My Personal Experiences in Gender Land

The following vignettes are from my life in gender land. I will be adding to them as more come to mind. Feel free to leave a comment describing your own.

Before I married in 1994, virtually every one of the many women I dated between 1980 and 1988 had a better home and car than I had. Most owned their own home while I rented. That is one of the observations I made that led me to become an activist in the so-called quest for gender equality.

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Growing up with two sisters who are three years and six years younger than I am, I remember their occasional bragging about the places their dates took them to. Or complaining: "He can't take me anywhere." Do men feel this pressure to take a woman to fancy places or on extravagant trips to beat their competition?

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Years ago at a singles group, I told a dance partner that women, too, should initiate things between the sexes. They should, for example, do their fair share of asking men to dance. She replied, “Men will just get cocky.” Hmmm. In our misandric culture, I had already heard “Men are cocky” more than a few times. But did my dance partner think men are in fact not cocky but women are because men do virtually all the asking? Somehow I don't think she did. (Many men, too, say women are cocky, especially the attractive ones.) Did she think it OK for women to be cocky but not OK for men? I never found out – she didn't want to dance with me again. Was she threatened by a guy who talked about real, across-the-board gender equality? (Was she yet another member of the “communicative” sex who didn't want to communicate, who wanted a smorgasbord equality from which she could pick the things that benefited her and leave for men the things that didn't?)

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About 20 years ago I suffered a lengthy period of painful tendinitis in my elbow. One day, my then-fiancée had to carry the small microwave we had recently bought and were returning to the store. I remember that as we crossed the parking lot and entered the store, I felt somewhat embarrassed. Did onlookers consider me a lazy, good-for-nothing husband who “made” his wife do the heavy lifting? Did they hold the same contempt for me that many would hold for the man who sits in a chaise lounge sipping a beer while his wife mows the lawn? Did they disdain me as much as an 8-year-old girl did 30 years ago, as I explain in a personal experience I call “Even the Very Young Enforce Sex Roles”?

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I sometimes call my spouse “My Home Improvement Wife.” She is very handy at home when it comes to painting and doing improvements. I help, of course — mostly by staying out of her way. In my first marriage, it was the reverse: I took care of 90 percent of the home repairs and improvements, and my former wife helped mostly by staying out of the way.

Recently, my wife invited her brother and his wife over to see her latest handiwork, painting and wainscoting our smaller bathroom. The brother, after looking it over, obviously was very approving of my sister's work. But instead of complimenting her, he turned to me as I stood aside feeling great pride in my wife's accomplishment, and said, “You should be ashamed of yourself.” If he was joking, his face didn't show it.

So, let's see...instead of feeling proud of my wife, I should have felt ashamed of myself? In my view, what he revealed is that he himself might have felt ashamed had his wife done what mine had done. By shaming me, my brother-in-law in effect told me I the man was supposed to do the improvements and not allow my wife the woman to do it. Of course, he may have shamed me because he thought I had forced my wife (ha!) to do hard, dirty “male” work, as did the 8-year-old girl I mention in the personal experience immediately above.

Such male-shaming illustrates how men can pressure and oppress each other (while feminists and the media take great pains to tell us only how men pressure and oppress women. The truth: both sexes oppress both sexes).

Male-shaming in countries such as Iran is practically a matter of public policy. One of its intents in these countries is to shame the man who does not control his wife. This shaming seems to be effective in compelling the male to exert control over “uppity” women whose competence might shame men, in the way my wife's competence provoked my brother-in-law's shame toward himself, a shame that he deflected onto me, not onto her.

The root of the male-shaming process, I believe, lies in rigid sex-role expectations upon which both men and women derive much of their self-worth. My wife's brother apparently sees home repair work as an expectation from which he derives much of his self-worth. By doing the work himself, he may feel he has worth to his wife. (Understanding all this allowed me instantly to forgive my brother-in-law for trying to make me feel ashamed. But I didn't tell him I forgave him. That might have dumbfounded him, and I could picture him saying, “Huh? You forgive me? You're the one who should be asking for forgiveness!” Such is why I, and probably most men, try to avoid talking about these sorts of gender matters around family!)

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At work in the mid 80s, I sat next to a feminist woman who often read Ms magazine at her desk. She occasionally sighed heavily and groaned, "Oh, I hate men." At the time, I had heard that long-sustained anger, including hate, might be a detriment to one's health. Was that, I wonder, why she died at the early age 59 of leukemia?

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In the mid-1970s, I was working in a very stressful job. My wife (at the time) had been venting considerable anger at me, often exploding over “nothing.” We finally went to a marriage counselor. The counselor looked at us from behind her desk and asked, “So...what brings you two here?” Before I could open my mouth, my wife exclaimed, “I think he should be earning more money!” No complaints about my spending too much time at work, too much time away from her and our five-year-old daughter. No, she wanted me to spend more time at work! She had also been complaining that I didn't do enough around the house. Ideological feminists and the mainstream media speak regularly often about the domineering husband and the cowering, controlled wife.

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I often see a lot of men grocery shopping. But today, August 28, 2007, while I was at Kroger waiting to pay for my cart of groceries, five people were in line, including me. All five were men. I then ran my eyes over the three magazine racks near the checkout. Each rack was brimming over with magazines pitching to women. Not a single magazine catered to men's interests.

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About 25 years ago I learned that women's primary fantasy was to marry a successful man who would provide his wife a beautiful home and gardens. I learned that men's primary fantasy was to marry a beautiful woman.

At about the same time, I held a job as a “field adjuster” in the federal government. The job frequently required me to go out and talk to, and try to obtain settlements with, home owners who had a government-insured, defaulted home-improvement loan. Since we had so many of these loans and so few employees to handle them, I almost exclusively worked the better, higher-income areas that not only were safer but were likely to yield settlements.

Often I entered very fashionable, affluent neighborhoods. Whenever I rang the doorbell of a huge, expensive home, I was struck by how often a homely, overweight housewife answered. My meaning? Even an unattractive woman can fulfill her fantasy of having a husband who provides her a beautiful home in a beautiful neighborhood. I was seeing proof that, contrary to ideological feminists and the mainstream media who implied that only attractive women get the successful men, women who are thoroughly unappealing can also get a man to provide her the lifestyle that only attractive women supposedly acquire. And think about this: every time an unattractive woman fulfills her fantasy, a man does not fulfill his.

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In 1980, my first wife and I divorced and I got custody of my then-9-year-old daughter. I remember getting a lot of raised eyebrows and odd-ball remarks. But the comment that won first prize is in the following incident that took place in 1984:

I always took my daughter grocery shopping with me; it was great daddy-and-daughter time. But one day when she was 13, I went alone. After paying for the cashier, she looked at me and said, "Can I ask you something personal? How old is your wife?"

Said I, "I don't have a wife."

"Well, your girlfriend. How old is she?"

"Which one?" I was dating two women at the time.

"The one you always come in here with."

I squinted. "In here...?” Then my retarded mind got it. “Why....that's my daughter!"

Was the cashier that unaccustomed -- even back in 1984 -- to seeing a father who was always with a child whose mother was not around?

Almost 25 years later in 2004, are things any better for dads who are out alone with their children? We get a hint in Isaac Bailey's column in the Myrtle Beach Sun Times, "'Good dad' role isn't superhuman." Bailey writes, "But I didn't figure out what they were really saying until recently. The three of us, Kyle in a high chair and Lyric in a car seat, were in a restaurant when a waitress asked: 'Did something happen to their mother?' It's almost as though they all think it strange, the sight of a man with his kids when Mom's not around, as though we're alien to the human race."

And many feminists and the mainstream media tell us only women have faced bias. Remember when people thought it strange to see a woman in a "male" job?

All this is instructive. Among other things, it suggests that if the sex roles had been reversed 30 years ago, female employers would have discriminated with equal vigor against men applying for the better-paying "female" positions. (See also "Movie Dads Not Treated As Equals To Moms.")

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Frequently when my wife and I dine out, the maitre d's and waitresses look only at my wife, as if I weren't even there. That happens elsewhere, too. In a grocery store's flower section one day in 2006, I was talking to the sales woman about a plant. When my wife, who had been in another section, suddenly appeared at my side, the woman ceased looking at me and directed all her conversation about the plant to my wife, as if I had suddenly become invisible. Feminists and the mainstream media talk only about how men ignore women.

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In October 2004, I broke my right foot. For a few weeks I had to get around on a walker. Out in public, whenever I approached a restaurant or other facility, people often rushed up to open the door for me. When men did this, I thought: “Hey, this is great. Now I have an idea of what it's like to be a woman!”

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In the mid-1970s, my wife and I and another married couple entered a Downtown Detroit restaurant on the spur of the moment. Immediately the other husband and I were told we were not appropriately dressed and must wear the dull-grey jackets brought out by the maitre d. Our wives were allowed to wear the drab casuals they arrived in. As we sat eating our meal, I felt like a “Niggar” who had been dressed up and temporarily allowed to dine in the “massa's” plantation house.

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When I was single, prospective dates sometimes asked me if I was handy around the house — you know, could I repair the plumbing, make improvements to a home, and so forth. When women ask men that, it is, of course, the equivalent of a man asking a woman if she is a good cook. If feminists say the latter is an example of how men thrust oppressive expectations upon women, what is the former — which feminists never bring up — to men?

tags: female fantasy  male fantasy  gender expectations  maleshaming  misandry  single fatherhood  male invisibility  

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