{"id":7945,"date":"2010-12-04T13:34:17","date_gmt":"2010-12-04T18:34:17","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/johnesimpson.com\/blog\/?p=7945"},"modified":"2010-12-04T13:34:17","modified_gmt":"2010-12-04T18:34:17","slug":"the-mostly-bogus-war-between-men-and-women","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/johnesimpson.com\/blog\/2010\/12\/the-mostly-bogus-war-between-men-and-women\/","title":{"rendered":"The (Mostly Bogus?) War Between Men and Women"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

From Seems to Fit<\/em>, Chapter 23(ish):<\/p>\n

Bonnie loved her own laugh. Or rather, she loved that George and other men loved it, that spontaneous eruption of trills and musical bubbles which erupted from her throat and open mouth when something struck her as especially funny — especially when the something wasn’t meant to be funny. She loved the way it made men’s heads swivel in a restaurant or crowded train, looking for the source of sudden brooksound. This laugh always caught even her by surprise, the first blurt and the ripple of voice and breath which followed quickly on its heels: it felt like a rabble of schoolkids at recess, chasing after and tumbling over one another.<\/p>\n

But she also knew the trouble which could follow when that laugh emerged at a moment not funny at all to those around her, to men especially, no matter how deeply ridiculous the moment (and the seriousness with which men regarded it) might be.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

H<\/span>ow different are men and women? And what, exactly — even approximately — takes place at the vertices where they bump into one another?<\/p>\n

I’m not talking physical<\/em> vertices, of course. (This isn’t that sort of blog.) It’s like… Well, a couple years ago I devoted a blog post<\/a> to the importance of edges: those (sometimes invisible) lines where two disparate things meet. In simplest geometric terms, an edge occurs where one two-dimensional plane intersects another. (In order to intersect at all, the two planes must “differ” in at least one respect: their angles in space.)<\/p>\n

But all kinds of things scrape up against all kinds of other things. The taste of one cupcake ingredient juxtaposed with another. The sound of a musical note against a silence. Countries. Cultures. Ideas<\/em>.<\/p>\n

Are you familiar with the word frotteur<\/em>? It comes from the French word frottage<\/em>, rubbing, and is a term applied to someone who derives physical — often sexual — pleasure from rubbing against someone else. While the pleasure isn’t physical (I’m not that far gone), I sometimes think of myself as a frotteur<\/em> of ideas and facts.<\/p>\n

So what the heck is it, exactly, that happens in that narrow, narrow<\/em>, quark-wide little gap where men and women intersect? Is it a “war”? Is it even friction? Is it even confusion?<\/p>\n

(In what follows, please understand that I’m certainly not ignorant of extreme cases — relationships of brutal violence, physical or otherwise, or weird power trips and perversions. I’m just not talking of them for now. I’m talking of “normal” relationships — whatever the hell that means.)<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

Y<\/span>ou may remember the post here from back in early October, Is It Love? (Local Edition)<\/em><\/a>, which in turn sprang from a post<\/a> over at The Burrow<\/em>, home of RAMH<\/em> regular “Ashleigh Burrows” (“a\/b,” as she styles herself in the comments). That first got me thinking about this topic.<\/p>\n

Then, a few weeks ago, I encountered a post over at the new(ish) blog by the new(ish) RAMH<\/em> regular who identifies herself here as “whaddayamean.” (That nickname comes from the unlikely-to-be-claimed-by-anyone-else-ever<\/em> name of the blog<\/a> itself: Whaddaya mean, do I have room for dessert?<\/em>) In that post<\/a>, Wym (as I will call her for now) described something she’d been puzzling over, regarding her significant other, “F.” Please read this mindful that Wym is, as they say (or used to), a sharp cookie, with a dry, dry<\/em> sense of humor, and is likely fully aware that F himself might read her post; you can hear sly laughter scattered here and there (but not everywhere) among her words:<\/p>\n

Would any real father tell his son to be forthright about his affections? I mean, I wish they did. But in my experience, men survive — and avoid getting screwed over — by keeping their cards as close to the vest as possible, keeping their woman under a pall of nagging uncertainty in the relationship, thereby earning her desperate sense of relief when they \u201ccome round\u201d to settling down. I mean, haven\u2019t we all seen kinda a lot of that?<\/p>\n

On the other hand, F — who does not support my taste in music, for reasons I find stupid and closeminded, but that is neither here nor there — is a great practitioner of the [hypothetical aforementioned] father\u2019s advice (as opposed to his own father\u2019s advice, which was \u201cmake sure you meet her mother, so you can see what she\u2019s going to look like in 35 years before you decide if you want to get involved\u201d). F is very demonstrative and uses well-timed reminders of his affection to (manipulatively) end \u201cdiscussions\u201d and bad moods.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

What is<\/em> going on, anyhow, at the edge where men (as Wym understands them) and women (ditto) intersect? Is it typical?<\/p>\n

H.L. Mencken took the received wisdom of his time — that men were cold-blooded realists, and women silly, sentimental ditzes — and stood it on its head. The following appears in his looong essay, “In Defense of Women.” This passage, from the Introduction, always struck me as especially wise:<\/p>\n

Women, in truth, are not only intelligent; they have almost a monopoly of certain of the subtler and more utile forms of intelligence. The thing itself, indeed, might be reasonably described as a special feminine character; there is in it, in more than one of its manifestations, a femaleness as palpable as the femaleness of cruelty, masochism or rouge… Find me an obviously intelligent man, a man free from sentimentality and illusion, a man hard to deceive, a man of the first class, and I’ll show you a man with a wide streak of woman in him.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Now, Mencken was a bit of the blowhard which he often professed to dislike. He also packaged this argument in a pretty but poisonous wrapping paper — denying to women not just the faults but the virtues<\/em> normally (by men!) ascribed to them. But I still remember the shock of reading passages like this in Mencken’s essay.<\/p>\n

It was a shock of recognition. In a comment on someone’s blog in the last few months, I mentioned a theory I’d developed as a boy, one which I could never disprove for reasons which will become obvious when I relate the theory to you. It went like this:<\/p>\n

Women can read men’s minds<\/em>.<\/p>\n

A boy — a man — can pretty much drive himself crazy once he starts to entertain this line of thinking. Evidence of it seemed to be everywhere. Even claims of not understanding men (as in Wym’s blog post) sounded hollow when filtered through the fuzzbox<\/a> of this theory: such claims were obvious camouflage, like the scraps of aluminum foil thrown out of World War II bombers to confuse the enemy’s radar.<\/p>\n

And yet, if women could read men’s minds, couldn’t they hear me<\/em> clinging to this theory in noisy desperation, like a man holding onto scraps of a lifeboat destroyed in a typhoon, and screaming into the wind?<\/p>\n

The conclusion was inescapable: whether or not women really could read men’s minds, it didn’t make any difference because they behaved as if they could<\/em>. For me, that always defined what went on in the gap between men and women: women got<\/em> it, instinctively or telepathically, no difference; and men did not<\/em> get it.<\/p>\n

And yes, even now, you women reading this: I know you’re running off to your little enclaves, entry barred to anyone with a Y chromosome. Running off and laughing among yourselves. I know you<\/em>.<\/p>\n

________________<\/p>\n

P.S. You might wonder, by the way, why or how a boy could develop such a theory. My only answer would be to point you to my remarkable mother and sisters, or most recently to The Missus, and raise a quizzical eyebrow. Not that my dad or brother were ever slouches in the brains department. But they weren’t scarily<\/em> smart.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

From Seems to Fit, Chapter 23(ish): Bonnie loved her own laugh. Or rather, she loved that George and other men loved it, that spontaneous eruption of trills and musical bubbles which erupted from her throat and open mouth when something struck her as especially funny — especially when the something wasn’t meant to be funny. […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"_genesis_hide_title":false,"_genesis_hide_breadcrumbs":false,"_genesis_hide_singular_image":false,"_genesis_hide_footer_widgets":false,"_genesis_custom_body_class":"","_genesis_custom_post_class":"","_genesis_layout":"","h5ap_radio_sources":[],"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"activitypub_content_warning":"","activitypub_content_visibility":"","activitypub_max_image_attachments":3,"activitypub_interaction_policy_quote":"anyone","activitypub_status":"","footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[14,16,38,15,247,37,515],"tags":[215,807,1089,1544,1996,2095,2096,2097],"class_list":{"0":"post-7945","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","6":"category-01_intheblood","7":"category-themissus","8":"category-backwards","9":"category-family","10":"category-ruminations","11":"category-onlineworld","12":"category-grail","13":"tag-love","14":"tag-men-and-women","15":"tag-psychology","16":"tag-james-thurber","17":"tag-the-burrow","18":"tag-relationships","19":"tag-h-l-mencken","20":"tag-whaddayamean","21":"entry"},"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p6kZSG-249","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/johnesimpson.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7945","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/johnesimpson.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/johnesimpson.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/johnesimpson.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/johnesimpson.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=7945"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/johnesimpson.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7945\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":7960,"href":"https:\/\/johnesimpson.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7945\/revisions\/7960"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/johnesimpson.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=7945"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/johnesimpson.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=7945"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/johnesimpson.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=7945"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}