Beware what books you read when you’re fourteen. Wait… just about everyone reading this is long past fourteen. Too late, then.
When I was fourteen, I read Jailbird, by Kurt Vonnegut, and it remains perhaps my favorite of his novels. Vonnegut was, of course, one of the secular saints of American literature in the 20th century, and I’ll lick any man in the joint who says different. But damn, he missed the boat on gender issues a lot.
There’s a passage where the protagonist references, among the embarrassing and regrettable episodes of his past, a blatantly misogynist song he learned at college:
It was a song to be kept secret from women. It may be that no woman has ever heard it, even at this late date. The intent of the lyricist, obviously, was to so coarsen the feelings of males who sang the song that the singers could never believe again what most of us believed with all our hearts back then: that women were more spiritual, more sacred than men.
I still believe that about women. Is that, too, comical? I have loved only four women in my life – my mother, my late wife, a woman to whom I was once affianced, and one other. I will describe them all by and by. Let it be said now, though, that all four seemed more virtuous, braver about life, and closer to the secrets of the universe than I could ever be.
He goes on to describe how he and his college buddies were terrified of women and what women might expect of them as men and as lovers, a fear that found its expression in jokes and songs degrading women. As he puts it, “It might properly be compared with a song making fun of lions, sung by lion hunters on a night before a hunt.”
That was a very easy sentiment for a fourteen-year-old boy to recognize, and after the manner of boys that age, I took Vonnegut’s statement about women entirely at face value. (I am eternally grateful I didn’t read Atlas Shrugged that summer. I’d probably be an asshole to this day.)
Naturally, this led to some seriously embarrassing problems relating to girls over the next several years of my life. I’m sure many of our female readers will remember me or one of the million boys like me from their high school years: blindly chasing after a perfect female image we kept on a pedestal, and simply pasting one girl’s face after another onto this idol. I stalked, I obsessed, I wrote love letters that would give diabetes to a bowl of butterscotch pudding. I feel like I owe an apology to every girl I fixated on in high school, one in particular who probably knows who she is. I’m sorry I was an addled adolescent asshole. It seemed like a good idea at the time, what with the hormones and the Vonnegut and whatnot.
Meanwhile, my mother was a professional guru. She literally made a living just being wise and enlightened. She used to occasionally list her occupation as “cult leader” on forms because, well, fuck forms. People came from all over to study with her, and one evening over dinner she told me a story that, in the manner of the best gurus, completely shook up my worldview in one minute. To roughly quote her:
One of my students came up to me at the retreat, she was in tears, she was so upset. It seems that at last year’s retreat, she’d met this man, another student, and they had an affair. And it was a really bad idea, and it wasn’t good for her marriage or his, and he’s kind of a jerk, and it ended badly and she regrets ever doing it.
But now she’s run into the same guy at this retreat, and she says she knows she’s going to have another affair with him, even knowing in advance it’s a terrible idea. And she’s crying and beating herself up, asking “What’s wrong with me? Why am I doing this to myself?”
And I think about it for a minute and I tell her, “Well… girls are dumb.”
That was a bolt of lightning to me, and one that was long overdue. In giving that woman permission to own her own foolishness, to see it as mere foolishness rather than a deep personal failing, my mom also opened my eyes.
Girls are dumb. Girls are every bit as prone to ill-considered dipshittery as boys are. Girls are not fucking magic. They are not Tolkein elves who always move gracefully and do everything better and whose farts smell like cookies. Yeah, I know how embarrassingly obvious that sounds, but at the time, that was seriously new information to me.
My relations with women improved dramatically after that, and I became more feminist than I had been after some unfortunate early encounters with overzealous young true believers. It took me a while to actually subscribe to the radical notion that women are people, because I’d been operating on the assumption that they were elves.
I suspect a lot of guys walk a similar path. Some, burdened with the girls-are-magic theory, do what the boys in Jailbird did and try to replace reverence and fear with hate and contempt. Others walk what they imagine to be a nobler path, paying tribute to the perfect goddess that they’re projecting onto some poor human girl who didn’t ask for it. And some, like me, eventually figure out that pedestalization is bullshit, love is something that happens between flawed and fallible human beings, and girls are dumb.
BTW, you know that I really saw the WANTED: THEODORE BUNDY posters in my favorite haunts, right? They were plastered all over college town bars, and there was near-hysteria in sorority houses, since Ted had broken into a few (and murdered them right in their rooms). There were copious warnings about the leg cast, arm sling and the Volkswagen. For about six months, his photo was everywhere and people warned young women, like they did in New York about Son of Sam, where I was also dumb enough to be, during that summer. Please understand that these incidents really do… Read more »
@dungone
oh yes, because Ted Bundyfest 1, 2, 3, 4, and 5 were all annual MRA get-togethers a la Burning Man or something like that.
Your original point aside, I’m surprised you didn’t go with the more obvious Michfest reference, especially if you wanted to refer to an event with a disturbing undercurrent of hate.
Dungone: @Daisy, oh yes, because Ted Bundyfest 1, 2, 3, 4, and 5 were all annual MRA get-togethers a la Burning Man or something like that. The tradition lives on! I swear, it’s as if you had a 1 in 2 chance of getting getting killed if you so much as lift a finger to help out a guy. Honestly, if you think Ted Bundy is bad then I’ve got to tell you about this little thing called lightning… you’ll never leave the house again. No, it’s not the sensationalist media reporting and scare mongering at the expense of men…… Read more »
Dungone, excuse me, but YOU mentioned that you were a Marine. If it is not my business, don’t use it to bludgeon me and one-up me. I just assumed you were bragging; I know how difficult Marine basic is, in fact, it might surprise you how much I know about Marines.
And here you are asking me why I go to restaurants whose websites you couldn’t even afford to look at? Maybe it’s because I just want to avoid people like that.
FTR, poor people are just as peace or war loving as anyone else.
@Daisy, I did answer your question. Twice. Actually three times, and this is the fourth. You don’t seem to accept my answers. Speaking of Marines, I have written on NSWATM about some of my experiences with Marines who committed suicide. As for my personal life, I have written about many of the fucked up relationships that I have had as a result of our society’s gender roles. I have written about plenty of things. So how can you read about what I write about, and then turn around and tell me that I’ve had this perfect life and then ask… Read more »
@Daisy, oh yes, because Ted Bundyfest 1, 2, 3, 4, and 5 were all annual MRA get-togethers a la Burning Man or something like that. The tradition lives on! I swear, it’s as if you had a 1 in 2 chance of getting getting killed if you so much as lift a finger to help out a guy. Honestly, if you think Ted Bundy is bad then I’ve got to tell you about this little thing called lightning… you’ll never leave the house again. No, it’s not the sensationalist media reporting and scare mongering at the expense of men… that… Read more »
Danny, yeah. Dungone, and don’t forget, Ted Bundy favored a leg cast or arm sling, and asked some of his future victims for help. I still remember the panic over this, as those of us living in college towns were warned ***NOT TO HELP ANY GUYS WITH LEG CASTS AND VOLKSWAGENS!*** Bundy often wore his arm in a sling or in a fake cast or his leg in a fake cast. He would ask his victims to help him carry things to his car or help load or unload things from his car. Once the victims got in his car… Read more »
So it’s really aggravating when you have this helper-of-women role enforced on you ever since you were a kid, mostly by other women – sisters, aunts, mothers, teachers – and then when you follow through with it like a good little gender-normative man, they accuse you of trying to get in their pants. Its just f’d communication. We’re told to do those things for women because as men its our job. Someone along the way some jerks decided to use this as an opening to get into women’s pants. And then Schrödinger’s Helper happened. “Is he one of those that’s… Read more »
Dungone, well, its just like what I asked you, that you declined to answer: you eat stuff from the Food Network and go to restaurants whose websites I can’t even afford to look at, and have lots of different girlfriends and you are living the good life, by your own description, so I don’t see why you are so easily angered? What’s NOT going right in your life? According to your account, everything in your life is like TV; hunky dory and sheer wonderfulness. Yet, you have this hair-trigger temper when it comes to the expectations of your gender role…… Read more »
@Daisy, nah, I was not insulting you, I was just defeating your anecdote. Was it a credible anecdote? Who knows, maybe. Or maybe you really were scowling. I have seen you be pretty insulting to other male readers on this blog, so it’s tough for me to say what I think you are like in real life. Probably a sweet old lady who bakes lots of cupcakes. But I know that I often see young men helping elderly ladies out (I was in the Marines by the way… once you put those Dress Blues on you are expected to be… Read more »
Schala: That’s no justification: Most women have long hair.
Until they are in their 30s, then most do not, unless Latina or Asian (which is a cultural difference I have noticed). At least not here in the USA. If you go to “hippie places” like Asheville, NC or Eugene, Oregon, then lots of older women do have long hair… but mostly I am in a definite minority.
Not that it can never get to me, I am rubber, you are glue etc. but I frequently at least attempt to just be like, “your expectations are not my problem”. With men there is a special predicament – if they do not play the game by the rules, they’re very unlikely to meet enough women to form a relationship with any sort of reliability. It’s a double bind. You might get less attention as a woman if you have that attitude, but chances are that men are still going to make attempts to get to know you, so you’ll… Read more »
Dungone: I mean, I’m sorry but if I was walking past some old woman who was probably scowling at me because she has such a negative view of men then yeah, I’d probably walk right past her too. Nah, you ain’t sorry, you just insulted me. 😉 There is no reason to get so personal. Was that necessary? BTW, I daresay, you ain’t Jesus or The Amazing Kreskin, and you can’t read hearts and minds. I rarely scowl, regardless of what I am thinking. Retail! Hypomania! 😀 (If anything, I have adopted the annoying southern woman’s habit of BEAMING at… Read more »
@f, about that baggage, I would like to reclaim any of it that you detected. I may have misunderstood what you said, but I don’t have a problem with the idea that the most progressive of women no longer like it when men behave chivalrously around them. That’s all I thought you meant, sorry if it came out differently. I just meant to say that in spite of this attitude, it’s still got a way to go before it really manifests itself into a better set of gender relations. Which, again, I was not trying to ascribe to anything specific… Read more »
debaser: But to be clear, elevatorgate showed me in no uncertain terms that the self ascribed “skepchicks” are not skeptics at all. I am not a skeptic, so not sure what you mean by this? Why aren’t they? (I figure people are pretty much whoever they say they are). This reminds me of Christians who say so-and-so isn’t REALLY a Christian, feminists saying so-and-so isn’t really a feminist, etc etc, and it bothers me when I see skeptics and atheists falling into this awful habit. Better to say she is lacking as a skeptic or needs to learn her skepticism… Read more »
@EasilyEnthused, okay, so I had no idea that you were serious. I don’t think that you are disgusting, but this whole entire thing is disturbing to me… the fact that we are at the point of engaging in those kinds of behaviors as a serious way of demonstrating social fitness… where we have to use deflection as a strategy to disguise our intent so as not offend either the old woman or miss out on a conversation with the young woman. It’s just that… it’s not really your fault, or mine. I just wouldn’t want to give that piece of… Read more »
gender role enforcement is petty, and it doesn’t mean it’s not real. I feel you on this, I do. But also at some point subway complainer lady is just… a petty complainer? I don’t know how to square this circle but at some point the concept of “you know what? Fuck this petty bullshit” is key to my relationship to gender enforcement. Not that it can never get to me, I am rubber, you are glue etc. but I frequently at least attempt to just be like, “your expectations are not my problem”. As for this: I noticed that you… Read more »
Dungone: So when Daisy was complaining about the young men who ran past her to help the young lady out, she didn’t seem to have a problem that the “young and strapping” woman didn’t offer her any help, either. I guess it’s not her place to lend a hand if there is a strapping young man who could be used for the task, instead. When I was young, I sure did. But now? As I said, I am the one who needs the help. As a young girl, when I offered, they looked surprised and would usually laugh, like I… Read more »
@f, by the way, in your personal example I noticed that you said you had a problem with guys offering to help you out and that you might have reacted negatively to it in the past. This is a good example of the conflicting messages of gender role expectations that men are sent in our society. And I don’t blame you for being annoyed about it. But this is a situation where you are annoyed by a behavior that isn’t necessarily men’s personal choice but something they are captive to. In a way, you are being a good sport by… Read more »
That’s no justification: Most women have long hair. And until WW1, so did many men (more than a minority). The buzz cut came in vogue because of US soldiers, so did “blue for boy” because of the uniform.
@f, yes I get your point that this is all very petty, but gender role enforcement is petty, and it doesn’t mean it’s not real. I would totally agree with you on this if these were just random pet peeves that went every which way. But there is a clear pattern to them – it’s a whole lot of people who are ready to be slighted for the same exact reason, so much so that without even coordinating it ahead of time, one woman might be carrying a box, a second woman will storm out of her seat to help… Read more »
I’ll get this out of the way. Up front. The plural of anecdote is not data. One time I (age 20) was in a Boston T (subway) station. There was this old Asian woman (about 80) carrying a huge suitcase. We were both at the top of the steps. I offered to carry her bag down for her. She looked at me like I was going to kill her and quickly just grabbed her bad a headed down, struggling. Like she was going to fall struggling. I think I almost killed her by scaring her into a dangerous situation. Btw,… Read more »
@dungone, my basic point is this – if you ask me life is too short to worry about pleasing the type of person who is currently able-bodied and yet complains about having to stand up on the subway while others sit. Or whether you offered to carry something heavy. Or (in my case) whether or not you agreed to have someone carry something heavy for you. If a person intends upon feeling slighted, she’ll feel slighted no matter what the human beings around her do or don’t do. Oh of course this can be justified by calling upon chivalry, radical… Read more »
@f. VERY VERY FUNNY! I like it! @dungone: I resent that you think I’m being manipulative when I approach women. I can’t really be sure that the techniques I’ve used in the past weren’t “disgusting,” as you put it. Disgusting is a relative term – did you know in some parts of the world they eat ammonia-soaked rotted shark fat? Tacky – possibly. But I live in a society where if I waited for an woman to introduce herself to me – I would probably still be alone. Just because I have a job at a global corporation doesn’t mean… Read more »
@f, I have also been caught in several situations where some woman was carrying a box or something and I was busy doing something of little import, but busy nonetheless, so another woman in the room would give me a dirty look, get up and offer help to the woman. Both women being roughly equal in age and stature and neither one of them being incapable of completing the task entirely on their own. So this was just a show, pretty clearly. On several such occasions, at least one of the women in the room interrupted what I was doing… Read more »
go to the pretty young girl and say, “excuse me, would you please help this older woman with her groceries?” @f, I want to give you a high five for that. That is great, and I didn’t even think of that. Truth of the matter, in my own experience I have had conversations with young women who were pissed, and I mean downright angry that they had to do something such as give up their seat for an older woman while the men around them did nothing. When I ask how old, in those kind of situations, one time I… Read more »