God Jeremy Kyle, Jerry Springer - got a lot to answer for. They are just the patriarchy's latest weapon to make us all hate each other.
I was thinking this earier on. The history of the patriarchy has in a sense been a history of the denial of love between the two halves of humanity - the business of humanity they said, is commerce, war, and controlling as many other people as possible; romantic love was an unimportant diversion. And yet with the exception of a few great war epics like the Iliad, the great literature of most human societies, has dealt with heterosexual romantic love between men and women, the impossibility of their love within whichever rigid patriarchal society they were in, adn their desperate determination to risk total destruction in their defiance to pursue that love against the rules of their society.
It's a really interesting psychological phenomenon that. Why weren't the great dramas about commerce, setting up empires, the "important" stuff? It's like people recognised the lack of balance in society and tried to express it somehow in their literature. Women were effectively wiped out of public life, but the need for them to be there in art and literature, re-asserted itself again and again and the greatest expressions of human culture, haven't been teh story of how a new adminstration for administering taxes was set up by a conquerig army, it's been the story of how couples defied the gods, their families, their destinies, for love. Patriarchy just can't seem to stamp it out.