The Necessity of the Opposite Sex

In Virginia Woolf's essay, "A Room of One's Own," she describes her thought process on the position of women in society.  For me, one of her ponderings really caught my attention.  It is number 2 in the journaling questions which asks us to discuss the fact that many books are written by men about women, but there are much fewer books written by women about men.  Woolf takes this to mean that women are much more important to men than men are to women.  This got me to thinking, and after a few minutes I realized that Woolf is right.  That there really are many books written by men about women, and I could not even think of one written by a woman about a man.  Which also lead me to think about examples of why this would happen in the real world.  What i came up with is this: men and women define success very differently.  Most men define success as having a stable, well-paying job so that they can not only support themselves, but their families as well.  Women define success purely by the amount of happiness that they have.  They are much more likely to take a job just by the happiness that it brings them, unlike men who mostly base their decisions on the amount of money they will earn.  This is also the same for families.  If a woman does not think that having a family will make her happy, then she is very likely to not have one.  Men on the other hand place a lot of importance on having, and supporting their family, which in turn causes them to place a lot of importance on finding a woman in order to begin that family.  Therefore, I agree with Virginia Woolf in that men place much more importance on women that women do on men.  Even at the high school level, where kids are not really concerned with marriage just yet, I see that guys always want a girlfriend at all times because they get complimented by their friends on how many girls they can get.  With girls, having too many guys will result in them being labeled as sluts, and whores, and it is looked at as negative by their friends, so they tend to be a little more cautious about getting into relationships.  "A Room of One's Own" contains many valid points about women and men, like this one, even though it can be very hard to follow Woolf's train of thought at some points.