In the Company of Women

The world of my work-in-progress is populated by females. Each has her own story, her own relationships, her own fears. In a lot of ways, it is the interaction and friendship between the female characters that propels the novel's action forward.

When I conceived of the book's idea, I imagined two females, one forty-ish, one a teenager, thrown into a difficult situation. Men are there--husbands and boyfriends, fathers and brothers--but they are most often on the periphery. And they are often selfish and negligent. This wasn't a conscious choice. In fact, I'd written over 30,000 words when I realized that readers of the book will think I hate men!

Of course, readers of this blog know that's not true: I think the world of the men in my life. But as a writer, I wanted to explore the bonds, spoken and not, between women. I wonder sometimes if men really understand how powerful those bonds are.

In my next book (!), I'll try to make my gender treatment more balanced. If I had trouble getting into the head of a fifteen-year-old girl, imagine the fun I'll have trying to see things from a thirty-year-old man's point of view...

The End of Men?

The Atlantic recently had a fascinating article, "The End of Men." Author Hanna Rosin chronicles and analyzes the shifting workplace and education dynamics and asks, "What if modern, postindustrial society is simply better suited to women?"

The gender imbalance at colleges has been growing: women make up something like 60% of the student body in 4-year bachelor programs. One reason, of course, is that men with a high school degree still make much more money than women with that same diploma. She needs to further her education simply to compete. But also, women seem better prepared for the demands of college. Rosin spoke to some students at the University of Missouri-Kansas City:

Burress, a cute, short, African American 24-year-old grad student who is getting a doctor-of-pharmacy degree, had many of the same complaints I heard from other young women. Guys high-five each other when they get a C, while girls beat themselves up over a B-minus. Guys play video games in each other’s rooms, while girls crowd the study hall. Girls get their degrees with no drama, while guys seem always in danger of drifting away.

This seems an apt metaphor: "drifting away." The comments following the article--many of them critical--suggested that our education system the past twenty or thirty years favors girls. Stereotypical masculine traits are devalued in favor of more feminine ones. Commenter Doug111 wrote,

This now begins in kindergarden[sic], with all male roughousing [sic] of any sort suppressed and belittled. Classes in first grade and on are taught so as to favor girls. Everywhere there are cheers when girls beat out boys and all is done to see that this happens time and again. The emasculation of boys really gets going by junior high when again girls are favored. Final exams are deemphasized. Massive grade inflation encourages diligent consistent plodding performance, which obedient little girls are good at, and gets them As and A+s now with no extra grade given for the ocassionally [sic]brilliant insight, mixed with less than total diligence in mundane assignments and pop quizzes that are typical of how brilliant boys tend to operate, and what the education system used to prize most of all.

He goes on to describe this trend as "positive discrimination." I think he raises interesting points. But I think this is part of a larger paradigm shift, one in which women--more than men--are adapting and taking the initiative. I see young women in school--they have one or two children and, sometimes, an unemployed husband. They are getting this degree to support their family, to gain stability, and more often than not they are working another job at the same time. I see young men--unattached, unburdened by children--drifting, unmotivated.

Toward the end of "The Poisonwood Bible," Orleanna Price, the mother, reflects on men, women, and history. Men, she says, are around for the beginning and the end; the birth and the death. They fire the shot that launches wars, they plant the flags. But women are there, too, between the lines. They're doing the laundry, teaching the kids, and comforting the ill. I think about those articles on marriage from a few months ago that I read and posted about. One of the writers suggested that, usurped of their traditional roles as providers and breadwinners, instead of adapting, many men will turn to hypermasculine behaviors. Violent, misogynistic. Orleanna described the danger of standing still, refusing to change--she was condemning the United States and men in general, and her husband in particular.

I do recommend reading "The End of Men" article in whole - it's long, but worth it.

If 40 is not the new 12, then 29 is not the new 21.

I always enjoy Judith Warner's writing over at the New York Times. Until recently, she penned the weekly column, Domestic Disturbances, in which she wrote about motherhood and modern life. Now she contributes to the Opinionator, where her columns have a similar focus. I like her style and voice - personal, honest, smart - and how she looks for connections between trends and behaviors, using herself and her family as models.

In her most recent column for the Opinionator, "40 Is Not the New 12," Warner describes a piece about bullying that she attempted to write a few years ago. She wanted to visit a girl who had been "particularly cruel" to her in junior high in order to reach some kind of understanding. Warner was unable to locate the "bully," but she did fine another classmate who remembered things differently: Warner wasn't bullied; rather, Warner deserted her and others for a more popular clique.

The piece goes on to describe and reflect on the nature of memories, especially of a time in each of our lives so wrought with daily crises and hormones. She wonders about the impulse of mothers to revisit these experiences, using their daughters as proxies:

These days, I come back a lot to memories of 7th and 8th grade (and the unreliable narrators of those memories), because my elder daughter, Julia, is now in 7th grade, which means, of late, that she lives in a world filled with endless girl dramas of the most unfortunate and, alas, ordinary kind.

Warner suggests that parents, especially--or uniquely?--mothers, want to make sense of their children's experiences, or at the least, help the children make sense of those experiences. Frame them in some kind of narrative, one that allows them to dismiss some experiences and heighten others. But, she concludes,

I’m not sure that our selves really are so continuous. And the experiences of childhood are not really as universal — i.e., as accessible to us as parents — as we’d like to believe.

That is, each of us has a right to our daily traumas; on our own, we'll write our narrative.

I enjoyed reading this piece, but it was the comment section that drew my attention more than Warner's column itself. Many reflected on being bullied, being bullies, or being both. Others wondered about their own children. A few described experiences at lunch with distracted peers, texting their daughters, being BFFs. But one wrote the following:

Maybe it would be good if the economy collapsed totally or we had a total war like WWII so women would have to spend all their time focused on tilling the fields, working in factories or doing something constructive to keep themselves and their families in food, shelter and clothing, leaving them no time to think about the silliness that is the subject of this article. I cannot imagine productive intelligent women (whether holders of one or more degrees or possessing little education) wasting time on such foolishness. Indeed, I'll bet women who were successful mothers in years past never did.

If only women would chop Maslow's hierarchy of needs in half: food, clothing, shelter. None of that silly happiness stuff and, god forbid, self-actualization, this commenter implies.

Actually, I think many of us - men and women alike, though I imagine (maybe wrongly?) that it's women, more so - experience that guilt. We know that there are those with real problems: hunger, homelessness, lack of opportunities. We know that regardless of what's going on in our own life, someone, somewhere, has it far worse. We know it's a relative luxury to wonder about things, to seek meaningful connections. But I also think that this knowledge contributes to our ambivalence - dually holding the desire for better and the fear and guilt of having better.

And I'm realizing that, in general, women aren't encouraged to do and have better in the same way that men are.