The Scenic Route
In the Spokesman Review recently, on
the gossip page, a woman celebrity
was quoted as saying, "Men are
confused right now, and that's good,
but they still pay. We can do
everything else, but they pay and
kill the bugs in the kitchen."In another piece I read a month ago, an American woman living in Japan wrote that she was amazed and humbled by an experience she had with a Japanese woman who was her neighbor in a crowded apartment building. When the American woman visited her friend one day, she was surprised to learn the Japanese woman and her family would be moving the next day to a house. The Japanese woman explained she would give her husband directions to the new house in the morning, and that he would come there from his work place the next evening for the first time. The American woman, as you can imagine, was incredulous that her friend's husband had never seen the house; nor been consulted about location, size, price or color scheme.
When she expressed her astonishment, the Japanese woman looked at her with an expression that reflected sympathy, amusement and pity, and said, in effect, "And you American women think you are liberated."
In the battle of the sexes, the rules of conduct are always a little confusing, and in our time of blurred boundaries of gender roles it is less than comforting to know we are still trailing old ideas into a completely new arena of relationships, particularly when they are generalized rules of culture, and not specific ideas of conduct based on individual need and desire.
I suppose that the celebrity woman's glee at men's confusion is a backlash against male domination, but when she says, "they still pay," she is, in my opinion, confessing to her own sexist ideals. After all, a relationship based on a man's ability and willingness to pay is somewhere in the realm of prostitution, isn't it? If she is one of the many women who "wonder where all the good men are," she has fenced many of them out by those words. She has failed to realize is that if she wants to change the way men look at women, it is equally important to change the way that women look at men.
A recent book written for the aspiring bride-to-be, "The Rules," explains to women the basic tenants of keeping a man off-balance, training him to respond through the random reward method of behaviorist B.F. Skinner and leading him to "fall in love," with them. I would quote a current country hit song, "Love isn't someplace that we fall, it's something that we do."
My analysis is that the curiosity and vague uneasiness caused by the well-contrived and hidden agenda suggested in the book, coupled with random reinforcement for "proper" behavior, gives the poor sap who responds to this kind of training that "giddy" feeling associated by poets and pundits with love. They could get the same feeling from riding The Octopus at the county fair, and it wouldn't cost as much.
I am pleased to have read the book. I know a few "Rules Girls," and I avoid them like the plague. They may be just as happy about that, if they even know or care. My point is that "Rules Girls" are playing by rules written by other people and trying to apply them to a game that is not a game, but a physical, spiritual and emotional contract between two individual human beings, and that the rules they are playing by are inherently manipulative and sexist, as sexist as male attitudes that deem women "the weaker sex."
Perhaps it is in taking responsibility for all of our lives, that we open ourselves to having relationships based in equality. In the real world, I know that marriage for financial security is not prostitution. In fact, it is a venerable human tradition that has gone on for millennia, and is in no means confined to the female side of the equation. Relative wealth is a criteria many people use to rank potential mates, and that is not a bad thing. I just happen to believe it should be listed somewhere below mutual respect, honesty, loyalty, friendship and fidelity. This is a hard-won belief, I confess.
Isn't it funny that we perceive the Japanese woman as bound by rules of tradition and cultural expectation, when in some fashion she is actually freed by the very things we think of as constraining. The relatively rigid rules of her culture allow her to make decisions many American wives would never chance alone.
The key here is that neither party to the arrangement has to guess about what her or his responsibilities are. They are both operating for the benefit of a common cause within well-defined parameters.
In our culture, we don't have the luxury of well-specified gender roles. If we are going to have healthy relationships, it is important to work out who is responsible for what early on, honestly and in a spirit of cooperation, not competition.
I say to you, Ms. "Men-still-pay," kill your own bugs and pay your own way for a while. Mr. "Women-are-weaker," keep your own house and learn what you can about child-care. Then, you will both be free to establish some really important standards for potential partners in your life. In fact, in a relationship based in criteria like that, anything might be possible, including a woman giving her husband a note about how to get to the new house when he comes home from work - or vice-a-versa.
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