My Word's Worth: a weekly column by Marylaine Block

vol. 2, #26, December, 1996

TO MY KNOWN AND UNKNOWN FANS

I've been trying to figure out why my fans--the ones I know about, the ones that write me, argue with me, praise me--are mostly guys. There's a fair sprinkling of female librarians in there too, but mostly, the ones I hear from are men.

Statistically, of course, there are still a lot more guys out there on the net, so they are more likely to come across my work in the first place. And it's also true that women may be just a bit more hesitant about putting themselves forward, about e-mailing strangers--diffidence is part of our socialization as women, after all. I used to be charmingly shy myself once upon a time.

But I'm thinking maybe it's because I like men. Not just individual men, though I know a lot of men who are interesting, kind, and generous of spirit. No, I also like the whole principle of maleness, the qualities that men want to have, and admire in each other. Certainly I've never before or since received such actual gratitude on any column as I got for In Praise of Men."

I guess maybe, in the process of trying to obtain equal rights, women got into the nasty habit of taking potshots at men. While it is now unacceptable to make jokes about ethnic groups, it seems like it's perfectly all right to make jokes predicated on men being clueless jerks. A lot of us forgot to acknowledge the good things that men do. We are now living in a society that, in the process of questioning all gender roles, is even going so far as to ask, "Except for sperm, do we actually need men?"

What a silly question. Of course we do.

Men and women experience the world in radically different ways. What's more, we develop entirely different aspects of our personalities to meet our different roles. It's not like men lack the genetic capacity to be nurturing and sensitive, for example, but until they are thrust into the role of caretaker, they aren't asked to develop this quality in themselves. Nor do women lack the capacity to do the daring, life-risking, life-saving things that society expects men to do--it's just that in general, society expects us to do the quieter caretaking kinds of things instead.

We have a lot to learn from each other. Left to consort solely with our own sex, we run the risk of becoming parodies of ourselves. I think of the time when men and women at the University of Iowa had separate dorms, and separate dining areas. In the men's dining room, the guys started trying to outgross each other, with belching contests, brawling, and trying to see how many times the cafeteria's version of Jello would bounce off the walls before breaking down (answer: 19). In the women's dining room, we tended to get bitchy and petty. When the dining areas integrated, men and women civilized each other, and dinnertime became a lot more enjoyable.

I think men are really bothered by the changes in gender roles. It's like they used to understand what the world, and women, expected of them, and now they feel like every time they deal with a woman, there are landmines waiting to go off.

I have never gotten so much impassioned argument as on my statement, in What Does a Woman Want?, that women are not that hard to figure out. After all, I'm pretty straightforward, and so are most of my female friends. But maybe men's problems are not so much with women as with girls. When we are young, we women hide our real selves a lot more. We are taught that, to be loved, we need to be pretty and sweet and caring, and to put our own needs on hold. This doesn't mean that we stop having those needs--it just means that we fulfill them in more indirect, even devious, ways than men. It may be this indirection, even manipulativeness, in girls, that men have difficulty understanding.

I've noticed that a lot of the guys that like me think I'm not that markedly female, or at least, God knows, not feminine. Earth mother, yes--something which my grown son wishes I would get over, thank you. I do believe that as women get older, we become more complete personalities. We worry less about fitting into society's expectations of us, and start demanding that the world accept us as we are. For me, in my youth, the most liberating thing I ever read was Dorothy Parker's little verse,

In youth it was a way I had
To do my best to please
And change with every passing lad
To suit his theories
But now I know the things I know
And do the things I do
And if you do not like me so
To hell, my love, with you.

So getting older, for women, is a release, a chance for us to be ourselves rather than our roles. In short, no, I guess I'm not that markedly "female" anymore. Except that, like most women, I value connectedness more than money, power, or personal freedom.

I'm thinking another reason men seem to like my stuff is because of the low B.S. factor. Men tend to value honesty, and I try to be honest and truthful, insofar as I understand the truth. When I have an opinion, you know exactly what it is, in spades. When I don't know, I'll admit it--and then feel totally free to speculate about why something is the way it is.

Judging from my mail, too, it seems a lot of disaffected men are asking some of the same questions I am. We want things to work, dammit, and we try to fix it when it goes wrong. We don't like our political system, because we sense that neither of the two major parties are interested in understanding our real problems and figuring out a solution for them.

I think maybe we sense things going badly wrong between people as groups--that barriers are growing between black and white, male and female, old and young. The old roles and social bonds have broken down, and we have little sense of what other people want from us. We don't know what's safe to say, not even sure we can joke with each other without getting sued.

We mourn the loss of America--that golden age America, when everything seemed possible, and everyone had a fair shot at achieving their dreams, and people worked together. We love those World War II movies where the Irishman and the Jew and the upper-class WASP shared a foxhole and depended on each other for their survival. We miss the sense that we shared a common dream.

We miss the sense that our government was there to protect us. That it would never lie to us. That the people we elected would represent our interests against powerful economic forces, instead of colluding with them.

So maybe it's that I worry about the same things that bother a lot of men. Or maybe I'm speaking to women too, and I just haven't heard about it very much. In which case, send me e-mail. I want to know who else I'm talking to.

These columns are where I do my thinking, where I pin my thoughts down in place and time so that I can examine them. My thinking is always a work in progress, because I'm still learning about the world, still trying to make sense of it. I always consider the evidence. (Indeed, as a librarian, whose job is to deliver information in a neutral way, I am a professional on-the-other-hand-er.) So, please, write me. Argue with me. Tell me about how your world is different. Give me a chance to learn from you.

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NOTE: My thinking is always a work in progress. You could mentally insert all my columns in between these two sentences: "This is something I've been thinking about," and "Does this make any sense to you?" I welcome your thoughts. Please send your comments about these columns to: marylaine at netexpress.net. Since I've written a lot of these, some of them many years ago, help me out by telling me which column you're referring to.

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