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THE PURSUIT OF WORLDLINESS A blog by Barry Edelson CRUEL JOKE 2:Sex Is Up to UsANTAGONĒ Now that is what I call a beautiful woman. QUERIOUS Where? ANTAGONĒ The blond standing there, by the counter. QUERIOUS Oh, yes. I wouldn't say beautiful, though. But certainly very attractive. ANTAGONĒ You're quibbling. QUERIOUS Am I? Isn't there a difference between beautiful and attractive? ANTAGONĒ Does it matter? QUERIOUS Only aesthetically. ANTAGONĒ My point exactly. The overwhelming majority of women in the world, regardless of their looks, are attractive to the overwhelming majority of men. QUERIOUS But some are in fact beautiful, whereas others are merely pleasant to look at. ANTAGONĒ Yes, but for all intents and purposes, what does it matter? Nature has conspired to trap men into noticing nearly every woman. QUERIOUS You say it as though it were a curse! ANTAGONĒ It is. QUERIOUS Oh, come on. Observing the opposite sex is one of life's great pleasures. We enjoy physical beauty. What's wrong with that? ANTAGONĒ Nothing, except that it puts us at odds with society. QUERIOUS How so? ANTAGONĒ The rules of social behavior demand fidelity to one's mate. But the rules of nature, as dictated by the necessity of propagating the species, demand that men find great numbers of women sexually alluring. It's not just the appreciation of lovely features that propels us to contemplate women at all hours of the day and night. That's just a means to an end. QUERIOUS The end beings reproductive success? ANTAGONĒ Bingo. QUERIOUS So, it's a balance we have to achieve. I see little difficulty in finding women attractive — from a distance — without actually desiring every one of them. ANTAGONĒ But you do desire every one of them. QUERIOUS No, I don't. ANTAGONĒ Then you are hormonally deficient. I know that I do. QUERIOUS No, you don't. ANTAGONĒ I most certainly do. I want to have sex with dozens of women I see every day. QUERIOUS Well, perhaps as a passing fancy, something that casually crosses your mind. You don't actually intend to fulfill every pang of desire. ANTAGONĒ That's the crux of the problem: we're not even allowed to think about intending to do anything about it. We couldn't possibly sleep with all the women we find attractive or society as we know it would completely break down. So we have to subvert these feelings and pretend we don't have them. QUERIOUS You're not pretending you don't have them right now. ANTAGONĒ Well, not to you, but to women I do. Remember that story, "The Girls in Their Summer Dresses"? About a couple who walk around Manhattan on a nice day, the man trying to rationalize to his wife why he can't help noticing all the woman passing them on the street? QUERIOUS So he can't help noticing. So what? ANTAGONĒ So his wife is quite put out by it. She just doesn't get it. QUERIOUS Why does she have to? As long as he doesn't act on his fleeting desires, then there's no need for him to talk to her about it at all. ANTAGONĒ Then we live a lie. QUERIOUS In order to preserve the peace. ANTAGONĒ Exactly. Society demands that we hide our feelings. QUERIOUS But these really aren't actually feelings you're describing. They are biological urges that have no more meaning than hunger or thirst. ANTAGONĒ But hunger and thirst I am allowed to satisfy. QUERIOUS You can't eat or drink anything you want any time you want without facing some consequences. You may gain weight, or make yourself sick, or otherwise endanger your long-term health. Think of sex the same way. Wanting it doesn't mean that having it is good for you. ANTAGONĒ If nature intends us to feel this overwhelming urge to mate with a vast number of females of the species, then how could it be bad for you to do so? I mean, bad for you physically, of course. The consequences for one's marriage are obvious. The man in the story learns to his detriment that being honest about this is a big mistake. QUERIOUS You are forgetting that humans have a unique combination of both social and individual traits. Why do you separate social consequences from physical ones? Something that's bad for your way of life is just as serious as something that's bad for your health. A person can't be happy unless both sides of his nature are satisfied. ANTAGONĒ I still can't help feeling that sexual attraction is a cruel joke played on us by nature. I find many women desirable, and I can't help it. But women simply can't understand it, and therefore don't have any patience for it. They think men are just being infantile — or worse, behaving like animals — if they indulge themselves sexually. And by indulgence, I don't just mean sexual activity. A lot of women think that looking at a woman's breasts constitutes a crime against humanity. Anything that remotely smacks of viewing or treating women as sexual objects in any context is met with derision and contempt. QUERIOUS By some women, maybe. The vast majority of the women of my acquaintance are very happy to be treated with deference to their sex. They don't have their hair done or shop for beautiful clothes merely to draw compliments from other women. They just don't want to be jumped by every man who looks at them. They demand some respect. That doesn't seem unreasonable to me. ANTAGONĒ I think you're kidding yourself. If your wife knew how keenly you noticed the women who pass by your line of vision in the course of the day, she would be shocked and hurt, just like the woman in the story. You would never have pointed out that woman at the counter to her. QUERIOUS Why would I? She wouldn't appreciate what I was looking at. It's an aspect of life that we simply cannot share. And, by the way, it was you who pointed out the blond to me. ANTAGONĒ Did I? In any case, you and I may be perfectly willing to accept this difference in our natures, but women are not. QUERIOUS Why is it so terrible for men and women to have different attitudes about sex? Is it such a serious deception for men to talk among themselves about what woman look like? I'm sure women do the same thing about us. ANTAGONĒ The difference is that if we overheard women talking about what they liked in men's bodies, we would probably be aroused. If women heard the way most men talked about women, they would be horrified. QUERIOUS Then it's better they don't hear. ANTAGONĒ Which means that relations between the sexes are doomed to remain divided. QUERIOUS Men and women are different. Their ability to understand one another will always be constrained by the realities of their natures. So we learn to live with it. ANTAGONĒ Well, that's the problem. Men are very happy to live with it. But women are perpetually intent on holding men to an unattainable standard. Heterosexual men, no matter how respectful, how civilized or how liberated, will never cease to be preoccupied with women as objects of desire. It just isn't going to happen. QUERIOUS But women do want to be desired. They're not indifferent to sex. ANTAGONĒ But they're interested in men only on certain terms. Namely, they want us to be like them. They've turned Henry Higgins' famous question around: Why can't a man be more like a woman? They want us to settle into monogamous relationships and notice only our one partner forever after. They refuse to acknowledge that we have to be different: that men haven't chosen to be different, but that nature has made us different. Sexual fidelity in a woman is no more a virtue that a roving eye in a man is a vice. Biology has made us both this way for reasons that are self-evident to every man and incoherent to every woman. Are we to be forever chastised as unruly boys because evolution has made us as we are? QUERIOUS What women dislike about men's attitudes towards them is not that we are attracted to them, but how we express it. Asking a woman out on a date is no less an expression of that attraction than whistling at her in the street, but it's a lot less offensive. ANTAGONĒ But what you're describing is not a difference in kind, only a difference in degree. The executive in a suit and tie who politely tells his secretary that her dress looks lovely desires her, at that moment, no less than the construction worker who ogles her on the sidewalk at lunch. Women suffer a double delusion: that the man in the suit, an educated and civilized person, really isn't thinking about sex at all when he pays a woman a compliment, while a crude man's attitude and behavior set him apart from other men. QUERIOUS Well, if that's true, women are doomed to disappointment. But that doesn't mean that men are not obligated to treat them decently. ANTAGONĒ You are reducing a complex social question to a superficial point of etiquette. QUERIOUS And you are looking for controversy where there isn't any. ANTAGONĒ Me? Am I responsible for the status quo between the sexes? When I think of how badly women have been mistreated throughout history, and still are in large areas of the world, how rape and prostitution and slavery continue to thrive, how whole systems of government, religion and law have been devised by men to oppress them, and how many individual men in our own supposedly liberal society continue to do their level best to terrorize their girlfriends and wives and daughters even without the benefit of social approval, and then consider, nonetheless, how drastically improved conditions are for the vast majority of women in this country and most of the developed world, it makes me shake my head in wonder to realize how little women seem to recognize it, how they won't be satisfied until men are thoroughly emasculated and interactions between the sexes are reduced to a cold, hard set of regulations. QUERIOUS Is it gratitude you want? Do you expect women to come up and thank you for looking them up and down on a crowded train instead of groping them? We should be kind and respectful of women because it is the simple, decent, human thing to do. As far as I can see, sexual relations have only improved as a result of more civilized male behavior, regardless of how men may 'really' feel. Don't expect women to kiss your feet for not treating them like personal property or porn stars. ANTAGONĒ I expect nothing more than a mutual acknowledgment of biological reality. It goes without saying that men ought to treat women fairly and not allow their momentary sexual feelings to interfere with their otherwise better judgment. But I also expect a woman not to roll her eyes in impatience and disgust every time her husband's or boyfriend's eyes follow another woman down the aisle of a theater. A woman's right to be dealt with as an equal is undeniable, but so is a man's tendency to notice a woman's legs before he contemplates what kind of person she is. QUERIOUS What exactly have women done to you to make you so resentful? ANTAGONĒ Nothing at all. I love women. I prefer their company almost exclusively to the company of men — present company excepted, of course. QUERIOUS In light of the opinions you've been expressing, I'm not so sure that either womankind or I should take that as a compliment. ANTAGONĒ Well, it was meant to be. Some years ago, I was walking in the city during lunch time on a nice summer day, and there were lots of people out in the street — much like the day in the story — when I overheard two men talking about a pretty woman who had just passed by. One said, gently, "Very nice." The way he said it wasn't at all aggressive; it was rather shy and warm and totally unthreatening. The other man, with equal deference, said, "They're all nice." Now, you and I may smile over that charming exchange, knowing full well that those guys were not the usual catcalling yahoos but men who felt a genuine appreciation for women as women. But I fear that most women would see it as just another example of men demeaning women by alluding to them as mere objects, more beautiful sculptures than living beings. QUERIOUS Now you're the one who is oversimplifying. You are slotting women into narrow categories that don't reflect a much more complicated reality. There are many women who would also find that little exchange touching — your wife and mine come immediately to mind. ANTAGONĒ And if our wives didn't agree with the general view they would be branded as traitors to their sex who evidently suffer a tragic deficiency of self-esteem. QUERIOUS It seems to me that you are as guilty in your attitudes as the women you are condemning. ANTAGONĒ How? QUERIOUS Because you are blaming them for their inherent natures just as you are accusing them of blaming us for ours. Have you considered the possibility that a woman's response to a man's infidelity, or the threat of infidelity, is no less an evolutionary tool than a man's frequent urges to have sex? Perhaps the survival of the species demands that the female keep the male to herself for reproductive reasons. Once she believes she has found the right mate, her instincts may tell her to protect the purity of the gene pool by keeping his chromosomes in the family, so to speak, and keeping him around to help raise those terribly dependent babies. An overzealous, and overly jealous, attempt to control a man's sexual activity may be no more than the expression of this valuable instinct. If both men and women are prey to our respective primal natures, then we are more equal than you think. ANTAGONĒ Well, perhaps a better word than 'equal' would be 'equivalent'. Anyway, I've already conceded that evolution has made us different. But it still leaves the problem of why otherwise rational men and women are not only so ignorant one another's natures, but so unwilling even to acknowledge the differences between them. QUERIOUS Reproduction evidently doesn't require a great deal of mutual understanding. But we're still a young species. Give it time. People will figure it out eventually. ANTAGONĒ Neither of us has that kind of time. What are we supposed to do while we're waiting? QUERIOUS Women make life worth living. Enjoy yourself. ANTAGONĒ But not too much, right? posted October 2007 Return to home page • Send an e-mail All writings on this site are copyrighted by Barry Edelson. Reprinting by permission only. |