In my experience, it is really difficult to find female divers who are independent. The husband or boyfriend brings her into the shop, saying he wants her to learn to dive. The man picks out the gear. The man assembles the gear. The man carries the gear. I seen many women who have no idea how to put a reg on their tank. My husband has even had a male customer who is using his hoseless AI computer to moniter his wife's air while her computer was hooked on her ankle! :11:
How and why does this happen? Here are some of my observations/ theories:
-Dive gear is "mechanical" and most women tend to think that mechanics are Men's Stuff. The men continue this problem by assembling gear for women and even by doing things in the water like reaching out and inflating/ deflating the woman's BC for her and by adding and subtracting weight for her. Although women learn in class how to assemble their own gear (hopefully) they probably forget if it is always done for them after OW.
-Men want to protect their wives. We were all taught at a young age that the men are the Protectors. When women are diving, they become too protective and actually inhibit the female's independence.
-Women have a natural tendency to be more conservative than men. All extreme sports show an abundance of male participants. I guess this is an instinct we have evolved to stay alive and raise the babies; continue the human race. The men were the ones stupid enough to go chase mammoths with spears! We picked roots and berries. Anyways, this natural tendency toward conservatism is something we are trying to overcome by our participation in scuba diving.
-We don't look awesome with mask lines and snot on our lips. Lots of women don't want to be seen in a wetsuit. Well, they're just missing out, but honestly there are some women who are just too vain/ high maintenance for scuba.
-Many instructors do not encourage female independence. Often the husbands begin their overprotective, take-charge attitude in OW class and the woman never has a chance to learn to dive without him. He hovers over her, sets up her gear, and then pulls her around underwater. This is the same problem instructors have with parents and children - they need to seperate the spouses and keep them separated so the women can learn. We tried this method with a class recently and had success with the women being more independent and comfortable with their skills.
I don't think either sex is doing this purposefully, it is a cultural issue. We have been raised this way. But we need to break the mold. My husband is now going to seperate the men and women for every class until the last dive. I am seeking women to buddy up with. I am encouraging new girl divers to come out to the lake with me, without the spouses. I am thinking of setting up a Girls Only Dive Club. Would you believe, in my husband's last class, a poor girl had to ask him if she could dive with a tampon? She must have been so embarrassed! But that's something important that should be included in our dive training. Agency curriculum does not address Diving On Your Period or How To Fit Your Boobs In A BC. How can women learn to dive independently if the agencies, instructors, and diving community do not address our feminine needs?
I don't think it is necessarily a case of co-dependance. Last dive campout I went on with my husband, I don't think I set up dive gear once in the four dives we did over 3 days. My husband just did it. I've never asked him to and don't need him to, but he took it upon himself to do it. If it were anyone else, I'd have a problem with it. Because it is him, I trust that it is done properly.
In fact, for that weekend, he packed up the truck almost entirely himself (I was finishing up food for the weekend), and when we got there, he had our sleeping tent up, our qwik-tent shade tent up with our chairs out underneath as like a covered patio in front of our sleeping tent, blew up our air matress and had our bed made with our sleeping bags and all our dive gear out of the truck; all done before I got done greeting our friends.
At home, I can't even get him to put his dirty socks in the hamper and he still seems to not know how the vacuum cleaner or washing machine work? What the ....??? We go for a weekend of camping and he's Mr. Domestic?????
Furthermore, he's a dive instructor (wasn't we we met). So he's very often stepping in and giving unsolicited advice to me. I have over 300 dives, many of them under challenging conditions. I can handle myself and have my reasons for doing things a certain way. For example: On the weekend, I was previously talking about, we have to do a giant stride entry off a reef. One particular time in, I didn't put my mask on beforehand because I wear contacts and it had a lot of sand inside. Instead, I opted to wear it in around my neck and deal with the sand after we get in the water and were floating and putting on our fins. Of course, I got the lecture to which I replied, "Leave me alone, I've done this a few times before, you know!"
Very often, in a relationship, there's a lot more going on than meets the eye. There's a lot of different dynamics going on and this just may be the one arena, where the gals in question, are letting the pendulum swing further in the other direction to create the balance of their relationship.
I wouldn't create classes of separate groups of male and female. This is a co-ed world and I think we all need to learn to function in it. Certainly, I would separate couples as buddy teams in a class to be sure that everyone was learned the skills without their buddy over-compensating. What they do afterward, you have absolutely no control. In fact, I thought it was pretty much standard practice to separate couples in dive classes???
Personally, I wouldn't want to be in a class that was purposely separated into male and female groups. Men have different perspectives on things and an approach that I find educational. For example, I hate women's only gyms. The reason being is that in the ones I've been in, the women weren't serious about working out. In the men's ones, they were and if you were serious, they had no problems with a female being in their midst.
As far as the question of the tampons was concerned, if one is embarrassed about asking a question, then they can ask the instructor after the class, one-to-one. Then the instructor can decide if the question is one that would provide useful info for the entire class, while keeping the asker anonymous. Perhaps, there are guys who are diving with women, to whom the info is useful for them to know. After all, we're all adults. Perhaps, she wasn't as embarrassed as you seem to be about the subject.
Like the guy monitoring his wife's dive computer, my husband has the desire to do the same thing. He likes the idea that he can monitor my air on a dive without having to ask. Part of it is a control thing that appeals to him, I know. It's not like I need him to monitor my air. In fact, most of the diving I have done, during the time we we've been together as a couple has been without him. I even went on a 2 week dive vacation without him. He was an instructor in a shop for a while and I quickly got sick of sitting on a sandy bottom repetively performing skills for the billionth time! We don't have the wireless setup and computer for me as of yet. I am still diving with my hose-attached DataMax Pro and probably will be for a while.
In regards the diving community addressing the needs of women, it is a numbers issue that drives business decisions. Because the sport is largely male-dominated, it is not cost-effective spending massive dollars marketing to females. It's gotten better over the years since I first entered the sport in '93. There are now actually a number of BCD's designed for women. But things aren't going to change much in that arena, until more women are actually in the sport and the demand is there.
It is one thing to separate couples in classes, however, I think you should refrain from making judgements and assumptions about the level of co-dependance in other's relationships. Otherwise, you might get an earful like the last person who did such a thing to me! Had a co-worker who assumed that I was lazy and made the mistake of telling me so, because my husband burned some CD disks for me. Lazy!!! I don't think so! Perhaps, I'm just a little busy cooking dinner every night or understanding the mechanics of operating my washer and vacuum cleaner to be concerned about learning how to burn CD disks. On the other hand, my husband is a total PC geek who loves that sort of thing.
