YOU JUST DON’T UNDERSTAND ME

            The movie starred Mel Gibson and Helen Hunt. My wife and I loved it. “What Women Want” is a very enjoyable romantic comedy about a male chauvinist pig who can, all of a sudden, hear what women are thinking. It also caused Laura and me to do some thinking about the battle of the genders. So far there is no clear winner, but women seem to be ahead on points…at least that’s what they’d like us to believe.

            Now before any feminine hackles start to rise, let me say that I’d like to see women win the fight, especially if they could do it in the next thirty seconds or so. I’m sick and tired of it all. I would readily admit defeat just to stop all the carnage, but unfortunately, my personal surrender would have no effect on the battle as a whole. I’d break ranks and run away, but that’s tough to do when you’re surrounded. I’ve tried screaming “Please don’t hurt me, I give up!” but the noise of the American Women’s Battle Cry drowns out my feeble shout. You know it. Many of you even utter it from time to time.

“Men just don’t understand us!”

            Ladies, you’re right. We don’t. We absolutely, positively, do not understand women. The statement is a generality that is completely correct, as long as it is not applied to specifics. When it is applied to specifics, it is as absurd as any other sexist, racist, hateful utterance on the planet. Tell me men don’t understand women all day long, I have no problem. But if you tell me that I do not understand women because I am a man, smile.

            Even though I freely admit my guilt and complicity in the ongoing conflict, there are some double standards that irk me a bit. If a woman says “my husband just doesn’t understand me”, the rest of us, male and female alike, are supposed to look at her sympathetically and say “aaawwww”. If a man says “my wife just doesn’t understand me”, the rest of us look around for the poor, unsuspecting barfly he’s saying it to. Which brings me to another point. Be advised, I’m using the term “I” in the broadest possible sense, as a generality applying to men as a group, not to any specific man.

            If it is true that men are from Mars and women are from Venus, then women are not from Venus and Mars. If I do not understand you because we are from different planets, what the hell makes you think you have such a firm grip on what makes me tick? Answer: You don’t.  Difference? I don’t expect you to understand me, and when you don’t, I don’t worry my pretty little head about it.

            There is a great deal of psychobabble out there on how little boys are programmed to be warlike, sidewalk-spitting, crotch-clutching, beetle-browed clods, and more than a little of it is true. Little girls are programmed, too. They are taught to keep some mystery in a relationship, to not give too much of themselves, emotionally or physically, away. They are also taught that they will have to suffer in one way or another at the hands and will of men. Then they are given various visions of prince charming, or vine covered cottages, or perfect picket fences, and told to aspire to them. Women have been taught fear and fantasy. Just like the guys, gals, you bought into the bull. We have all been misled, all of us. Let me say that again. ALL OF US.

            We have had stereotypes thrown at us from earliest memory, and our internal computers were programmed, whether we liked it or not, by generation after generation of people whose only qualification to be parents was the fact that somebody could get somebody else pregnant. We are, for the most part, composites of what we have been told we should be, what we have emulated from experience, or what we have run from because of fear. Even in our overreactions to sex, ours or somebody else’s, we are not consistent. Homosexual men, for the most part, get along with women fine, even love them dearly. Homosexual women are often antagonistic to men, especially those who strive so hard to appear male themselves.

            Let’s get back to the original question. What do women want? I don’t know, and neither do most women, for the very reasons I mentioned earlier. I suspect, in their heart of hearts, it’s much simpler than we have been led to believe. Fortunately, in my life, I have enjoyed association with a number of remarkable women, and what they seemed to most desire is also what most men want, when all the B.S. is scraped away. Love. Men and women don’t have to understand each other to love each other. Parents don’t need to understand their children, or children their parents. Love soars above all that.  It’s up to us to stop pointing fingers and making demands, and realize that while men may never understand women, and women may never understand men, a person can at least come close to understanding another person, even if one is male and the other female. When the generalities are dropped, it ain’t them against us any more. It’s just the two of you, each with the with the standard issue BS that comes with the respective gender, and each with plenty of love to go around once fear gets out of the way. It’s all part of a plan that we understand even less than we understand each other.

EAT A SANDWICH

I’m going to date myself horribly in this piece, so let me admit the disgusting truth up front: I’m old. I have worked hard to reach this age, and the exertion required to continue climbing the ladder of years gets more and more difficult as time goes by but, I suspect, it is not nearly as taxing as the effort in which so many engage to remain young, or the self-abuse and struggle required to remain beautiful. Because I don’t give a rodent’s rectum about appearing to be half my age, and because I feel that those that prize form above function range from the sadly misguided to the laughably ludicrous, I am able to quash any shred of empathy for these poor souls and pass judgment on them without the slightest twinge of guilt. What fun.

While surfing television the other day, I encountered a short report on some terribly vital and celebrated fashion show. I watched a minute or so of the exhibition; stick figured women of indecipherable age slinking up and down an elevated walkway as onlookers photographed them and a commentators spoke of what the “right” people were wearing this season, as they implied that only the alarmingly unaware among us could even consider appearing in public without being draped in one of the magnificent creations on display.

Fashion bugs me. I do not engage in its pursuit. I am not concerned with labels. I do not care if a garment says Hillfiger or hill climber, Prada or nada. I consider those that are dependant upon such trivia to be as laughable as those that are famous for merely being famous. But this time, while watching the parade, my scorn of the fashionistas and the enriching shot of superiority that came with watching such a tableau while brushing dog hair off my Walmart sweatclothes and drinking coffee in the living room, was pushed aside by examining the women skulking up and down the runway. My God, ladies. What’s happened to you? When did such women, many of them only girls actually, so thin as to be emaciated, become beautiful? Did Twiggy start all this?

Those of you old enough to remember Twiggy…think back. How odd we thought she was, almost alien, nearly something from the mothership in Close Encounters. This big-eyed, no breasted, switch of a girl…asexual…boyish…painfully thin. Different? Sure. Attractive? Hardly. I have a tendency to shout “Eat a sandwich!” at these emaciated denizens of the vomitorium. Evidently Twiggy heard me. Some years later she appeared in a movie with Robin Williams and actually had a figure. Well past thirty, she was cute, womanly, attractive, and rather normal looking.

Let’s go back a decade or two before the madness struck, and recall some of the sex symbols of old. We will forego Marilyn Monroe and Jane Mansfield, for they were nearly human cartoons of sexuality, and look at some others. Gina Lolabrigida, Elke Sommer, Ursela Andress, Jane Russell, Senta Berger, Ann Margaret…no walking skeletons these, no body builders either. And let’s not forget another shining example, Sophia Loren. Lovely in youth, outstanding in adulthood, amazing in age, giving lie to the bull that women must be young and thin to be attractive. It is simply not true, and yet we have sold this bill of goods to society’s daughters for several decades now. Who’s at fault? All of us of course, to varying degrees, but possibly women more than men. I hear the screams of protest, but think. Unlike many of the other species on this planet, it is the female human who most often displays color and plumage to attract suitors. It wasn’t always that way. Men wore makeup, wigs and high heels first, but over the last few hundred years, in this society at least, the gals have blown the guys out of the water! And these same marvelous creatures, these same wonderful women, dressed to the nines, made up fit to kill, tucked and plucked, surged and purged, complain bitterly if the wrong man leers, weep if they gain two pounds, and scrabble until their French manicured nails break trying to hold on to youth, a complete and total impossibility.

 

And men, don’t think for one minute that we’re off the hook. Many of us deplore age in women, turning instead to ending longtime relationships in favor of trophy wives, or pursue arm charm and eye candy, lying to and cheating on someone else while stealing from ourselves, in the vain belief that associating with attractive youth will keep us young and attractive, too. We, men and women, tend to focus on the perishable and neglect the substantial. Age is ugly. Youth is beautiful. And, as we all know, youth is slim, firm, and taught. It is also temporary. But, for only the giving of money and the acceptance of pain, we can reshape, rebuild, restore, remodel and, hopefully, reclaim lost youth with the pinch of a needle, the slash of a scalpel, and the denial of the inevitable. 

Speaking of the denial of the inevitable, regard Suzanne Somers. Some of her personal history is horrible. She is a survivor, no doubt about that. She is also a caricature of her former self. Like someone who keeps adding chrome and accessories to a motorcycle until the madness of accomplishment takes over and the motorcycle itself can no longer even be seen, she has so disfigured herself with surgery and stem cells as to look nearly like something from the Muppets Take Manhattan. I don’t know if this aliment has a name, but I find it sad. Sadder still, any of us run the risk of catching it.

My wife of over forty years, the coveted Laura, was a model when I met her. An attractive girl with a pretty face and a lovely figure, mindful of a young Shirley MacLaine. She’d been the whole route, from duct tape in strategic places to the eternal smile that comes from applying Vaseline to one’s teeth before hitting the runway, thought it ridiculous and, with at least ten years of easy work and good money ahead of her, she quit.

She and I were watching the tube the other evening when a makeup commercial came on, a lovely young face with pouting lips and gleaming eyes, extorting how marvelous the product was in a seductive whisper.

            “Fourteen,” Laura said.

            I responded with the typical male reply. “Huh?”

            “Fourteen,” she repeated. “Maybe younger.”

            “What?”

            “All you have to do is make up little kids to look older and it drives the older women nuts. They pay through the nose trying to look like their daughters. It was starting when I was in the business. Just makes you sick, doesn’t it?”

            It makes a lot of us sick. It makes some of us dead. Anorexia and bulimia are not the problem. They are merely a couple of the symptoms. It comes back to societal focus. We actually believe that something outside ourselves is responsible for our happiness. Oh, to be one size smaller, or one decade younger. God, just to have bigger boobs or a smaller butt, or a larger home, or a younger wife or a fancier car, or dozens of other things that are outside us that we’re convinced will make inside us all better.

Of course, I’m not saying we should neglect our bodies, we shouldn’t. We have to live in them. Nor do I think that cosmetic surgery is completely wrong. That is simply not true. But, if you believe that clothes make the man or woman, you are what you drive, young is good and old is bad, or that your body is really who and what you are, if you can still think independently at all, perhaps you should consider re-thinking things a bit. There is one particular hazard that affects all of us, I’m afraid. While I do not believe that the devil necessarily wears Prada, I do believe that the fashion fire-lover is out there, watching, waiting to pounce. Any of us are available to his wiles. Should you encounter old scratch while walking down the street, do not issue that immortal phrase, “Devil! Get thee behind me!” Sorry. Those jeans really do make your ass look big.

After I watched the snippet of the fashion show that started all this excess verbiage, the regular program returned to the TV. A talk show of some variety. The current guest was the lovely Keira Knightly. Beautiful girl, funny, sweet, poised, popular. Keira, my very dear, if not for your sake, then for ours, EAT A SANDWICH!