A new perspective for sons

I looked at Lucille Clifton’s “wishes for sons” as a learning experience for men. Clifton uses struggles women go through as a learning experience for men in order to fully understand what it is like to be a woman. Clifton writes, “i wish them cramps/ i wish them a strange town/ and the last tampon/ i wish them no 7-11” (1-4). Here Clifton isn’t actually saying that she wished her sons had it as hard as she does and she fully knows that her sons can never truly experience these events. What Clifton is actually saying is ‘i wish them to know what it’s like to…” in this section. She is using the struggles to illustrate her point that men often don’t think of the things that women have to worry about. I will reiterate NOT THINK, she isn’t only speaking about the fact that these are things men don’t worry about, but these are things that men absolutely ignore. She wants the future to be different and to me the importance of it is that men pay more attention to the differences between what it is like to live as a man in our society and what it is like for a woman and to appreciate that their struggles shouldn’t be taken for granted by men.