I've been reading Norah Vincent's book Self-Made Man, her account of life as a (straight) man in various, ostensibly typical male situations. She joins a bowling league, frequents strip clubs, goes on dates, attends a monastery, and hangs out with an Iron John crowd.
Norah (she seems that familiar to me) has written an excellent book that I can only hope gets recognized as a major contribution to inter-gender understanding.
To me, it's a little disturbing to realize that for all the time we spend with each other and obsessing over each other, men and women understand very little about each other. By her own tacit admission, Norah went into this experiment with some rather unfavorable perceptions of men.
And she ended up being surprised, I think, by the inadequacy of these perceptions.
It seems ingrained in our collective unconscious that women have a civilizing effect on men, and therefore on the human condition: A society of men is driven entirely by the individual men's id, characterized by aggression, violence, sloppiness, and dangerous behavior. Women hold us by the ear, domesticate us, force us into unnatural monogamy when our instinct would be to spread our seed as widely as possible. And so it follows that men's natural instincts are base in the worst sense of the word - whether we are motivated by the availability or absence of sex or our better aspirations, it is the feminine side of humankind that is good; the masculine side therefore bad.
Norah tells of her first attempts to pick up women in bars, and she notices that it's an exercise in rejection. For the very effort at hitting on women, men deserve scorn, unless they are attractive at that moment, in which case they get a positive response. (See this entry on this phenomenon). In other words, there's no glory in trying; only in succeeding.
Now, I have to ask: what kind of civilizing effect is that?
The interesting thing is that some of the worst typical-male behavior has little to do with primal drives: the promiscuous, forever-seeking cad is looking for some kind of emotional gratification; discrimination is (imho) the result of an inferiority complex; objectification of women is the result of an inability to accept one's sexuality.
Norah was rightly disturbed by her experiences at the strip clubs, horrified at the figurative and literal odorlessness of the women who worked there, and a bit mystified by the men who got off on it. I think she reaches the right conclusion about it - strip clubs are about reductionist sex, a desperate attempt by a great many men to reduce a powerful drive to a few simple artifacts.
In virtually every experience Norah has as "Ned," she is struck by the fact that societies of men are isolated, emotionally stunted, and tragic. The door-to-door salesmen who hype themselves as big swinging dicks in the beginning and end of every day; those who bowl without irony and show kindness in small, subtle ways; the monks with rich but largely unexpressed inner lives; the excruciating reality that men can be brushed off by women without getting a chance to show who they are; and it goes on.
To generalize, women are good at talking about and/or expressing their emotional needs. Either the culture of women or popular culture has validated every single emotional need a woman might have - whether she needs more (or less) sex, more financial equality, more respect, more space, or whatever, she has the right to say so.
For men it's more confusing. We're only entitled to what we earn, whether it's money, sex, authority, fame, etc. Expressing our need can be construed as a sign of weakness, a sure way to make sure we don't get it.
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