everything. Nothing is unique to a gender. Why do we need to distinguish certain things with a certain gender? It is human to feel angry or jealous. It is alright. Their is nothing wrong in it as long as you don't act on your instinct as far as negative feelings are concerned. Some women are jealous, some are not. Some men are jealous, some are not. In short some human beings are jealous, where as others are not. The green eyed monster hides in each one of us. The important thing is, to understand and accept its presence yet not be its slave.

So next time you hear a boy saying , " Hey I am not jealous cause I am a boy", or a girl saying " I am jealous, so what? After all I am girl" I request you to rectify them immediately and ask them to say " Hey I am (not) jealous 'cause I am a human being." After all, all of us are human beings. :)