Aquillea

Ooops- Lots of posts popped up while I was thinking. My 'nope' goes back to Wilpin's:
"I don't know if that tells you anything about what audience those posters are..."

This is the only Everwood forum I go to so I don't know the age breakdowns there.

I also wanted to add a comment about how much I loved Andy's line -roughly: "I don't think of you as a woman... and... and I don't want to." {ROTFL}

I'm a big fan of the concept that "less is more". One of my alltime favorite movie scenes is from Witness, when Harrison Ford's expression changes radically while he's on the phone. Then he proceeds to the Amish boy who is pointing at the killer's picture. Then he covers the boy's hand to hide the pointing finger. Not a word was uttered yet so much information was conveyed.

Andy did have a few words, above, but not a lot considering what I took from it. The more obvious one first - I don't want to [think of you as a woman]. Shippers had to have loved that. Why doesn't Andy want to think of Nina as a woman? I'm thinkin' - Julia. He doesn't want to 'betray' Julia and he doesn't want to ever hurt again the way he was hurt by losing Julia.

{PS- That's why I kinda like that Andy/Linda always felt a little off. I think subconsciously Andy 'knew' it too, so Linda was 'safe' (i.e. transitional/rebound woman). She was never going to be what Julia had been to him. I think Nina, however, could be.}

The first part of the quote was even more interesting to me. I've noted that Andy is a few years older than me. Importantly, I think Nina is a few years younger. In a reflex response, Andy was actually trying to say the appropriate thing. I think both the gender gap AND the generation gap got in the way. My impression is that the mainstream message of feminism has changed over the years. When society probably had its greatest influence on Andy, the message was that women were just as smart, just as ambitious, just as tough as men. The only meaningful difference is in the reproductive organs. Other than that, men and women are the same. I think that mainstream feminism today is more balanced - recognizing that men and women are the same in some ways but different in others. And those differences should not be overlooked or trivialized, they should be celebrated.

The feminism of Nina's formative youth thinks being recognized as a woman is central to being accepted for who she is. The feminism of Andy's formative youth taught him it was demeaning to think of women as, well, women. He should think of women as 'people', as 'peers', as 'colleagues', as 'neighbors', as 'friends'... etc. A proper thinking, educated, liberal man in the 70's was a gender-neutral thinking man. In telling Nina he doesn't think of her as a woman, Andy was trying to reassure her that he doesn't introduce gender-bias into how he values their interactions.

You can't teach an old dog Girl-Power {snicker}.
Aquillea