Reflections In a Jaundiced Eye Page 6
In an argument with Plato, Antisthenes the Cynic defended nominalism by saying, “I see a horse, but I do not see horseness.” American women see horseness everywhere.
American men have very few masculine stances left. If they want to show that they can take it, they can go without a coat on bitterly cold winter days, like Gary Hart shivering in the New Hampshire dawn; or Ronald Reagan shivering in Geneva while Gorbachev, who is used to much colder weather, bundled up in coat, scarf, and hat and regarded him with undisguised bemusement. “Where’s your coat?” asked the translator. “Oh, I left it inside,” the other translator replied manfully.
Alternatively, men can become terrorists and practice an updated version of the chivalric “women and children first” by releasing their female captives immediately—an extremely wise move for anyone wishing to practice terrorism in peace and quiet.
They can get convicted of first-degree murder and request execution for the purpose of dying bravely before witnesses. Gary Gilmore and Jesse Bishop both died bravely; Gilmore with stoicism and Bishop with jauntiness, calling for a bottle of booze and a woman for his final meal—classic male responses to danger and destruction designed to prove that Beau Geste is alive and well on Death Row.
And for men who want to flee Family Man America and never come back, there is a guaranteed solution: homosexuality is the new French Foreign Legion.
One of the most striking examples of last-ditch masculinity that has cropped up lately is the way baseball has turned into football. Long the Jack-be-nimble game in which height and a big build are unimportant and can even be a drawback, baseball has found ways to stand tall. The team at bat and the team in the field are now called the “offense” and the “defense.” Unnecessary roughness being almost impossible to manage in this most spread-out of games, pitchers have taken to hitting batters with the ball. Much of it has to be intentional; I never saw it happen when I was going to games during my first tomboyhood, but now, in my second, I see it dozens of times in a season.
And then there are the new uniforms. The chaste baggy flannels that served the important purpose of soaking up summer sweat have been replaced by skintight stretch pants to permit football-style crotch-and-ass flaunting, and the gridiron’s glare-deflecting black cheekbone smudges are now sported on the diamond by men in visored caps who want to look ferocious.
Almost as pathetic was the grim head-’em-off-at-the-pass atmosphere surrounding Coca-Cola’s decision to change its longstanding recipe. “Now we’re willing to take risks,” said company chairman Roberto C. Goizueta out of the side of his mouth. Company spokesman Carlton Curtis squared his jaw and added, “You’re talking about having some guts—and doing something that few managements would have the guts to do.” It’s true that a great deal of money was at stake, but talking about courage and recipes in the same breath made these men sound idiotic.
These are the confused and wounded males that Shere Hite finds insufficiently sensitive and vulnerable. Don’t try to disagree with her because she has statistics to back up her accusations. We’re talking about research—and doing things that few researchers would have the guts to do:
1. Have you stopped hating men?
2. How many men have you fantasized murdering?
3. Check the word that best completes the sentence: “The worst thing about men is their im—” a. potence
b. modesty
c. placability
d. pertinence
e. perviousness
f. petigo
4. Check the word that best completes the sentence: “My current lover/husband is un—” a. kind
b. available
c. concerned
d. stable
e. couth
f. ctuous
5. Check the word that best completes the sentence: “Every man I meet is pre—” a. sumptuous
b. tentious
c. varicating
d. occupied
e. posterous
f. ppy
6. Check the word that best completes the sentence: “All men are in—” a. ferior
b. fernal
c. ept
d. ert
e. ane
f. grates
7. Which of the following historical figures makes you think of your current lover/husband? a. Ivan the Terrible
b. Pippin the Short
c. Peter the Hermit
d. Louis the Pious
e. William the Silent
f. Ethelred the Unready
8. In which of the following great works of literature would you expect to find your current lover/husband? a. The Idiot by Fyodor Dostoyevsky
b. Polyeucte, Martyr by Pierre Corneille
c. “The Rape of the Lock” by Alexander Pope
d. Bleak House by Charles Dickens
e. The Hairy Ape by Eugene O’Neill
f. Dead Souls by Nicolai Gogol
9. Which of the following musical works best expresses your experiences with men? a. The Unfinished Symphony
b. The Trout Quintet
c. “A Rambling Wreck From Georgia Tech”
d. “The Picture That’s Turned Toward the Wall”
e. “Where Did Robinson Crusoe Go With Friday on Saturday Night?”
f. “She’s More to Be Pitied Than Censured”
If Shere Hite were an unreconstructed Southerner, her mind would work like this: “I have nothing against men as long as they stay in their place. There’re some nice men, I’m the first to admit it. Why, I used to play with a little man back when I was a young ’un. They’re so cute when they’re little—I tell you, there’s nothing cuter than a little man. If only they’d stay little … . Now, I believe in being fair, but it we let up on them they’ll take it as a sign of weakness and just go hogwild. I feel sorry for the nice men, I really do—and let me tell you, I’d rather live next door to nice men than trashy women—but you know what they say. Men might be nice all week, but when Saturday night comes around they turn into guys, and you know what they say—once you’ve been a guy on Saturday night you’ll never want to be anything else.”
I wish Shere Hite or some other feminist would explain to me what is so wonderful about “vulnerable” men. Too rich a diet of male vulnerability does things to women, and if you don’t believe it, look at Rosalynn Carter’s mean mouth. Better yet, reflect on Gen. George S. Patton’s maxim, “Men who won’t fight won’t fuck.”
It’s time for American women to stop wailing “He never talks to me!” and let men be men, instead of fashioning dross out of gold and calling it “humanized.” Men have always had their own brand of sensitivity, and the world thrilled to it long before Shere Hite was a cast in her daddy’s eye.
One of the most sensitive men who ever lived was a foot soldier in the English army in 1431. No one knows his name. He must have been a roughneck and a drunkard, and a wife-and-child beater in the medieval manner. Probably he was a rapist, perhaps even a murderer. But he fashioned a cross for Joan of Arc out of wood from her pyre, and her last coherent words, “God bless you,” were spoken to him.
Anyone who fears that letting men be men will endanger women and turn back the feminist clock should contemplate the words of Cervantes: “The woman who is resolved to be respected can make herself so even amidst an army of soldiers.”
6
DOES YOUR CHILD TASTE SALTY?
The next earnest voice you hear will not be mine. I am sick of Helpism and its handmaidens, Education ‘n’ Awareness.
Bleating “I want to help people” used to be a temporary aberration of sophomore sociology majors, but today we have an entrenched Helpism industry. Helpists are everywhere, complete with toll-free telephone numbers composed of the letters H-E-L-P so we can call up and get more information on the afflictions that keep Cliff Robertson and Sally Struthers awake and tossing.
Helpists have a fiendish habit of running their public service announcements during shows that appeal to escapists. A three A.M. showing of Wutherin
g Heights stars Lawrence Olivier, Merle Oberon, and the Laird of Cystic Fibrosis Manor asking, “Does your child taste salty?” Many Helpist messages segue so seamlessly into the feature film that it’s hard to tell one from the other, e.g., a Vincent Price wax museum movie and the Narcolepsy Awareness minidrama about the girl who falls asleep at her mother’s funeral while the church organ pumps out a dirge.
Many Helpists are simply funny, as earnest, half-baked people are always funny. Dickens had his philanthropic Mrs. Jellyby, who deprived her own children of milk so she could contribute to the African children’s milk fund. America has Andie Blanton of Melbourne, Florida, who lost a python when it slithered into hiding somewhere in her car. According to the AP, she was taking it to school “as a classroom pet for her 10 emotionally disabled students, she said.” [my italics]
Far more insidious is the Helpism that crawls out of the woodwork whenever a student commits suicide or dies in an accident.
Immediately, a school crisis team goes into action. A representative at the student’s school gets to work, collecting information on what happened. Then additional team members move in, breaking the news to teachers and students, setting up counseling sessions to help the school deal with the loss, the grief. Throughout the school, teachers and counselors will be on the lookout for students especially troubled by the news. Their focus—to prevent emotional problems and something known as “the cluster effect,” a tendency of one teen suicide to be followed by several others. [the Fredericksburg, Virginia Free Lance-Star]
School suicide squads are the wave of the future according to King George County social worker Allen Mikszewski, who explains: “This sort of thing is just starting in Virginia, with Fairfax and Virginia Beach and a few other places the only other school systems developing programs. There’s no one trained in it, and few authorities on the subject. We’re breaking new ground.”
If that sounds suspiciously eager, stand by for some unabashed drooling. The above-mentioned article goes on to say: “Teachers will be trained to look for trouble signs from students overcome with grief and depression. Still to be decided is whether all students would be automatically seen or addressed by the crisis team, or whether just particular groups or classes will get that attention.”
Social worker Mikszewski has no intention of excusing anybody from crisis counseling: “If we don’t see all of the students, there is always the risk that one shy, withdrawn student who won’t ask for help is the one that we really need to see.” Translated from Helpese, this means that any youngster with dignity and self-control will become a special target of the Clammy Ones.
Anyone who could read this article without getting a cold chill deserves to live in America. The school crisis team, with its counseling tables set up in the hall like a morbid version of Career Day, encourages kids to make a career out of falling apart. Inviting adolescents to emote is bound to be crowned with success. As girls do most of the emoting, the school crisis team perpetuates the stereotype of the unstable female. At the same time, it exerts a subtle pressure on boys to prove their “vulnerability” at an age when proof of vulnerability can leave males with permanent psychological scars.
A girl in my high school committed suicide when I was sixteen. The next day the student body was quieter than usual, but nobody broke down. Since the deceased had been in my homeroom, I was one of the group of girls officially designated to represent our class at the observances. Somewhere between the wake and the funeral, several Southern grandmothers got into the act with a dispute about some point of etiquette. I think it had to do with calling cards—it usually does—and by the time it was over (not settled, just over), we were all drained of every drop of emotion. We went to the funeral in a state of exhausted stoicism, completely wrung out and nerveless from coping with old ladies huffing “I never heard of such a thing in all my born days!”
What happened to us was precisely what is supposed to happen to people caught up in a sudden death: our emotions were dominated and redirected by the trivia of civilized behavior. As Mary McCarthy wrote in The Group: “You found that you got obsessed with these petty details. They were supposed to distract you from your grief. In fact, that was just what they did. You caught yourself forgetting the reason you were doing all this: because Kay had died. And the relief of finally arriving at a decision or having it taken out of your hands, as when Lakey got the dress, made you feel positively gay, till you remembered.”
Since there can’t possibly be anything pleasant about having several hundred hysterical teenagers on one’s hands, it is time to wonder why these school crisis teams are doing everything in their power to encourage displays of inconsolable grief.
I daresay they do it out of love—specifically, love of money. Helpism of this sort is not without precedent. In her 1985 book, The Weaker Vessel: Women in 17th-Century England, Antonia Fraser tells us that in 1643, the financially desperate midwives of the realm petitioned the government to end the long French war and “return husbands to their wives, to bring them yearly under the delivering power of the midwife.”
This obscure little footnote of history is disturbingly relevant vis-à-vis today’s burgeoning supply of ostensibly compassionate counselors of drug addicts, unmarried mothers, battered wives, and abused children—all of whom would be out of work if the supply of drug addicts, unmarried mothers, battered wives, and abused children were to dry up.
My Sunday paper contained a curious insert, a whole section called “Support Groups” that turned out to be a directory of local conversational clearing houses for every conceivable form of trouble and strife known to humankind. They included Life Management Seminar, Stress Management Workshop, Depression Resources, and Chronic Pain Outreach, to name just a few.
The proliferation of support groups suggests to me that too many Americans are growing up in homes that do not contain a grandmother. A home without a grandmother is like an egg without salt, and Helpists know it. They have jumped into the void left by the disappearance of morbid old ladies from the bosom of the American family. The emotionally satisfying discussions that take place in Chronic Pain Outreach and Depression Resources are simply updated versions of the grandmotherly practice of hanging crepe. We could eliminate much of the isolation that support groups exist to fill and save the “traditional family” that everybody is so worried about if more couples took their aging parents to live with them.
Having a grandmother in residence makes books and articles on “How to Help Your Child Cope With Death” totally unnecessary. We tend to assume that old people fear death, but somehow I doubt it … .
“Oh, good, the paper’s come! Let’s see who died.” Expertly inserting her thumb into the obits section, Granny began to read. “I knew it! Look at the story the family’s giving out. ‘Sudden stroke,’ indeed! I heard that she was really murdered in the beauty parlor. They say the dye got in her ear and went all through her system until it reached her heart and killed her. That’s what you get for dyeing your hair … . Oh, here’s poor Mr. Jordan. You know he choked to death at the table? Aunt Cora’s cousin’s niece died that way. They say her mother reached down her throat to pull the bone out and pulled all her insides out with it. She just kept pulling and pulling, and they just kept coming and coming, until it was all there on the table and the undertaker hardly had any work to do. He only charged them half-price.”
To make sure I learned the etiquette of grieving, Granny took me with her to the many funerals she attended. O Death, where is thy sting? Search me. I grew up looking at so many corpses that I still feel a faint touch of surprise whenever I see people move.
One of the reasons today’s children are such sheeplike conformists who won’t make a move without checking their peer pressure is that they are never exposed to old people in the fullness of their carte blanche. In his essay “On Liberty,” John Stuart Mill wrote: “Eccentricity has always abounded when and where strength of character has abounded; and the amount of eccentricity in a society has ge
nerally been proportional to the amount of genius, mental vigor, and moral courage which it contained.”
Helpists hate eccentrics because people who march to a different drummer never follow the pied pipers of Education ‘n’ Awareness. Television’s dullest public service announcement is the osteoporosis pitch that shows a young woman on a train regarding with mixed pity and dread a bent-over old lady struggling painfully into her seat. Neither woman seems to have any personality whatsoever; although they sit opposite each other for the duration of the trip, they never even say hello. All the talking is done by the earnest voice-over; the women sit there in total silence with Calcium Awareness looming between them like a stone wall.
If Granny were cast as the old lady, the pitch would go like this:
“My, what a nice straight back you have, honey. I had a straight back when I was your age; I could walk down the steps with a book on my head. Now I’m so bent over I find six dimes every day. They say a dowager’s hump will make you rich! Old bones, that’s what it is, old bones. The Change does it, you know—after you stop coming unwell, you lose all your marrow. It’s got to come to all of us someday. My mother’s sister-in-law’s cousin knew a poor soul who got so bent-over that one day she just went pop! and broke right in half. They had to put her back together again in the coffin, but they didn’t lay her out right and it showed.”
I maintain that this is more interesting than droning milligram counts. Granny’s old wives’ tale might or might not raise the young woman’s Calcium Awareness, but it would certainly raise her hair, and give her a train ride to dine out on for years to come. Take my word for it: If a child grows up tooling around with a grandmother who buttonholes strangers and strikes up conversations that leave them bug-eyed with wonderment, he will never wind up in Crack Outreach because he feared being “different” from his strung-out peer group.