It’s not uncommon to have a “gender divide” in discussions of feminism, sexuality, or marriage. Rarely, however, has the divide been as stark in my comments section as it is beneath my post last Thursday about men and “emotion work” in marriage.
One thing that tends to happen in these discussions is a revisiting of the nature/nurture argument. In particular, many men make the claim that women are simply hardwired to “do emotion work better.” They insinuate that it’s unreasonable for women (or their pro-feminist allies) to demand that men “behave like women” and learn to talk openly and freely about their feelings.
Of course, many of these same men express frustration with their girlfriends and wives about sex. When, say, a wife or girlfriend shows less interest in sex than her guy, or perhaps seems to have some reticence about acting out one of his fantasies, the same guy who insists that he is “naturally” less verbal than his female partner insists that she “work through her sexual issues”. It is a pop culture stereotype that men have higher sex drives than women and that women have a greater need for emotional connection, and like most stereotypes, it’s perhaps partly grounded in truth. But what I see happen a lot in the relationships and marriages I know is a kind of profound inconsistency on the part of the husband/boyfriend — when it comes to excusing his own unwillingness to do “emotional relationship maintenance”, he explains it away with biology; when it comes to his female partner’s “sexual inhibitions” (which may simply be an unwillingness to fulfill his needs whenever he feels them), he insists that this is something she “needs to work through.”
I am convinced to my core that both men and women have enormously powerful libidos. Sex drives may vary in intensity from person to person, but that variation has less to do with gender and far more to do with individual preference. Almost all of us have a capacity to delight in sexuality. Similarly, almost all of us have the ability to express ourselves verbally; we all have the capacity to accurately describe our inner emotional terrain. The problem is obvious: in our culture, we shame and shut down young women’s sexuality to the point that many have a hard time acknowledging that they have the capacity for eros. At the same time, we shame and shut down young men who are too freely expressive with their emotions.
“Slut” and “fag” are words that whip the two genders into line; the fear of being “dirty” leaves many young (and not so young) women profoundly disconnected from their own authentic sexuality. These young women may have a sense of themselves as objects of desire, but they all too often have been shamed out of their own sexual subjectivity. In almost exactly the same way, their boyfriends and brothers have been brutalized by the cult of contemporary American masculinity. The “fear of faggotry” not only causes young men to hide their tears, it eventually leads to a kind of emotional frigidity that leaves them profoundly disconnected.
All over America, there are heterosexual couples having sex. Far too often, a key issue in the sexual relationship is that the woman “doesn’t feel anything.” She wants to enjoy sex, she’s attracted to her guy, but somehow, things just don’t end up as exciting for her as they do for him. Sometimes, she fakes it, or she’s passive. She feels guilty, perhaps, or resentful. Often, she just feels frustrated and a little bit cheated.
And all over America, there are men and women trying to have a conversation. And the guy is trying (maybe) to connect emotionally with his wife or girlfriend. He wonders why the words seem to come so easily for her, why her tears flow more quickly than his. He loves her, but when he looks inside of himself, he isn’t sure what he sees. He wonders if he’s just shallow, or numb, or some sort of sociopath. Maybe he feels guilty. And maybe he feels a little frustrated at his own lack of emotional vocabulary; maybe he feels resentful at the woman in his life for “wanting so much emotional connection” all the time.
Look, I’m doing some whopping stereotyping. Relationship advice manuals do this all the time, of course. But the point I want to make is that we make a dreadful mistake in our culture when we assume that women will never be as randy as men, and that men will never be as emotionally intuitive as women. From early childhood, we shut down women’s sexuality and men’s emotional sensitivity; in school, peers use terms like “whore” and “queer” to reinforce the point that certain things (female sexuality, male sensitivity) are taboo. And we then launch a generation of young women who don’t know how to have an orgasm and a generation of young men who don’t know how to connect to their deepest, most authentic feelings. Worse, we assume that this is “just the way it is”, and we begin to believe in the lie of complementarianism, in which each spouse becomes chiefly responsible for one specific compartment of a shared life, a compartment in which the other is neither expected nor allowed.
I’m being a bit crass here, but I want to make this point clear. We need to do more to raise our young women to be comfortable with their sexuality, with their anger, with their appetites for food. We need to do more to raise our young men to express their pain, their hurt, their anxiety. We don’t need any more “people-pleasers” or “sturdy oaks.” I’ve been the sturdy oak married to a people-pleaser, and it’s nothing short of sheer hell — alienation, distance, misunderstanding, resentment. My job as a human being is to become as emotionally complete and multi-faceted as possible. It’s my wife’s job to do the same, and to a very great extent, we can each play the role of the other’s cheerleader in that process. But in the end, we are each fully responsible for our own completion.
My job as a human being is to become as emotionally complete and multi-faceted as possible. It’s my wife’s job to do the same, and to a very great extent, we can each play the role of the other’s cheerleader in that process. But in the end, we are each fully responsible for our own completion.
This seems to be the part that stumps people. They can’t imagine why two COMPLETE people would want to get married. It is based, I think, in the “romantic” notion of 1+1 equals 1. There is also the probability that some people don’t want to do the work or don’t know how to do the work so they fall back on the 1+1 equals 1 because we are complementary equation.
Well, when it comes to math, they forget that it’s multiplication, not addition, that counts in relationship.
1×1=1
1/2 x 1/2 = 1/4.
Two complete people, guardians of each other’s solitude and cheerleaders for each other’s continued growth, can form an amazing uni-one. Two half people are headed for trouble, each feeling trapped and “less than”. In some sense, they’re right.
It never fails to amaze me how often a woman’s reduced interest in sex–whether it’s “just the way it is” or a product of social conditioning–fails to manifest itself until AFTER she has a wedding ring on her finger.
Just as it never fails to amaze many women that the attentive, thoughtful, affectionate man she thought she married disappeared around the same time.
Chief, let’s not escalate this into a blame game. This is about socialization.
What never fails to amaze me is how two otherwise and supposedly reasonable human beings can both believe that if they go through a ritual, get some rice thrown at them, eat an overpriced and bad cake things will change. Even more so that the other one is the only one who needs to change. And Even more so they will stand there in shock and disbelief and in a perfect snit at the slightest hint that they might be expected to come halfway and do some changing of their own.
“They need to do this” and “I have already done my half” are not only signs the marriage is doomed, they are most of the time lies and/or self-deceptions as well.
And yes, the poster boy for failed marriages is doling out advice on marriage. Please do note I don’t tender advice on how marriages can succeed, but observations on how they fail.
Gonz, in everything I do, I am living out the principles I profess to the best of my abilities. Ask athletes, politicians, and scientists: we often learn a great deal from our failures.
This is a bit iffy in the way it approaches drawing a false equivalence between these two areas, just because they’re both unbalanced between the genders - doing twice the emotional work is exhausting, whereas having twice the orgasms is, well, kind of fun, actually. And while feeling half the emotions your partner does means that they do more emotional work, feeling half the sexual pleasure your partner does…means you do more ’sexual work.’ It reads like even though you deplore men’s and women’s artificially created deficits, and you don’t want them to persist, you still want them to come out even somehow, to match up symmetrically, and they don’t.
My concern with your comparison of men’s stereotypical attitudes to emotions and women’s stereotypical attitudes to sex, as you present them, is that it could be taken to imply this: just as men ought to do the emotional work that women demand, women ought to work on fulfilling the sexual demands of men. That if a guy invests in emotional work within a relationship, he has the right to expect his girlfriend (wife) to go along with his sexual fantasies.
I understand that what you are probably wanting to bring across is that there is some ideal level of emotional maintenance that relationships require, and there is some ideal level of sexual liberation and pleasure that is healthy for the parties in a relationship; and that if either men or women have a longer way to go to reaching this level in a relationship, they should work on this for the benefit of all. But you might want to emphasise that these ideal levels are not equivalent to the woman’s idea of emotional connection, and the man’s idea of sex - that these levels may need to be negotiated within the context of each relationship (requiring also that the negotiation is conducted between two equally powerful partners).
In practical terms, there’s no question that each couple will have to negotiate what works, as Anna says, between two equally powerful partners.
I’m not sure I buy the notion that while sex is fun, emotion work isn’t also a deep source of fulfillment. We tend to perceive both as obligation at different times, but doing our work to overcome our own programming can go a long way towards alleviating that sense of being burdened.
Overall a great article. You do, of course, make some sweeping generalizations and compare apples and oranges, but still some very good points made here.
Soph apparently hasn’t heard of masturbation.
It never fails to amaze me how often a woman’s reduced interest in sex–whether it’s “just the way it is” or a product of social conditioning–fails to manifest itself until AFTER she has a wedding ring on her finger.
Interestingly, Chief, that happened to me in my first marriage. I couldn’t figure out what my problem was–clearly I *had* a libido before marriage, why did I suddenly never want sex anymore? It wasn’t until I DTMFA (and discovered that woo, I really DID like sex after all) that I realized the problem wasn’t hormones or Magic Ring Poisoning; it was that my husband was an asshole and I didn’t particularly want to be used as a masturbation device by an asshole. (And yes, he changed into a complete asshole *after* we got married.)
For spouses who aren’t assholes, I recommend these articles, which are a lot nicer and more positive than I’m generally inclined to be.
My job as a human being is to become as emotionally complete and multi-faceted as possible. It’s my wife’s job to do the same, and to a very great extent, we can each play the role of the other’s cheerleader in that process.
Or each other’s crutch, bandage, and/or fortress of solitude, for those of us walking wounded who managed to find each other.
Sure, but bandages are designed to heal, not to be permanent — we can often heal our wounds in marriage, but too often, we tend to use love as a narcotic to mask our pain rather than as an incentive to do the hard work of healing and moving forward.
I would compare it more to a little liquid courage to get you to push your own envelope.
But then, it does not sound like you’ve had much trouble pushing your own envelope, Hugo. :)
No, I found a letter opener when I was about 13 and started cutting holes in that envelope…
I like the math analogy. I think that sums (or is that multiplies?) it up nicely. I had a hard time following you in the previous thread, but now I think I have a better mental model of what you are trying to get at.
Of course, I thought marriage was more like Fourier Analysis - like a wave with various frequencies of ups and downs.
Your argument, as I hear it goes something like this:
Our appetites for sexuality are varied and intense. It is only shame that suppresses it in women.
Our ability for emotional self expression is equally varied. It is only shame that suppresses it in men.
Therefore, if we can only release ourselves from this shame barrier, then men can be more expressive and women can be more sexual.
Men can apply themselves more diligently to emotional work. I think they would even get significant results. Furthermore, I agree with you that pretending there’s no natural barrier to emotional discovery may be a good idea. We can apply ourselves with optimism, free from imagined barriers. However, if there really are limits, people are going to be disillusioned when they try harder and harder and just don’t make any further progress.
You haven’t provided any arguments against the hard-wire position except to say you don’t like it. That doesn’t make it false.
What is true is that well before we hit our natural limit, there is still much good ground to cover.
Well, the hard-wire position strikes me as a classic cop-out to avoid responsibility. Folks love talking about the role of biology because it becomes a perfect excuse for refusing to do the hard work of transforming their own nature, becoming more complete, loving, effective, human beings.
Let me recommend my longest post on the subject: http://hugoschwyzer.net/2006/07/07/biology-and-bladders-excuses-and-explanations-why-im-tired-of-hearing-about-testosterone/
You haven’t provided any arguments against the hard-wire position
It’s not Hugo’s job to prove a negative.
Soph apparently hasn’t heard of masturbation.
No, but I’ve heard of non sequiturs!
I’ll tell you a secret: when men are alone, they — are you ready for this? they have emotions, just as women masturbate. It’s true!
It is also, however, stunningly irrelevant to Hugo’s points, which apply to heterosexually coupled behavior, not solitary splendor.
Or, if you were talking about men masturbating, not women (it’s impossible to tell what you meant), that’s also irrelevant, because men who happily go off and do that instead of sleep with partners who have to work at enjoying it are…not what Hugo was writing about.
Hugo: I’m not sure I buy the notion that while sex is fun, emotion work isn’t also a deep source of fulfillment.
I said orgasms vs. emotions, not sex vs. emotions, for a reason. You were talking about heterosexual, coupled sex - both partners in such an enterprise are, by definition, having equal amounts of sex. But they are not having equal amounts of sexual pleasure, in the archetypally/stereotypically gendered situation you laid out.
And with ‘emotional work,’ if you are working through your husband’s anger, stress, frustration, impatience, depression, and anxiety as well as your own, that is truly not a deep source of fulfilment. Putting his unspoken affection for you into words and into a context may be fulfilling as all get out, but it that not the main thing people mean by “emotional work.” Repressed emotions are likely to be unpleasant, a great deal of the time, as is coping with them. Sex, if you’re having it only when you actively want to, is almost always pleasant. So: your picture of a stereotypically socialized woman is the person who does the unpleasant emotional labor and the person who has the unpleasant sex. That’s why the two supposed deficits in the genders aren’t symmetrical.
It’s not Hugo’s job to prove a negative.
The burden of proof is on anyone who makes an assertion, whether or not that assertion is a positive or negative.
And negatives can be proved:
P1: When my car is out of gas, it will not run.
P2: My car is running.
C: Therefore, my car is NOT out of gas.
The burden of proof is on anyone who makes an assertion
Correct. Which is why if Michael T wishes to argue that men and women are “hard-wired,” he needs to prove that assertion. Saying that Hugo has a weak counter-argument doesn’t mean anything if the original argument is itself weak.
And negatives can be proved
Well, yes. “Can be proved” != “I can say whatever I want and it’s your job to prove me wrong, or I’m right.”
Sophonisba, thanks for re-phrasing your earlier statements. I think you make a great point.
That is all. Back to lurking.
Sophonisba, that’s fair — all the more reason to continue to challenge men to do this vital emotional work so that women won’t have to do it for them.
If someone makes an argument based in the truth of a premise that is unproven, it is called “begging the question.”
Anybody here ever see”The Road to Wellville” from 1994, from the book of the same name by T. Corahgessen Boyle? It’s loosely based on actual people and events, about the health spa run by John Harvey Kellog (inventor of Corn Flakes) during the early 1900s. Kellog had very unconventional methods for his spa, mostly involving a vegetarian diet, colonic irrigation and enemas featuring all kinds of unusual substances. It wasn’t a very good movie–mostly enema jokes and juvenile sex gags, it was like paying $7 to see a protracted episode of “Benny Hill.”
But one scene stuck in my mind. Hopkins as Kellog is delivering a speech to new guests at his spa and showing off two wolves. One is your standard, meat eating, not particularly people-friendly wolf that I guess Kellog supposedly kept around for demonstration purposes. The other was, I believe, called “The Kellog Wolf,” essentially the spa’s mascot. It’s weak, enemic looking but docile enough. Kellog pets and brags on the beast, talking about how the “much loved animal” has been fed nothing but grains and a vegetarian diet, and is now harmless and domesticated–his point being that the diet he prescribes can help other overcome whatever ails them. It looks sickly and it seems to react to human contact with that combination of cringing fear and pathetic gratitude a whipped dog will give you but yeah, it’s technically still a wolf, and it’s tamed and eating veggies.
Assuming that the wolf really existed and wasn’t just a fabrication of the novelist or the screenwriters, I believe the poor creature’s trainers and keepers did indeed eventually get it to start eating and behaving in a domesticated manner–by keeping it in a cage and starving it of meat, allowing it only grains, fruits and vegetables. Later, they probably put a plate of meat in one corner of the room, a plate of veggies in the other and praised it when it went for the veggies but punished it if it tried to eat the meat. Eventually, hunger and the desire to get these damn humans to leave it the hell alone motivated the wolf to go against every bit of it’s natural programming, everything the world meant it to be. It started eating vegetables and reacting to people around it the way a domesticated housecat might.
There are parallels between this and the “reparative therapy” a lot of Christian fundamentalists and a very few psychologists advocate. Supposedly they can turn gay folks hetero with behavioral modification, aversion therapy and lots of ol’ time religion. I guess it works in a sort of half-assed way, in that sometimes they can get a gay person into a relationship with a straight person where they’re living together, having sex and the gay person is no longer having gay sex. From what I’ve read and heard the gay person also usually feels frustrated, unfulfilled, ends up bitter towards his or her hetero partner and frequently ends up returning to the gay lifestyle but, hey, the change has still been made, at least for a while.
And yep, there are real parallels between the Kellog Wolf and what some women in general and many feminists in particular seem to want hetero men to be these days. Much is made of the need for men to do more “emotional work” in a relationship, a term that still hasn’t been defined to my satisfaction. Does this mean thinking about things, feeling about things, reacting to things exactly as a woman would? I can tell you from both experience and observation that women would find this satisfying, briefly. Then they’ll want their man to “act like a man” again. When he’s done this for awhile they’ll want him back to Mr. Sensitive. Repeat, repeat.
Among all this talk of men changing, by the way, there’s a real lack of motivation. To make a woman happy? As above, it ain’t going to happen. Hugo, particularly, loves to preach on how men CAN change. He’s weak on providing the reasons why we SHOULD. To put it crassly, what’s in it for us?
Ladies, if you want a partner who acts just like a woman maybe you’d better do a little reverse-reparative therapy of your own and try actually being with a woman. Whatever the case, you really don’t have any right to ask a person to change the basic elements of who he is. I believe the Kellog Wolf should not have had to change just to make John Kellog happy. I believe gay people shouldn’t have to change just to make some Christian fundamentalists happy. And I believe men shouldn’t have to change just to make some feminists happy.
I’m not a wolf. And wolves would have a much harder time being vegan than humans — totally different stomachs and digestive systems.
The Chief asks:
Hugo, particularly, loves to preach on how men CAN change. He’s weak on providing the reasons why we SHOULD. To put it crassly, what’s in it for us?
Well, that’s a bit like white bigots in the South asking what was in it for them if they gave up segregation, but I’ll bite. Time permitting, answering that question is my next lengthy post.
So a man’s basic nature is analogous to that of a white bigot?
Your blog, I guess you can say that if you want. I feel compelled to point out that a similar false analogiy between racism and a woman’s nature from anybody else would probably get a ban or deletion, though.
Chief, that’s incredible insulting to imply that men’s “Basic nature” is an asshole.