Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: TUESDAY, July 12, 1994 TAG: 9408030021
SECTION: EDITORIAL PAGE: A5 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: ADRIAN BLEVINS-CHURCH
DATELINE: LENGTH: Long
But he was wrong.
Before I get into that, let me say that slogans such as Women Unite! were printed across the covers of the books that lay around my childhood house. I read these dust jackets before I read Dr. Suess. My mother subscribed to Ms. magazine, and my father read it. For many years when people asked me what I was going to be when I grew up, I said, because my father told me to, that I was going to be the first woman president of the United States.
So don't mistake mine as another voice among those of the new generation of women who have more or less had it with Herland (though I have): I understand that the Equal Rights Amendment has not been passed, and this embarrasses me for my country more even than the possibility that we might supply Oliver North with more power than would befit a car-wash attendant.
Still, women need to stop tooting their own trumpets long enough to think about the fact that men have it hard. We ask that they be sensitive - that they change diapers and make dinners and read the articles on communication we leave open on the coffee table. But we also want them to be men. They really ought to know how to play baseball, and they ought to be willing to protect us from wasps and, if need be, from psychopathic killers. They need to provide us with a fat bank account and be home for quality time with the children. They need, in other words, to hold the pie plate in one hand and the chain saw in the other.
And while men are no more driven by the urges of their bodies than are women, they are more at risk of having to pay dearly for their transgressions on the marital front. Most women still get the custody of their children, and, in some of the cases I know about, they even get custody when it's clear they should not. And women are still rewarded huge sums of money even if they have their own jobs and remarry and thereby gain access to another man's funds. I don't know how a man who must pay child-support under these circumstances can stand to pass his ex-wife on the interstate.
Because of the sexual revolution, which, as I see it, was no revolution at all, men do not know who they are or what it is women want from them. It's no wonder that most of the men I know walk around in a state of permanent confusion. It's no wonder that the boys in my youngest son's preschool stand against the far walls of the classroom and watch the girls parade around in their princess costumes as if they were, like their fathers before them, born into an undeviating condition of perplexity.
It's a woman's beauty that is the trouble. A woman is powerful if she is beautiful. A man, though he may get a few good toothpaste commercials if he is handsome, is not really, after the age of about 22, valued for his appearance. He is valued for his ability to make it in the world. He is valued for his wisdom, endurance and generosity, for his physical strength and his emotional restraint. He is valued because he knows how to operate the fire extinguisher, and because he has sense enough to say, "yes, dear."
A woman is not to be blamed, of course, for her own beauty. Women are simply the most attractive, like males within the bird species, of the two sexes. Their beauty also accounts for the fact that women do not like each other. Even if they try: Even if they meet for drinks and talk antiques and children and go off on weekend trips to Hot Springs, the primitive well within them always opens up its little mouth and coos enemy, enemy, hiss, hiss.
And beauty is the reason older women despise and fear younger women. While wisdom grows with the passage of years, beauty - oh, yes - fades. Older women know this. And hate it. Thus they go in for face-lifts and the like, and look at their grown-up daughters, whom they love with every inch of their vast and saddened hearts, with envy.
No matter how cultivated we get, how enmeshed in science and technology and art and philosophy, there are the bodies we must live in. There are the primordial leanings that make us, more than anything else, do what we do and feel what we feel. Both men and women, of course, know this. But men know it most assuredly. And because we demand that they fight it - that they appreciate women for our spirits and minds or chance sexual harassment charges - many of the best men loathe the music that nature croons within them. What could such repression and body-contempt be but perilous?
Then we contradict our pleas that men appreciate us for our most internal selves by offering them the earth-bound, lush, wild and redolent beauty of the feminine. Against this power, men do become weak and vulnerable. They become the walking brokenhearted.
It's no wonder men start wars and buy fancy, ridiculously expensive sports cars and abandon their children and fall asleep on the couch and have affairs with barely grown girls and fail to talk in a significant way to their wives. It's no wonder they fail us in their silly governments and lie like the liars they are upon their glorified podiums and drink too much and die of heart attacks and leave nothing of themselves for us to remember them by but a canceled life-insurance policy. It is no wonder.
When I was a child growing up on feminism, it was the main contention that men and women were equal in every way, that any difference between them was sociologically induced, and that the way toward a symmetry of rights was to admit and teach this truth. When I gave birth to my first son, I began my long lesson in the great fallacy that is this notion.
Women aren't superior. They are simply different. This is, for me, a cause for celebration. But it is also the main source of conflict between the sexes - in part because we demand that only the civilized mind, and not the urges of nature, be acknowledged and honored.
As for that professor who was convinced that women are the better sex: Not two weeks after our conversation, his wife left him for another man.
Adrian Blevins-Church is a writer and teacher who lives in Fincastle.
by CNB