Men, Divorce, and Beer

Since I recently had the honor of being named an "underexposed blog" by DruBlood (Goddamn, did my site statistics jump), I thought I'd check out one of my fellow underexposees. I hadn't read but two posts at 64 Arts before I'd jumped on the "comment" button. But then I jumped off, because I could feel the sap rising and I knew that I had more to say than I could squeeze into a single comment.

She's talking about the fact that several of her friends are getting divorced. Then she says:

I have heard the edict that it takes two to make a marriage but the fact in all these cases is that the women have been changing, adjusting, compromising, letting go, trying over, but the men have made nothing more than incremental moves.... But I guess I am most apalled by the fact that I know these women to be wonderful people and cannot understand how their partners refuse to get well enough to see it and see how lucky they were. Now I have to say that I don't think this is gender-specific, it just happens that in these cases the people I am siding with (and with good reasons) are women.

As a guy who works hard on his marriage, I have to disagree. Not with the general gist of the above, but with the disclaimer at the end, "I don't think this is gender-specific."

I think it's gender specific. I think it's real damn gender specfic. Having grown up as a guy in mainstream American culture, having come out of the mainstream only gradually and having been a student of American Culture (dissertation and everything), I have to say that generally speaking, guys have a problem with relationships.

Ok, once again I demonstrate my keen grasp of the obvious, but I just want to make the argument that 64 is being unnecessarily cautious. Let's call a spade a spade here (and no, that's not a racist slur. I checked). While there are really wonderful guys out there who are caring, considerate partners who listen, share, compromise and spend time thinking about where their relationships are going, there are millions more who not only don't act that way, but they actively ridicule men who do. And maybe worse, they actively celebrate behaving like the selfish dicks that so many women (and I imagine, not a few men) have had to put up with in relationships.

This celebration of emotional infantilism and thinly-veiled misogyny extends to commercial as well as day-to-day, interpersonal culture. I rarely watch TV, but when I do, it's usually a sporting event, so I get exposed to more beer commercials than my lifestyle might otherwise predict. And beer commercials are one of the best examples of this kind of misogyny and selfish infantilism. Although there are examples too numerous to mention, the one that comes to mind is the one with the guy who is accompanying his wife shopping. She's totally into it, but he's bored, and looking for a way out. He spots an extension cord running across the floor, and follows it until it disappears under one of those circular clothes racks they have in stores. He ducks under the rack, and finds several guys like himself, huddled around a TV showing (surprise) a sporting event, and drinking whichever beer paid for the ad.

As the one instructor in my undergrad days was fond of saying, "Where do I start?" I guess the best place is the tight connection between a fantasized return to childhood (I vividly remember hiding under those circular clothes racks--when I was five, not thirty) and a rejection of the supposed "woman's world." Under the clothes rack, safe from "mommy's" eyes, men can be boys. They have their TV, their sports, their beer, and--Oh, yes--the company of other boy-men.

Were this just about a rejection of the adult world, it would be bad enough. But in so many of these situations the rejected "adult world" of responsibility and maturity becomes a rejection of an imagined "woman's world," and by extension, women. The fantasized world of boy-men includes an abandonment of not only responsibilities like bills and jobs and insurance, but also emotional responsibilites like caring and sharing and listening.

Which brings me to my other favorite example of this mentality. In researching masculinity and gun culture, I came across one of those free-floating internet texts called "rules for women." One version had a couple of my favorite "rules," which really illustrate what I'm on about.

Sunday = sports. It's like the full moon or the changing of the tides. Let it be. Ditto Saturday

Like the beer ad, this one clearly demarcates a world of "sports" which is exclusively for men (tell that to Mia Hamm or Cat Osterman), and which women, if they are wise, will simply avoid. Notice, however, that this world conveniently covers the entire weekend. Yes, I know it's meant as a joke, but you can tell a lot about people from their fantasies. Men who fantasize about uninterruped, woman-free weekends of sports--especially men in relationships, the obvious target market for this text--obviously have serious issues. Weekends are when people do things as a family, work on the house, mow the lawn, go out to the lake, see movies together. Who would want to avoid his partner for the entire weekend, in favor of televised sports?

Come to us with a problem only if you want help solving it. That's what we do. Sympathy is what your girlfriends are for.

Jeez, this one is painful just to read. It wouldn't be so bad if I couldn't imagine millions of guys, some of whom I know, saying "Hell, yeah!" to that one. It's such a sad rejection of the entire emotional life. Sympathy is a basic element of the human condition. I'm actually at a loss to put into words what is missing from a life without sympathy.

Crying is blackmail

Ah, my favorite. Boy-men generally hate to see women cry, especially if there's any chance that they might be legitimately at fault. If crying is blackmail (not "sometimes blackmail" or "often used as blackmail"), then anytime a guy like this is such an ass to a woman that she tears up, she is automatically in the wrong, he is automatically in the right, and nothing she says any longer has any validity. Nice bit of logic. Talk about blame-the-victim. I mean, this is abuser mentality. Do these guys, in their darker moments, think "bleeding is blackmail?"

Anyway, I could go on and on. Hell, there's a good dissertation right there, about the emotional infantilism that's not only propagated among men, but celebrated and pushed on them as a way to sell beer, etc.. I know I've been rambling a bit, but I think it all supports my original point--refusal to do the emotional heavy lifting of a relationship is a gender thing. Yes, there are lots of great guys out there, but how many relationships do you know or have you known in which the man refuses to: share his feelings, listen to her feelings, remember birthdays and anniversaries, plan parties and other social events, discuss the current state and future of the relationship, contemplate the current state and future of the relationship, take the time to figure out what's wrong when she says "nothing,"get to know her friends and relatives, work at building a social network that includes her friends and relatives, cry when his heart is breaking, or write the cute little notes that go in the kids' lunch boxes?

Hell, I even came across a paper on the gender-specific ways in which emotional work within relationships is imbalanced. The authors propose that just like the imbalance of domestic work and child care, the imbalance of emotional work has a negative impact (psychological stress) on women. The sad part is that while the boy-men are damaging their partners, they're also damaging themselves. Like so many traditional male patterns, it is both other- and self-destructive. The paper says:

In communal relationships people feel mutual responsibility for each other’s welfare, help each other, and give benefits as a response to the other person’s needs. Emotions are more freely shown and responded too, and this is one of the ways closeness is built and maintained in relationships

Dip me in patchouli and call me a sensitive New-Age guy, but that sounds like the kind of relationship I'd like to have. And I think most guys would like to have it, too, but waaay to many hear the siren song of the boy-men, calling from beneath the clothes rack.

"Come with us, run away from mommy. come with us..."