The Male Member. Third and Final in a series: a California community college professor’s essay below caps the third in my compilation of articles on a theme: kvetching about gringas based on insightful, first hand observations. Many thanks to the actual authors of the articles.
My previous two threads were:
“To Women Everywhere from a Man Who’s Had Enoughâ€
https://costaricaticas.com/phpBB2/vi ... php?t=7269
and
“Wisdom from U. of CA, SF Center for Gender Equityâ€
https://costaricaticas.com/phpBB2/vi ... php?t=7274
The current article below can be found at:
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.c ... 01&sc=1000
Bear in mind the year it was written.
The Male Member
Jaime O'Neill
Sunday, July 14, 2002
Like so many things in our lives, this tale begins in the 1960s, a time when sexual inhibitions fell away. Women were encouraged to shed hypocritical reserve. Orgies were much discussed. The word "promiscuity" became a quaint anachronism. Monogamy came to be seen as stale, bourgeois, Victorian. The phrase "swinging singles" was heard throughout the land.
Everyone was doing the Twist, a dance popular because anyone could do it. The topless craze swept the nation. Sexual positions once known only to contortionists were practiced from Buffalo to Boise. The concept of "free love" was retrieved from the bohemian fringes of the 1920s, dusted off, and put back into play. For those of you too young to remember, it was called "the sexual revolution." It started about two weeks after I got married.
Now flash forward. Suspicion and distrust run deep between men and women. A dozen or more years of male bashing have filled the afternoon talk shows. Sexual harassment cases are cropping up all over. The nation is having a fit of giggles over a severed penis. I am newly separated from my wife of many years, and I am, most assuredly, a babe in the woods on the dating scene. Those woods are dark and deep, and in those woods women are learning to run with wolves.
The majority of men are dolts who don't understand women. People of my gender are interested in "only one thing." We are childish, brutish, churlish, perfidious, untrustworthy, puerile and insensitive. We like wet T-shirts, trucks with 4-on-the-floor and belching contests. We are mindlessly competitive and aggressive. Our personal hygiene is suspect and our table manners are atrocious. We never put the toilet seat down and we leave our underwear on the bathroom floor for somebody else to pick up.
I know. Phil and Maury and Montel and Geraldo told me so.
So did my therapist, a septuagenarian with a limited practice and a pronounced lisp. As a corrective to all my toxic testosterone, he puts me in with a group of five women, all of them in therapy because of some calamity in their lives directly traceable to a man. Or several.
We meet at the therapist's house every Thursday night for three hours: the hoary psychic healer, five pre-menopausal women, and me, the male member.
What do I have to fear? Women are kind, nurturing, invariably sweet-natured.
They recognize their sisterhood and are always good to one another. Women are cooperative, ego-less team players in pursuit of the common good. Their understanding of life's mysteries is far deeper than men's. They are more in touch with the Earth and the cosmic cycles. Despite exploitation and discrimination, they mature faster, live longer and control more of the national wealth. They are a unique minority group in that, collectively, they outnumber everybody else. Their favored amusements include quiet talks in front of the fireplace, monitoring their caloric intake, cuddling kittens, making things nice for everyone and walking on beaches at sunset in an environmentally unobtrusive way.
I know. Oprah told me so.
So does my therapist. Given my gender, I feel privileged to get to hang out with a bunch like that, even at group therapy rates. With patience, I would get them to see that I wasn't like those other men, those animals. I would convince these women to see me as a person, not as just another repugnant representative of my gender. After all, in the war between the sexes, I was definitely a draftee. Now, with the battle going against us men, I would desert, shamelessly go over to the other side, renounce the lost cause. My daughters, my sister, my aunts, my mom and my estranged wife were all women, and I liked every one of them.
Besides, what had men done for me lately? Or ever? Coaches had pushed me to abuse my body. School principals had detained me, excoriated me, paddled me. Presidents had wanted to send me off to foreign lands where people I didn't know would shoot at me. Bosses wanted me to work cheap in crummy and often dangerous environments. More than once, my brethren had tried to steal women away from me. Friends wanted to borrow money, or take it from me at poker or bar dice. They wanted me to go with them to cold and uncomfortable places in order to kill small animals. Their conversations about internal combustion engines or batting averages bored me. And even I wasn't too crazy about their table manners.
Guys? I could live without them.
But even the briefest time without the companionship of a woman sent me into a panic. My self-worth plummeted; my sense of personal failure soared. Topping it off, there was the pain of marital discord. For those of you who haven't experienced that, it hurts. It hurts so much even guys can feel it.
So what better place to be on Thursday nights than in the company of a kindly old therapist and five members of a gender known for its genetically encoded compulsion to compassion?
On the first night, we all introduce ourselves and sketch in our stories, the rocky paths that converged in therapy. Faith, Hope, Charity, Prudence and Shiva (not their real names) are all women who loved too much, who gave too much, who loved the wrong men for the right reasons, or vice versa. Variously, they had gotten tangled up with alcoholics, sex addicts, dissemblers, ego shredders, philanderers and other assorted scoundrels. At work, men refused to take them seriously. Their fathers hadn't paid them enough attention, or had paid them too much attention, had set standards so high they were doomed to failure. Like Trenton, New Jersey, their collective motto was: "We Make, and the World Takes."
As the tales unfold, I am borne down by guilt. What scum these men were, I think. I would never have behaved in such ways, I think. Charity is actually kind of cute, I think.
After each recitation of woe, the therapist asks how we feel about what we heard. Unction is offered by all, and no one more unctuous than I.
"What would you know about it?" Prudence says.
"Men are [universally disrespected body part here]," Shiva says.
"Why are you trying so hard to be ingratiating?" the therapist lisps.
"Men just don't get it," Hope rejoins.
"Piss off," Charity purrs.
Et tu, Charity?
That is the tone of the first several weeks. It is my medicine, I figure, and since it is fairly bitter, it must be good for me. These are the dues for my failure at marriage. These women are teaching me something; I just have to wait until it dawns on me what it is.
Just before the fifth session, I learn that my estranged wife is seeing another man, one I know to be a particularly odious specimen. Gaining information of this kind is about as much fun as having your eyeballs sandpapered. Now I have a woe to match anyone's. I can scarcely wait for the session to begin, so anxious am I to purge my pain, to bathe in the balm of these women whose tribe I have joined.
"You were too good for her anyway," they will say.
"She never appreciated what she had," they will say.
"Forget her," they will say, "take us."
"You're a prince, and you're no longer neurotic," the therapist will say, and he'll refund my money.
There are salty tears in my eyes when I tell the group my superheated imaginings of my wife with her new paramour. "How could she?" I wonder aloud. "With him?" The divorce papers haven't even been served yet.
"Maybe he's a good dancer," Prudence suggests.
"He's bound to be a lot more fun than a mope like you," Shiva says.
"She's getting on with her life," Hope says, and Charity gives her a high- five.
"You've got to stop letting your emotions be controlled by what other people do," says the therapist.
"But, but, but . . ." I say, and then they move on to discuss Shiva's hatred of the color blue.
"That'th very interesthing, Thiva," the therapist says.
Two nights later, my phone rings. This, in itself, is a fairly novel event. It's Shiva. Could we get together for a drink?, she wonders. Shiva is the scariest woman in the group.
What is it that makes a woman scary to a man? Perhaps it is the fear of rejection. It might be the fear of falling under her spell, of losing one's self. In Shiva's case, it might be the vague sense one has that she's assertive, sexually insatiable and inclined to touchiness should one fail to meet her needs. Or maybe it's the T-shirt she sometimes wears that reads: "A woman needs a man the way a fish needs a bicycle." You make the call.
I am five minutes early to meet her. Loneliness will do that to a person. Shiva is 20 minutes late, but when she arrives I hardly know her. Her hair is down, in profusion, rampant; her Birkenstocks replaced by pumps. Her ample hips are swathed in a billowy green skirt. She is wearing a red peasant blouse.
And earrings, also red.
I take these as signs.
It turns out that Shiva likes me. A lot. The problem is, she is more than a little bit crazy. My estranged wife once said that a woman would have to be crazy to get involved with me, but I'd shrugged it off as being an example of the good-natured ribbing couples engage in when their marriages are going through rough patches.
But here is Shiva, and each moment with her brings new evidence of her craziness. Like twisting a tendril of her hair around her index finger until it gets tight enough to cut off the circulation. Like getting very angry when she thinks I am paying too much attention to the cocktail waitress. Like following up that anger by reaching across the table and caressing my face. Perhaps I shouldn't be surprised, seeing as how I'd met her in therapy, but I am in the same group, and I'm not crazy. You'll just have to trust me on this.
Nelson Algren has a line: "Never eat at a place called Mom's, never play poker with a man called Doc, and never go to bed with a woman whose troubles are worse than your own." I don't go to bed with Shiva, though not going to bed with her isn't easy. She wants to go to bed with me, and I am not good at rejection, neither in the taking nor in the giving. Plus, I fear Shiva's wrath.
Did I mention that she is scary?
The next thing I know, we are at her apartment. In the kitchen, a trail of ants is busily expropriating sugar from a bowl that is black with them. "Ant problem?" I say. "Oh, they're no problem," she says. "They don't eat much."
I could tell her I am impotent. A war wound. An industrial accident. Or that my impotence was brought on by the pain of separation. No. That won't work. Women think they can fix impotence. It will only add fuel to the fire. And she might bring the subject up in the group.
I could tell her I am gay, that my repressed homosexuality had emerged to destroy my marriage. No. That won't work. Women think they can fix that, too. Especially a woman like Shiva.
I could tell her that I am getting back with my wife. It might work. Most women respect the sanctity of marriage and back off, I reason. But I'd just told the group that my wife is seeing another man.
Meanwhile, Shiva slips off her pumps, lights candles, pours wine and puts on music. Well, not music, exactly. It was Kenny G.
The place is redolent of patchouli, musk and that ammonia smell ants give off. I linger in the doorway between the kitchen and the candlelit living room.
Shiva sways her hips to the music, does a thing belly dancers do, rippling her fingers so that each of them beckons. "Dance with me, big boy."
Big boy? Moi?
"Shiva," I say, "you're a very attractive woman . . ." but by then I am lurching around the coffee table, locked in Shiva's embrace, her hair tickling my nose.
I am, quite literally, saved by the bell. The phone.
"Don't you want to get that?"
"The machine'll pick it up," Shiva says.
And the machine does, broadcasting the caller's voice into the room.
"Thiva, darling, my wife knows about uth." Then there's a sob. "I've got to thee you."
It's a sublimely embarrassing moment, all the more so because I, of course, recognize the voice as that of my therapist and guide in matters of the heart and soul.
So ends my evening with Shiva. My therapy, too. The therapist's wife will no longer permit the sessions to take place in what is soon to be her house alone. The therapist's new bachelor apartment is too small and too unfurnished for the purpose. It takes another year or so, but my wife and I finally reunite, and are reunited still. I have yet to find a connection between the therapy and our reconciliation.
From the foregoing, I have learned the following:
-- When seeking comfort from women, seek that comfort from one woman, not from a group.
-- The sexual revolution is over. We lost. "We" meaning everybody.
-- Don't date people in your therapy group, especially if you're the therapist.
-- If you want to understand women, you have to gain that understanding one woman at a time. Women differ, one from another.
-- The world is a slippery and disordered place for the newly single. If you've been married for a long time, you've probably forgotten just how disordered that is.
-- And last, but certainly not least: It's hard to dance to Kenny G.
Jaime O'Neill teaches at Butte College near Oroville.
Login
Register
FAQ
Search
Calendar
Pura Vida 
