My various meetings and readings of late have been leaning toward a singular assertion;
I met, or re-met a guy who’s a friend of my neighbor, and he was saying how he loves his girlfriend because “whenever she’s not being a bitch, she’s really cool.” Before you try to draw a picture of this guy in your mind, stop, because you can’t, based on that, and come up anywhere near accurate. This guy reminds me quite distinctly of my dear friend Ben McClure, in that he’s interested, thoughtful, and possessive of an intractable nature. He’s not insensitive or bigoted. So he says this about his girl, and goes on to qualify: That if women would stop trying to control everything and stop obsessing about what they can’t control, we’d all be much happier. There’s not much less pleasant than a woman with a bad case of Cunt Trolls. Those will mess up everything.
Then I was reading in “Midnight” (by Sister Soulja) that “women are one hundred percent emotion. Love them, respect them, but don’t obey them.” The boy whose father taught him this is an Black Arab Muslim from Sudan. The overall message, which I’ve seen and heard in my own contacts with Mulsims in the US, is that women and men are different. They do different things well, they play into different stereotypes, they fulfill different roles in human society. An example is that in a healthy marriage rooted in the teachings of Islam, the woman and her beauty are viewed with such reverence that they’re considered holy and only her family is permitted the privilege of her visage.
Another conversation in my repertoire is that since the “feminist revolution,” divorce rates have skyrocketed, as has marital dissatisfaction and reliance on mental health counseling and psychoactive drugs. The suggestion is that no one knows who the hell they are anymore and it’s upsetting the whole shebang. Women assume control over not only the children in the family, but the men, and in this, there’s failure. They don’t really want to be in charge and often do poorly once they’ve seized the helm, and manly men aren’t made or maintained in the middling duties of manservant and the like. A guy who just takes orders from a bossy, domineering female isn’t going to command respect, not from her or anyone else. But don’t suspect that this perspective suggests that women are intended to take orders and blandly comply. A man with no confidence in his ability to make a way in the world would be provoked to violence or contempt when faced with the invitation to explain his reasoning, and such a man is not due the trust and respect implied by unquestioning cooperation. The point is that man and woman are each cut out for a different aspect of the human decision making process, and we rightly assume command over different domains in domestic life.
The singular point that seems to be blooming in evidence is this: Men and women are different.
I knew that before, and I’ve seen it from a lot of different angles, and today I’m seeing it from one more. I don’t think I have a hard time accepting that for the most part. I just want a guy who understands that he’s in charge because I allow him to be, not because I couldn’t be, or that I don’t know what to do if he’s not there.
And a corollary, heretofore unseen, is that maybe I don’t seem to know how to really live with this: I don’t accept that someone can be rational and smart and come to a different conclusion than I do about a major thing. I don’t know how to allow that if he has made a decision contrary to what I would make, he’s not necessarily just this side of the special olympics. I think that’s just one (more) place where being smarter than the average bear makes daily happiness more difficult.
