Hunting with Men

Ladies, you know you’ve been there.
You’ve got the gals all set up for a weekend of hunting.  No kids, no dishes, no laundry, just hiking and guns and bawdy humor with your favorite women.  Then, who wants to tag along? Someone’s boyfriend/husband.  Oh sure, he says he can hunt, but what if he doesn’t care for our schedule?  We’re all used to running on 3 hours of sleep, what if he gets cranky when we don’t turn out the lights 8 hours before our dawn roll out?  What if he expects us to cook for him or do his dishes?  What are we going to wear to sleep in? It’s a small cabin, he might be uncomfortable.  Heaven forbid someone be on the rag or lactating, men get pretty uncomfortable around liquid expulsions.

Seriously?
Ok, yes, I’m being facetious here. But, only a little.  A recent set of posts by a SHTF reader, really got me thinking about the co-ed hunting friction.  Hopefully he’s cool with a shout out, I’m talking about the set of posts by The Maine Outdoorsman – Girls at Deer Camp.  Now, setting aside his use of  the pejorative term “girls” when referring to grown women, 😀 I have to give him props, because the women in question had a great time, no men were harmed, (no deer either it sounded like) and everyone enjoyed the co-ed hunting experience.   Why does co-ed hunting get people’s dander up?  Women have been hunting since humans lived in caves. American women have been hunting since before there was a USA.  But, ask a man to take a woman hunting, and it’s like asking him to shift the magnetic poles. I’ve heard all the excuses. But what’s the real reason it’s so problematic?
Is it because women of my grandmother’s generation stopped hunting? I don’t have any facts or figures to back that up, but maybe they were too busy being the greatest generation, and they got caught up in the fancy home appliances and their growing wealth, and forgot to go out and shoot anything. Thus leading to a group of (mostly older) men who are unused to seeing females with guns? Perhaps even leading to another generation of women who never got exposed to hunting, I know my mother and her sisters never hunted, but again, I have little in the way of facts and figures to back that up.  I do know that my generation hunts. Granted, the numbers show us at a 1-10 minority, there’s at least enough of us to count. 😀 I’ve seen recent numbers that seem to indicate women hunters are growing in numbers while the ranks of men hunters dwindle or remain stagnant.
Is it the sit/stand issue?  I know the realities of blind hunting, and the convenient bottles of liquid that men fill to avoid leaving the blind or leaving scent.   Here’s a news flash.  We’ve got that one solved.  GoGirls and other Female Urination Devices enable us to just as discreetly use our own little bottles.
The blood thing?  This one is 2 sided, on the one side, I do know women that don’t dress their own kills.  They might for birds and such, but after bagging their deer for the season, they quite happily call up hubby and he comes and dresses said deer for them.  I’ve not yet shot a deer, nor dressed one, but I really think I could dress it without qualms, as long as it was small enough I could physically handle the weight.  I’ve cleaned a lot of birds, and I’m pretty comfortable with raw meat and dead animals.  The other side of this coin seems to be men’s fear of women’s blood.  Are they afraid we’ll attract bears? Be too smelly? Leave gross stuff laying about a small hunting cabin?  Again, I’d say we have that one covered.  Diva cups allow us to go all day, with no smell, no pads, needing nothing more than water to deal with the monthly visitor.
Don’t even try to bring up close quarters, humans have lived in much closer quarters for much longer periods of time, I have little patience for the particular brand of puritan modesty that so infests America. I scratch my ass when it itches, just like everyone else.
What is it? Guys? Speak up if you have some insight here.  Women, you too, what makes you pause before going on a co-ed hunting trip?  I’ve successfully done it a number of times, and everyone had a blast. It does feel like an uphill battle though, every time.
– Calamity Jane